Human Verification
Comprehensive Support
Real Mobile Numbers
Research on Demand
Guided Transitions
Contact Data
Intent Data
Company Technographics
Company Firmographics
What Is B2B Sales Intelligence?
Sales Intelligence combines data, information and insights around key business aspects of organizations such as technology stacks, revenue, size, people hierarchy, fundraising, purchasing intent and more. Such vital information can help sales, marketing and revenue teams to strategically identify, qualify and approach their ideal buyers faster and more accurately.
What Are Sales Intelligence Tools?
Sales intelligence tools enable businesses to collect and deploy sales intelligence in their overall go to market and demand generation strategies, largely eliminating tedious and manual methods with intelligent, automated and highly accurate processes. Sales intelligence tools are capable of monitoring millions of data points to identify key sales triggers that can enable sales and marketing teams to stay ahead of competition.
What Are Some of the Best Sales Intelligence Tools In the Market?
If you’re seeking an answer to this question, you’ve certainly come far in your research. You already understand the need for a sales intelligence software and stand at a key juncture in your growth journey. This is a key stage as there’s not a one-fits-all solution. However, there are some key factors that you can evaluate to decide what sales intelligence solution is ideal for you. This article will help you do just that.
The right sales intelligence solution will provide enormous benefits to your sales, marketing, revenue operations, and even your account management and customer success teams – bolstering sales productivity and revenue expansion opportunities for your entire organization. It provides you with key information your revenue acceleration teams need in an easy-to-understand format.
Finding the Best Sales Intelligence Tool for Your Business
By the end of this article, you should be able to fully understand the various sales intelligence tools on the market, their pros and cons and what those mean to your business specifically.
Before You Begin
To make your search easy, we’ve created an easy illustration that will help you identify your ideal solution depending on key factors such as your internal team and martech infrastructure capabilities to best utilize the sales intelligence tool, your budget, and what you should expect from your sales intelligence solution provider.
Sales Intelligence Tool Evaluation Grid
The Mid-market Context
While there are numerous sales intelligence solutions providers in the market, it’s important to evaluate the right sales intelligence tool for you depending on your unique business needs. If you are looking for a ZoomInfo alternative, it’s important to narrow your search to platforms that truly offer sales intelligence data (contact and company), insights (intent data, technographics, firmographics and other data types), solutions (data enrichment, on-demand data research) and so on. While you’ll find many resources on the internet that list various B2B sales intelligence companies that list solutions from small to enterprise level on the same list, it’s important to understand that not all sales intelligence tools offer the same depth of data and insights. A sales intelligence tool that primarily offers email lists and contact data is not truly a ZoomInfo alternative. ZoomInfo offers more than just contact data lists, and so if you are searching for a ZoomInfo alternative, you are essentially looking for a solution beyond an email finder tools – you are looking for a sales intelligence tool that addresses unique needs of your sales, marketing, revops and demand-gen teams across the stages of the funnel.
Start by understanding your business’ scale, needs and usage. For example if you are a small business, you are likely to have:
1 Limited team size: If you are a small business with a small sales and marketing team, you need a sales intelligence tool that you can afford and optimally utilize.
2. Limited martech stack: If you do not have CRMs and marketing automation systems in place, the vast majority of the features and capabilities of your sales intelligence tool will remain underutilized.
3. Limited functionality needs: If you do not have dedicated teams for functions such as revops or marketing, you cannot utilize features beyond building prospect lists for sales teams and leverage capabilities such as technographics firmographics, buyer intent data or website visitor tracking that can really scale your account-based marketing efforts.
For mid-market businesses with larger teams, matured marketing and sales systems, and the potential for the next stage in revenue growth, the search for a reliable sales intelligence tool gets narrower. That is where the search for a ZoomInfo alternative will lead you to a handful of reliable sales intelligence tools.
