Buyer Intent just got a new signal: Company Surge, powered by Bombora

Chris put Ryan on the hot seat for this one — cold, no setup, just "what do you think company surge means?" Ryan guessed hiring growth or revenue earnings, and Chris admitted afterward he'd have landed on the same guess. Both of them missed it. I had an advantage they didn't: I've worked with Bombora before, so I was glad Chris asked Ryan first and let me walk through what it actually does.

Company Surge is not about growth at the target company. It's a buyer intent signal — it tells you which accounts are actively researching topics you care about, right now, powered by Bombora's B2B data co-op. It ships in beta, native to HubSpot, and it's included in the cost of your existing standard intent signal tracking. If your portal already has HubSpot credits provisioned, you already have access — no separate Bombora account required.

Setup lives in Buyer Intent Signals, under My Signals, in the Company Surge row. HubSpot preselects up to twelve Bombora topics based on your website, and you can review and swap in others from Bombora's full topic library. One thing worth knowing going in: Bombora's topics run broader than the research topics HubSpot already gives you. That's not a flaw — go too narrow and you get nothing back. The broader buckets give you a pool to work with, and you narrow it from there by company size, location, or whatever matters to your ICP.

Here's the part I'd actually flag for operators: a surge signal is not an icebreaker. Don't reach out to your one contact at a surging account and say "I noticed you're researching revenue operations" — that means nothing to them and reads as unsettling. The right move is to connect with more people at that account, and layer the surge signal with something else — an event they're attending, another intent signal you're already tracking — so the outreach actually has a reason behind it.