Intent HQ runs its pipeline on customer evidence in Lightfield

Intent HQ builds customer intelligence products for telecommunications, retail, and financial-services companies. Its platform manages hundreds of millions of consumer profiles, and its own sales motion involves enterprise buying committees, long processes, and deal information scattered across calls, email, Slack, and internal documents.

Seven months after moving to Lightfield, Intent HQ runs pipeline reviews, forecasting, deal prioritization, and coaching off a self-updating record of every customer interaction. Jonathan Lakin, co-founder and CEO, describes himself as one of the company's biggest users, and Lightfield is the customer data foundation that feeds context to all of the agents that operate across their business.

Life before Lightfield

Jonathan described projecting revenue as one of the most important parts of his job. It informs where to increase investment, what markets to pull back from, and what changes need to be made to their product in order to hit their growth goals. Given Intent HQ’s large deal sizes and long sales cycles - often 18 months or more - one of the most important ways of doing this is to measure ‘flow rate’ - the speed at which opportunities move between stages.

"State is just a snapshot," he said, "and that snapshot is not particularly helpful because what you're really trying to do is project the future," said Jonathan.

Before Lightfield, Jonathan had no easily queryable view of the rate opportunities were flowing through different stages, and the static dashboards he did have available were not sufficient for accurately projecting revenue growth.

Compounding this challenge, Jonathan’s previous CRM made it difficult to inspect individual deal progress and accurately forecast when a specific opportunity would be likely to close.

"The only way to find what was really going on was to go ask the salesperson. And even then, you wouldn't actually get an objective answer. You'd get the salesperson's answer," said Jonathan.

This led them to explore different CRMs that would help them better capture what was happening in their business, use that to project revenue growth, and ultimately guide strategic decision making for the company.

Intent HQ selected Lightfield as their new CRM because of its ability to capture every single sales interaction and structure that information in a way that could be accessed by every person at the company - as well as every agent and external application that needed access to customer data.

Modeling Lightfield for more effective forecasting

Intent HQ extracts flow-rate metrics from the CRM Lightfield automatically captures. This includes an analysis of structured fields, like how long a deal has been in stage, as well as fields Lightfield’s agent populates based on what kinds of conversations have been had in the sales cycle. These fields are all queryable through Lightfield’s MCP interface. This enables Intent HQ’s agents to examine the CRM as a temporal record, rather than copying a current pipeline snapshot into another reporting system. Jonathan can ask which deals are moving, which have stalled, and what in the underlying customer history explains the difference.

Teaching Lightfield how Intent HQ works

Intent HQ wrote Knowledge and Skills that explain its markets, account classifications, qualification criteria, and sales logic. Whenever someone on the Intent HQ team asks Lightfield a question in chat or configures an automation, all of the necessary information about their business and pipeline is dynamically surfaced to the agent, which helps provide accurate and contextually relevant output.

For example, Intent HQ serves two distinct customer segments, which they internally categorize as ‘blue-box’ and ‘red-box’ customers. A red-box customer has on-premises requirements and brings a different level of technical and commercial complexity - requiring adjusted messaging and changes to their sales process. Intent HQ encoded those criteria in Lightfield. The agent can classify an account using the company’s own definition and carry that understanding into research, pipeline analysis, and positioning.

Finding blockers in deal reviews

Jonathan and his sales leadership team use the context in Lightfield regularly to focus their team in the right direction during pipeline review.

They can challenge an account owner on why a deal has not moved and point to the interaction that created the concern. They can take attention away from opportunities that have stopped progressing and put it behind deals with real momentum. And they can see what is missing across an individual seller’s pipeline and coach against observed patterns.

Jonathan described a sales process in Latin America where there were doubts as to their seller’s explanation for why the deal had stalled. Instead of engaging in a subjective back-and-forth, Jonathan opened the account in Lightfield and queried the customer interactions behind it.

“I was able to look at the account and understand exactly why we had got stuck in the process,” said Jonathan.

Using Lightfield gave Jonathan an objective read on what had happened in the deal that he could use to work with sales and sales leadership to navigate a path forward to progress the deal.

Other agents use Lightfield as their source of customer truth

In addition to providing customer context for Intent HQ’s leadership team, Jonathan has configured Lightfield to provide that same context for the company’s agents. Lightfield’s open platform is now the trusted source of truth for customer interactions for all other agents at the company.

For example, Jonathan is training an external Grok Bot agent to operate as a digital chief of staff It pulls customer and revenue context from Lightfield, combines it with Intent HQ’s other business systems, and follows recurring review processes Jonathan has defined. It triangulates customer requests with the company’s internal product documentation and code base to more deeply understand how they can better serve their customers.

What's next

Intent HQ began with a hard management problem: the truth about a deal sat inside the salesperson’s interpretation of it. Lightfield gave Jonathan access to the evidence underneath.

He can now see why an opportunity has stalled, measure movement across the pipeline, and direct the team using the customer record rather than a retold version of it. This information is not just reserved for the CEO - every employee (and every agent) can query the CRM, grounding the entire company and its work in customer truth.