SalesIntel Versus ZoomInfo – A Detailed Comparison
ZoomInfo remains the most popular sales intelligence platform but given many of its shortfalls – from poor data quality to high costs, customers are actively looking for better solutions than ZoomInfo. SalesIntel is a ZoomInfo competitor that has emerged as the best ZoomInfo alternative for customers who want a product like ZoomInfo but without any of its shortcomings.
Here we make a head-to-head comparison between ZoomInfo and SalesIntel on various benchmarks to see which one of them comes out on top. The benchmarks for comparison include:
Round 1: Data Quality
The data at ZoomInfo is mostly machine-processed and thus has significant gaps in quality. If you factor in the redundancies and lack of any re-verification process, the data continues to degrade and bring down B2B sales efficiency. It isn’t uncommon for ZoomInfo customers to dial a prospect only to find they have left the company a year ago.
Here are real LinkedIn user comments to a SalesIntel post.
Back when Toys”R”Us shut its operations ZoomInfo’s directories remained outdated for several months. Running a search on employees of Toys”R”Us who’d declared bankruptcy showed the company still employing 64,000 people.
SalesIntel has a large database of 90M+ contacts with 17M+ contacts that are human-verified and that are guaranteed to be 95% accurate and follow a 90-day re-verification cycle to maintain that quality. With 140k new contacts verified every week, the database continues to quickly grow in size as well.
But of course, don’t just take our word for it. Look at what the clients have to say about data quality on both platforms.
Many peer review sites show how users describe their experience using ZoomInfo.
The overall user satisfaction score across different aspects of the service including Service, Value, Quality and others remains low.
ZoomInfo Review:
SalesIntel continues to focus on delivering data that is actionable and real.
SalesIntel Review:
VP Sales, Why I Switched to SalesIntel
VERDICT: SalesIntel Wins
SalesIntel has markedly better data quality than ZoomInfo.
Round 2: Database Size
ZoomInfo claims to have the largest B2B database with over 220M business profiles and 150M emails which are impressive numbers by all accounts. There are, however, two problems customers should take into account that put these numbers in perspective:
I. Redundancies
ZoomInfo’s database isn’t one but an amalgamation of numerous data providers that were acquired and combined – RainKing and DiscoverOrg being the largest ones. The point is that most data providers have large overlaps between their data and merging databases creates a lot of redundancies. So if ZoomInfo acquires DiscoverOrg’s 5M contacts, it doesn’t necessarily mean the total number of unique entries grows by 5M. Additionally, these data sets often remained siloed after the acquisition for a period of time, meaning you cannot access all of the data in one place, and often not without upgrading your contract.
II. Segmentation
ZoomInfo segregates its database into numerous functionalities and it sells licenses, not for a comprehensive solution but only for specific functions. So a client who has a ZoomInfo license for, say, direct dials, can’t access mobile numbers. This means that while ZoomInfo has a large database, its clients can’t access most of it. Unless of course, they pay additional fees for each of the functions that increase costs exponentially.
SalesIntel also has a very large database with over 90M contacts including email, direct dials, and over 48M phone numbers. Every contact has an email address and over 8.3M contacts are human-verified decision-makers (at manager and above job level). The best part, however, is that each of SalesIntel’s clients gets access to the entire database, resulting in access to much more data than ZoomInfo.
VERDICT: SalesIntel Wins
Though ZoomInfo has a slightly larger database, SalesIntel’s clients actually get access to more actionable data.
Round 3: Features
The contact database is only a part of what ZoomInfo or SalesIntel offers. There are tons of other features that make prospecting easy and help close deals faster. Some of the features include:
Technographic
While it may appear ZoomInfo and SalesIntel provide technographic data
of relatively the same quality and scale, SalesIntel works with its partners who are leaders in the space to bring the best quality technographic data to their users.
Intent Data
Both ZoomInfo and SalesIntel provide intent data. ZoomInfo’s intent data comes from an in-house engine. Intent data is complex and we understand that in order to provide our customs industry-leading intent data, it’s important to source multi-stream data and so we have partnered with the market leader Bombora to provide its customers with the best intent data in the market.
