You don't need linkedin's intent score. You need the raw events.

Linkedin will sell you a "buyer intent" score. It won't tell you how it's calculated, who's behind it, or what you're supposed to do with it. that's not data. That's a horoscope.

You pay for it on the top Sales Navigator tier. You open it. It says interest at some account is "high." And then you sit there, because there's no person attached, no action to take, no event you can point a workflow at. A rep on r/sales put it perfectly: "we had intent data all last year and never used it." That's not a one-off. That's the normal experience of a buyer-intent score.

We've spent a long time looking at the actual events underneath these scores. The events are real and they're useful. The score wrapped around them is the part that isn't.

Why the score fails

Four problems, and they stack.

It's gated. The score lives behind the most expensive Sales Navigator tier. Most teams evaluating "buyer intent" never even see it, and the ones who pay are often the ones who, like that rep, never use it.

It's blurred. For privacy and platform reasons, the score won't tell you who. You get "this account is showing interest," not "this person did this thing." You can't act on an account. You act on people.

It's vague. A number from 1 to 100, or a "high / medium / low," with no event log behind it. You can't see what drove it, so you can't trust it or build on it.

And it lags. By the time activity rolls up into a score, the moment is gone. That matters more than it sounds, because 45.6% of ICP-matched leads engage with you exactly once. One profile view, one comment, then nothing. A score that updates after the fact tells you someone was interested last week. The raw event would have told you the day it happened.

What you actually want

Not a score. The raw events underneath it.

Who viewed your profile. Who engaged with your post. Who wrote a comment. Who accepted a connection. Who followed the company page. As individual events, with the person attached, as they happen.

That's the difference between "this account is warm" and "this named person looked at your profile twice this morning." One is a horoscope. The other is something you can put in a workflow.

And here's a truth the score buries, from another rep on r/sales: "just because someone matches your ICP criteria doesn't mean they will buy. create your email list based on intent." Exactly. The action is the signal, not the label. You want the actions, raw, so you can decide what they mean.

Why raw beats scored in the AI era

This is the part that changed for me in the last two years.

A score is someone else's judgment, baked in and frozen. LinkedIn decided what counts, weighted it, and handed you the conclusion. You can't see the inputs and you can't change the logic.

Raw events are the opposite. You take the stream of what people actually did, and you feed it to your own AI. Clay applies your criteria. Claude reads the context and decides how to respond. Your CRM routes it by your rules. The judgment happens in your stack, against your definition of a good fit, not LinkedIn's.

To be clear about what we do and don't do: teamfluence delivers the raw events. It doesn't decide which ones are good. That call belongs to you and your AI, because you're the only one who knows your business. We hand you the stream. You build the logic.

In a world where your stack can reason over data automatically, the last thing you want is a pre-chewed score. You want the raw material, and the freedom to judge it yourself.

These events were trapped until now

Last week I wrote about how this engagement is the best buying-signal data in b2b, and how it's been stuck inside the linkedin interface where your tools couldn't reach it (the full piece is here). The score was LinkedIn's answer to that gap: don't give you the events, sell you a number about them.

The better answer is to get the events themselves into your stack. Your engagement is your business data, and you have a right to use it. teamfluence is the layer that delivers that raw event stream into the tools you already work in. What you do with it is yours.

What to do with raw events

Concretely, once the events land in your stack:

• Enrich on arrival. Pipe each event into Clay and enrich the person against your own criteria. You decide what qualifies, not a vendor.
• Let your AI read context. Hand the event and the person to Claude to draft a relevant first line, or to score it however your team defines a good fit.
• Route by your rules. Send the ones your logic flags into your CRM or sequencer, tagged with the event that triggered them.
• Act in the window. Because the events arrive in real time, you can reach a one-time engager while they're still paying attention, instead of after a score catches up.

You build the logic. The events just have to show up raw and on time.

What to do today

Stop renting someone else's score. Own the raw signal. The teams pulling ahead on linkedin aren't buying a tidier black box. They're feeding their own AI the raw events and deciding for themselves what matters. LinkedIn's intent score answers a question you didn't ask. The raw events answer the one you did: who, doing what, right now.

Want to see what the raw events actually look like? See an example of the events you can pipe into Clay. Real event types, the data on each, and how they land in your stack.