We Almost Picked the Wrong Intent Data Provider for LinkedIn Prospecting. Then We Ran This API Test.

January 2024: The Spreadsheet I Wish I'd Never Built

Forty-seven columns. Fourteen intent data providers. One deadline I'd already missed by a week.

That was the state of my desk last January when our VP of RevOps dropped a folder on it and said four words: "We need intent data."

Not "we want." Not "we're curious about." We needed it. LinkedIn prospecting was eating our SDRs alive—too many names, not enough signal, endless hours spent waving at strangers on the internet.

I'm a quality and brand compliance manager at a mid-size B2B company. My job is to review things before they reach customers. Roughly 200 deliverables a year. Everything from email sequences to pitch decks to pricing pages. In 2023, I rejected about 22% of first drafts. Not because they were bad. Because they weren't ready.

So when RevOps asked me to evaluate intent data providers, I did what I always do. I built a scorecard.

47 questions. Coverage claims. Accuracy statements. Integration paths. Privacy compliance. Pricing tiers. Contract flexibility. I spent three full days on it.

What I didn't build was a test for what actually mattered.

The Scorecard That Told Me the Wrong Story

We shortlisted three vendors after the first round. Two had been around since before 2020. Gartner mentions. Case studies with logos I recognized. Account managers based in our timezone.

The third was OKKI Go.

Their docs looked thinner. Fewer logos on the website (which, honestly, I noticed before anything else). No Gartner placement I could find. In my scorecard, they ranked fourth out of four—a spot technically occupied only because we'd disqualified a fifth vendor for missing the RFP deadline.

My reasoning was simple: "We don't have time to babysit a newer platform."

That was mistake number one. There would be others.

What the Engineer Found

Two weeks into the evaluation, our data engineer pinged me on Slack. She'd been running sandbox tests on all three providers—not because procurement required it, but because she was curious about what the APIs actually looked like under the hood.

"You need to see this," she wrote. Then a terminal screenshot.

I called her.

The two "safe" vendors required custom middleware for our stack. One wanted a six-to-eight week integration sprint—engineering hours we absolutely did not have. The other's API documentation was, in her words, "a museum exhibit."

Then she showed me the OKKI Go developer integration. Twenty minutes of setup. Clean REST endpoints. Webhooks that fired on schedule. Documentation written by people who assumed you'd actually read it.

I stared at her screen. "Is that live?"

"It's been live for a week. I've been running it quietly."

Never expected the vendor I'd ranked fourth to be the only one that respected my team's scarcest resource: time.

The Question That Changed the Whole Evaluation

I killed the scorecard that afternoon. Not literally—I kept the file—but I stopped treating it as the decision-maker.

The new evaluation had three sections: capability, integrity, and exit.

Capability meant hard questions about what each provider couldn't do. Not what their deck claimed. Not what their website promised. What they'd openly admit were gaps.

That's when something strange happened.

OKKI Go's team was the only one that told us "we don't do X." Specifically, their intent data wasn't built for our exact sub-vertical. They suggested we supplement with another source for that slice rather than try to stretch their coverage into a market they didn't serve well.

I almost dropped them on the spot. What vendor admits a weakness during a competitive evaluation?

Then it clicked.

The other two vendors had promised coverage for that sub-vertical. When I pushed on methodology—how they sourced intent signals for a market that small—neither could explain it clearly. They'd been overpromising. And I'd almost bought it because their logos looked better.

The vendor who said "this isn't our strength" earned my trust for everything else.

The 90-Day Pilot and the Surprise We Didn't See Coming

We ran the pilot. Ninety days. The OKKI Go API integration fed intent signals into our LinkedIn prospecting sequences. Accounts on the "warm" list got worked first by our SDRs.

Here's what happened:

Reply rates on warm accounts: roughly 11%.

Reply rates on our existing cold list: roughly 4%.

Measurable. Real. But not magic. And I want to be careful here—this was our result, in our market, with our sequences. Your numbers will be different, and nobody should promise you a reply rate.

The surprise wasn't the reply rate lift. It was where the lift came from.

We assumed intent data would help us find new accounts. Instead, most of the lift came from timing. The right message to accounts we already knew about, at the moment they were more likely to care. New-logo wins were minimal. "Known account, right moment" wins were nearly everything.

If we'd measured the pilot on new-logo pipeline alone—which is what my original scorecard would have emphasized—we'd have called it a failure.

What I'd Do Differently (and What I'd Tell Your RevOps Team)

I still kick myself for that first scorecard. If I'd spent half the time I used building it actually testing the APIs, we'd have saved three weeks and one very awkward procurement conversation with a vendor I'd unfairly dismissed.

So for revenue operations teams evaluating intent data platforms right now, here's what I'd put in the brief:

• Test the integration before the contract. Not a demo. Not a sandbox screenshot. An actual API connection into your environment. If the vendor won't allow that before you sign, walk.
• Ask what they don't do. The answers matter more than the brochure. A vendor who knows their limits is usually a vendor who knows their product.
• Separate signal from sourcing. Intent data helps with timing and prioritization. It doesn't invent demand. If your pipeline is empty, no intent data provider will fix that.
• Define "success" before the pilot. Reply rate? Meetings booked? Pipeline created? New logos? Every stakeholder will assume a different metric unless you write it down and get sign-off.

One more thing (and here's where my bias shows). We went with the OKKI Go API integration because it was the only platform our data engineer could stand up in a day. That's not the reason to pick a vendor. But it's a signal. A vendor that invests in developer experience usually invests in the rest of the product too.

This worked for us. But our situation was specific—mid-size B2B, an existing LinkedIn outbound motion, engineering hours scarcer than budget. If you're a five-person startup with a technical founder, or a 5,000-person enterprise with a dedicated data team, the calculus might be different. And while I have thoughts about how a smaller team could apply the same logic, I'd be guessing.

I can only speak to our domestic, GDPR-relevant operations. If you're dealing with APAC privacy rules or UK-specific outbound regulations, there are probably factors I'm not aware of (as of early 2026, at least—regulations move faster than most vendor documentation).

What I'm confident in: the questions are portable. Ask them before your next intent data renewal. The answers will tell you who's selling software and who's solving a problem.