Richard Murg, Senior Vice President of Business Development – I love SalesIntel Intent Data
Enrichment
Both ZoomInfo and SalesIntel offer data enrichment but SalesIntel enriches customers’ CRM with human-verified data while ZoomInfo’s enrichment utilizes less reliable machine-processed data. When the whole point of enrichment is enhancing the quality of your data you obviously want to use the most reliable data, not inject new errors into the system.
Real-time Prospecting Tool
Both ZoomInfo and SalesIntel offer a Chrome extension – Outreach, and RevDriver respectively. However, with the RevDriver chrome extension. It allows you to identify prospects instantly in real-time. No more relying on LinkedIn InMail. On the other hand, Outreach users experienced a low success rate in finding decision-makers.
EE Incentives, Sales Enablement_ Revdriver
Research-on-Demand
SalesIntel provides a one-of-a-kind, Research-on-Demand service where if we don’t have the data our customers need, customers can provide us with a list of names and titles and we go get the requisite information for them. With ZoomInfo, if clients do not find the data they want, there is nothing they can do about it.
Clare Wynne, President, Great service from Research on Demand
VERDICT: SalesIntel Wins
While Both ZoomInfo and SalesIntel provide basically the same features, SalesIntel has better quality and Research-on-Demand.
Round 4: Contract Obligations
ZoomInfo is known to lock in its customers into renewals through the fine print in their contracts. Many customers only realize their contract obligations after they have signed on the dotted line. SalesIntel strives for 100% transparency where its customers are made aware of each of the minutest details before the contract is signed. No hidden charges, no fine print, nothing!
ZoomInfo customer reviews:
VERDICT: SalesIntel Wins
SalesIntel’s contract is 100% transparent and with no fine print.
Round 5: Pricing
The licensing fees for both ZoomInfo and SalesIntel are pretty much the same. The difference, however, lies in the detail. Each license gives customers a certain number of ‘credits’ to reveal or export contact information. ZoomInfo provides a limited number of credits for the same license fee as SalesIntel. So if you calculate cost per contact, ZooomInfo turns out to be way more expensive than SalesIntel.
Also, ZoomInfo has additional charges for specific data sets. So even if you have a ZoomInfo license and want to access mobile numbers, you’ll have to pay extra. SalesIntel’s license fee is all-inclusive.
VERDICT: SalesIntel Wins
Despite the same license fee, SalesIntel provides many more export ‘credits’ per dollar and access to more data.
Why SalesIntel Is Not Just the Best ZoomInfo Alternative, But Better Than Zoominfo
When comparing SalesIntel and ZoomInfo, SalesIntel comes out on top with higher quality data by only offering human-verified data, lower costs with SalesIntel’s customer-first approach, and the guarantee of finding the data you need if it’s not already available with SalesIntel’s Research on Demand.
With SalesIntel, you are not another data point shoved into a CRM. You have a personal relationship with our support and customer success teams. You are working with someone invested in your success instead of a company trying to pump as much profit as possible out of you with contact credit limits, hidden charges, and contract fine print.
The switch to SalesIntel is designed to be smooth, quick, and immediately beneficial for your team. The value of reaching the prospects you want to talk to is immeasurable. Let your sales team stop wasting time and start booking more appointments and closing more sales.
Avoid charges for extra data sets. Stop paying for out-of-date information. Start working with a better data provider.
Final Verdict: SalesIntel Is the Best ZoomInfo Alternative
With more accessible data, better quality, excellent features, and lower cost, SalesIntel beats ZoomInfo on all the benchmarks and is the best choice for customers looking for a ZoomInfo alternative.
Customers Who Made The Right Choice
How SalesIntel was selected as Map My Customers’ Data partner and why they switched from ZoomInfo.
It’s time for you to make the right choice and select the best Zoominfo alternative. Schedule a demo now to experience the difference.
