This glossary explains the key terms you’ll see across Lead Onion. Use it as a quick reference to understand how everything connects inside the platform.
Intent Data & Lead Types
IQL (Intent Qualified Lead)
A lead identified as showing active buying intent from one or more sources. Higher-quality than cold leads, as they’re already in research or purchase mode.
Intent Data
Signals that show when a company or contact is researching topics, competitors, or solutions. Lead Onion combines 20+ providers to give you a multi-source, validated view of intent.
Research Quadrant™
A framework that shows where a company is in its buying journey: Initial, Interested, Active, or In-Depth research. Helps you prioritise outreach based on readiness to buy.
Surge / Surge Phase
Represents the intensity of intent activity for a company. As activity increases, companies move into higher surge phases, signalling stronger buying intent.
Website Intent
Insights into which companies are visiting your website, what pages they view, and how often. Transforms anonymous visits into actionable accounts.
Person-Based Intent
Contact-level signals such as keyword research, competitor content engagement, or website visits. Complements company-level intent for more precise targeting.
Searches
Intent Searches
A search tool for identifying companies actively showing intent signals. Prospects uncovered here are not just any contacts — they both fit your ICP and have demonstrated real buying intent.
You can refine results further using intent filters (topics, surge phases, providers) alongside firmographic filters (industry, size, revenue, geography, etc.).
Contact Searches
A search tool for exploring the entire B2B contact database (100M+ verified emails and direct dials). Contact Search is focused purely on finding people — using filters like job title, department, seniority, company size, industry, and geography.
Unlike Intent Search, Contact Search does not include intent filters. It’s best used when you want to build targeted lists of prospects that match your ICP, regardless of whether they’re currently showing intent signals.
Saved Search
Any search (Contact or Intent) that you’ve saved for reuse. Helps standardise searches across teams.
LeadFlow
An automation feature that both reveals contacts from intent data and routes them into the right place — whether that’s a list, CRM, or ad platform. LeadFlows keep your pipeline moving by unlocking the right prospects and pushing them directly into your workflows without manual effort.
Understanding crown icons in IQL Search:
When viewing your IQL Search results, you may notice crown icons beside certain contacts. These indicate the type of intent match at the person level:
- Person Intent – Direct Match
This contact is the individual who showed intent based on tracked behaviour (e.g. keyword research, competitor engagement). - Verified Person Intent – Direct Match
This contact is both the person who showed intent and is verified in the Cognism database. - Intent Qualified Prospect
This contact has surfaced as an ideal persona match within a company showing intent. They may not be the one who personally triggered the signal, but they fit your Target Persona and are likely to be relevant in the buying process.
Revealing Prospects
Reveal
The process of unlocking contact-level details (verified emails, direct dials, LinkedIn profiles) from intent data, searches, or website activity.
Revealed Contacts
The repository of all unlocked prospects across the platform. From here, you can filter, export, and send contacts to integrations.
Quick Reveal
Instantly uncover contacts from companies showing intent, based on your saved Target Persona settings. Useful for bulk prospecting.
Organising Data
Lists
Collections of contacts or companies you’ve grouped together for campaigns, CRM syncs, or ads. Types include:
- Contact Lists → groups of people
- Company Lists → groups of accounts
- Segment Lists → sub-groups filtered from larger lists
Folders
Organisational containers for lists, helping you group by campaign, market, or team.
Segments
Dynamic filters that let you create subsets of your CRM (e.g. “Marketing Directors in the UK”). Segments can be saved as static or dynamic lists.
Integrations
CRM Integrations
Native connections with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics to push revealed contacts and company intent data directly into your CRM.
LinkedIn Ad Integration
Connections to LinkedIn Ads to sync lists for account-based marketing campaigns.
Zapier
An integration option that connects Lead Onion with thousands of other apps for automation.
Slack Alerts
Real-time notifications in Slack when new intent signals or revealed contacts match your filters.
Dashboard & Settings
Dashboard
Your central hub for monitoring data and performance. Customise with widgets to highlight the metrics most relevant to you.
Widgets
Individual data visualisations (e.g. “Top intent accounts this week”). Can be toggled on/off and rearranged.
Intent Settings
The configuration panel where you choose topics, industries, competitors, and signals you want tracked. These settings determine the intent data surfaced.
Target Persona
Your ideal buyer profile — defined by job titles, functions, seniority, and other filters. Used across searches and reveal tools to keep results aligned with your ICP.
Providers & Sources
Intent Provider
A third-party data source that contributes signals to Lead Onion (e.g. Bombora, G2, Foundry). Lead Onion aggregates 20+ providers.
Multi-Source Intent
The combination of signals from different providers to validate and predict buyer behaviour more accurately than relying on one source.
Miscellaneous
Credits
The units used to reveal contact details. Running searches is free; credits are only consumed when you unlock a contact.
Export
The process of downloading or pushing contacts/companies to a CSV, CRM, or ad platform.
Integration Sync
The automatic process of sending revealed contacts into connected tools (e.g. Salesforce).