Below the Mid-market Context: the Small-to-medium Sized Business (SMB) Market Landscape
While evaluating the best ZoomInfo alternative we’ve compared the leading sales intelligence solutions providers from a mid-market and enterprise perspective, it’s important to look at solutions providers in the small to SMB market. We’ve listed 20 sales intelligence tools that offer sales and marketing teams a range of solutions for prospecting, account-based marketing and demand generation.
Does SalesIntel Offer a Solution for the Small-to-medium Sized Business (SMB) Segment?
SalesIntel offers a full-funnel sales intelligence solution for sales, marketing and revenue operations teams with:
- Contact and company data with over 90 million contacts and 22 million company accounts
- Technographic data with over 18,000 technologies tracked, and data updated every single months for accuracy
- Firmographic data updated every 6 months (unlike most data companies where key data remains redundant for up to a year or more)
- Intent Data with over 12,000 B2B buyer intent topics actively monitored
- Data Enrichment for clean and update data
- 90 day re-verification for the highest level of accuracy in the market
- Research on demand with over 2,000 human researchers around the world, round the clock, fast-tracking the search or validation of the exact data you need
- Real-time prospecting with a Chrome extension tool
And much more.
SalesIntel can help you grow 5X.
Forward thinking small to medium sized growth stage companies no longer rely on dated sales and marketing practices to drive their go-to-market strategies and scale their demand generation. Companies that use sales intelligence tools across the funnel build pipeline faster and accelerate revenue efficiently. Hundreds of such small to medium sized companies trust SalesIntel.
With SalesIntel, we don’t focus on presenting large volumes of data but instead give our customers real, accurate and actionable data that they can effectively deploy and operationalize.
For small and mid-sized businesses, efficiency is key – across their systems (such as CRMs and marketing automation tools), as well as teams and functions (sales, marketing, demand-gen, revenue and operations). SalesIntel customers get high value for their investment in B2B data, industry-leading data quality, excellent customer service and support, and transparent terms around the usage and ownership of data.
SalesIntel’s flexible pricing plans for individual and small business users start at $129 per month. Learn more about Individual Plans.
Other ZoomInfo Alternatives
Every business has different data needs at different stages of their growth. Besides SlesIntel there are various sales intelligence tools that suit companies and teams of different sizes for specific needs from sales prospecting to account-based marketing to demand-generation and more.
Again, if you’re looking for ZoomInfo alternatives, explore sales intelligence tools that offer more than just contact and company data and include a range of data types needed to drive account-level targeting strategies. This can include technographics, firmographics, intent data and more.
On the other hand, if you are a small business and do not have mature or mainstream systems and processes, focus your search toward smaller B2B data providers versus bigger ZoomInfo alternatives such as SalesIntel.
To make this search easy for you, we created a sales intelligence tool evaluation grid. Now, we’ll segment the list of direct and ancillary ZoomInfo alternatives with more details based on your business needs.
You can either use the menu below or scroll down to review the credentials of each B2B data provider.
Lusha | Slintel | Cognism | Seamless.AI | Clearbit | Apollo | LeadIQ | Lead411 | Demandbase | LinkedIn Sales Navigator | Overloop | UpLead | LeadGenius | LeadFuze | Hunter
For Small-to-Midsize Businesses
Lusha
Lusha allows users to enrich and verify business profiles through its extension for LinkedIn. It also offers B2B data for enterprise sales, marketing and recruiting teams with a prospecting platform, web extension and API. It claims to serve over 70,000 sales professionals and 223,000 sales organizations.
Slintel (Acquired by 6Sense)
Slintel’s sales intelligence platform provides B2B leads and buyer intent data along with key data types and features such as technographics & firmographics, lead enrichment. It integrates with major CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive and sales tools such as Outreach. Slintel was acquired by 6Sense.
Cognism
Cognism’s AI sales technology offers B2B contact data, intent data, data cleansing and enrichment using patented AI technology to provide B2B sales teams real-time company, people and event data. The platform integrates with major CRMs
Seamless.AI
Seamless.AI serves sales, marketing, and recruiting teams to access B2B contacts with access to cell phones, emails, direct dials and buyer intent data. Seamless.AI claims to differentiate itself as a ZoomInfo alternative that offers a real-time data intelligence search engine, not a database.
Clearbit
Clearbit focuses on enrichment and claims to instantly append 100+ data points on a company, its technology stack (technographics), and its employees (firmographics) on your database. It integrates with Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, Segment, and other major CRMs to automate and optimize your sales and marketing workflows.
Apollo
Apollo’s claims to own a B2B database of over 250M contacts and 30M companies which combined with its Engagement Suite allows sales and marketing teams to run outbound activity and sequences effectively.
LeadIQ
leadIQs prospecting platform allows users to find B2B prospect data, track sales triggers, and use effective sequencing to personalize outreach all within its platform. Its patented AI technology aims to eliminate manual prospecting ways and makes it easy for sales teams to do faster outreach through personalization at scale.
Lead411
Lead411 offers contact and company data across the global marketplace. If you are not specifically looking for US data, they claim to have over 450M contacts, within 20M companies worldwide – offering a wide choice. Lead411’s data included B2B emails and B2B direct dials with Intent data.
Demandbase
Demandbase helps go-to-market teams create target audiences using its Account Intelligence on top of your CRM with B2B contact & company data, intent signals, technographics, and more. The Demandbase One™ flagship go-to-market platform called the Smarter Go-to-Market™ Platform that aligns sales and marketing teams. It integrated with popular CRMs, and sales and marketing automation systems such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo, Outreach and more.
For Small Businesses
LinkedIn Sales Navigator leverages LinkedIn’s own network of 800M+ members combined with its social networking platform’s InMail feature to make conversations quickly and effectively, making it ideal for small teams and individuals.
See G2 review for LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Overloop
Overloop is primarily a multi-channel outbound platform that comes with an email finder, a Google Chrome extension, and native integrations with a range of sales and marketing productivity tools, CRMs and marketing automation platforms.
UpLead
UpLead offers B2B prospecting with B2B contacts and company data of worldwide contacts in over 200 countries along with search filters, intent data, data enrichment, technology tracking, ABM, and more. It integrates with major CRMs such as others.
LeadGenius
LeadGenius offers B2B data and insights and claims to offer solutions ideal for mid-market and enterprise companies. The platform offers B2B data across EMEA, APAC and LATAM markets – ideal for global sales & marketing teams. It integrated with Salesforce, LinkedIn, Outreach and Hubspot.
LeadFuze
LeadFuse helps sales and marketing teams build target lists of B2B leads and automatically syncs leads to CRMs and sales outreach tools. The tool claims to aggregate B2B information in real-time across its database of 500+ million contacts and 10M+ companies globally.
Hunter
Hunter primarily helps find and verify B2B email addresses from web domains. It comes with a free email platform to send email campaigns directly from within the Hunter platform. Hunter’s data is crawled from the web and indexed from publicly available B2B email addresses. The platform offers web domain search, email finder, email verifier and add-ons including a Chrome extension and integration with major CRMs and marketing automation systems.
Conclusion
We hope that this article was helpful in providing information on how to pick a ZoomInfo alternative, while also providing a general overview of some of the free and low-priced ZoomInfo alternative solutions that are ideal for small teams or individuals. If you are searching for a ZoomInfo alternative, focus your search beyond just B2B email lists, and B2B contacts and company data. Evaluate your potential ZoomInfo alternative on capabilities such as intent data, technographics, firmographics, enrichment and more.
Choosing the right sales intelligence tool can be a decisive factor in the growth of your business. Companies can lose significant time and money by investing in a tool that doesn’t live up to their expectation, while picking a sales intelligence tool that offers what the business needs can supercharge growth. Different sales intelligence tools offer different sets of features and capabilities, it’s imperative to evaluate and pick a data partner that meets your needs.
