The B2B Marketer’s Quick Start Guide: Sales Intelligence

By Brenna Lofquist, Senior Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

In today’s digital technology landscape there are numerous platforms, tools and technologies at the disposal of every marketer—almost too many. My goal with the Quick Start Guide series is to provide you a quick synopsis of a martech solution category. For each category I’ll highlight a few platforms/tools, the pros and cons of each, benchmarks and additional resources. Without further ado…

Welcome to the eighth installment of The B2B Marketer’s Quick Start Guide. Today’s post is about Sales Intelligence platforms/tools. Check out the previous quick start guide posts on live chat and data visualization.

Overview

Sales intelligence software/platforms help companies use data to increase sales and improve sales processes. These platforms have a few uses including enrichment of existing contact data as well as finding and obtaining new contacts. Sales intelligence can be used by both marketing and sales teams and can be especially helpful when combined with other data sources. Sales intelligence tools over a diverse set of insights for sales teams that eliminate the manual labor involved with creating and tailoring prospect lists for targeting.

Depending on the software/platform there are additional features and functionality you should look out for depending on the objectives of your business. Some of these features might include CRM overlap and integration where the capabilities span across multiple platforms, data cleaning/cleansing, social media integrations, and technology prospecting.

Let’s get into it!

Data Visualization Platforms

ZoomInfo

• Features/functionality:
  • ZoomInfo has a portfolio of solutions that combine B2B intelligence and company contact data with engagement software, and dynamic workflows
  • Intelligence: Uncover opportunities within your market by understanding how to engage active buyers
    • Cross-reference 300+ attributes with professional and company profiles to find out who’s who in your market
    • Pinpoint and prioritize outreach to companies researching topics related to your business
    • Analyze customer calls, meetings, and emails to drive process changes that impact your bottom line
    • Reduce the burden of data entry and increase org-wide visibility into every interaction
  • Engagement: Pump the richest B2B data into your tech stack or take advantage of ZoomInfo’s fully-loaded suite of applications to reach your buyers faster
    • Eliminate productivity bottlenecks and create more sales conversations with email and phone automation
    • Qualify and route more leads to sales with a solution that brings intelligence to chat conversations
    • Deliver campaigns to tailor-made audiences through Demand-Side Platforms or ZoomInfo’s network
    • Remove “Hi <insert email>” from the equation. Put our data in your tech stack to bring personalization to life
  • Orchestration: Kickstart your go-to-market activities across the technologies and channels you know and love
    • Trigger actions based on key business changes at companies within your entire total addressable market
    • Say goodbye to incomplete, inaccurate data and hello to fresh information streaming into your tech stack
    • Keep applications in sync with your total addressable market courtesy of instant and ongoing enrichment
  • Integrations: Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach.io, Google, Microsoft, Marketo, and more
• Reviews/rating:
  • G2 Rating: 4.4 / 5
  • Pros:
    • The ability to get such deep insights into targeted accounts, contact information and more is unmatched by any tool I’ve personally used. The intent functionality is one of my personal favorites.
    • The overall user interface is super intuitive and easy to use.
    • Its massive database of accurate account and contact information arms our sales teams with the information they need effectively and efficiently prospect key decision-makers.
    • I like the ZoomInfo platform’s accuracy the most, the data related to accounts and contacts are accurate, the business emails and the phone numbers are accurate too.
  • Cons:
    • I don’t like how many great features seem to be lurking behind the ellipses (…) and should be more to the forefront.
    • The ListMatch function leaves much to be desired when we can’t do a straight-on import/export form our SFDC instance.
    • Sometimes ZoomInfo is almost “too good”. It’s a small complaint, but sometimes after using ZoomInfo, you may reach an individual on their personal mobile number, and they are surprised at how you were able to get that information.
    • The high price is the one thing that I dislike about ZoomInfo, the cost is very high if I will compare it with the competitive market and the technical support service is also not up to the mark, hence I dislike these two.

Adapt.io

• • Features/functionality:
    • Unearth ideal prospects
    • Harness deeper intelligence to close more sales
    • Mobile phone numbers and high email deliverability
    • Lead form enrichment
    • Enrich and validate contacts 24/7 in your CRM
    • Target and customize at scale using account insights
    • Chrome extension pulls out email address, phone number, and company details from LinkedIn for your sales team to follow up with
    • Integrations: Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo
  • Reviews/rating:
    • G2 Rating: 4.3 / 5
    • Pros
      • Starting from ground zero with a book of business, Adapt has made it so easy to research and outreach to potential clients, and all I need is their LinkedIn page!
      • Its easy interface, accessibility, I like the fact that it actually gives you free 20 credits before any subscription is paid as this make its easier to make an informed decision.
      • It provides what I needed at an affordable cost (pay for credits when you needed them).
    • Cons
      • I didn’t realize, when I was purchasing, that the level I was buying would only work with the extension. However, it has been easy to use the Adapt extension.
      • Some domains were not available, overall is very nice. Daily limit gets exhausted a little too soon, which is a very big drawback.
      • Set up times. Also, It would be very good to know the cost of the tool on its main page.
  • Adapt sounds like a great tool if you are a smaller business and don’t want to invest in a more complex, expensive platform

D&B Hoovers

• • Features/functionality:
    • Provides a faster path from prospect to profitable relationship by leveraging data and analytics
    • Access comprehensive intelligence on more than hundreds of millions of business records
    • Leverage advanced insights, AI, and audience visualizations to deliver personally-relevant customer communications
    • Customize a personalized dashboard continually updated with real-time alerts, dynamic lead lists, and active buyer intent
    • Solutions tailored for Sales and Marketing teams ensure function-specific outcomes and total team unity
    • Leverage Bombora’s industry leading intent provider and D&B Intent models to build a comprehensive signal illuminating all forms of buyer research
    • Free trial available
    • Integrations: Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365,
  • Reviews/rating:
    • G2 Rating: 4.0 / 5
    •  Pros:
      • The Database is very robust. The database has information on nearly every company we have ever searched from small 5-10 people organization to larger enterprises.
      • The user interface is very intuitive to use and can be easily adopted by new members of the team.
      • What I like best about the product is how it is integrated into Salesforce.com. No need to log into another web portal or website to manage the access for it. Everything can be done within Salesforce.com.
      • The ability to filter and sort multiple ways such as city, state, industry, company size, revenue, and name prevent the vast amount of results from being too overwhelming and hard to read through and sort. 
      • We really like that we can build a company list and target those more efficiently, rather than wasting our time targeting too many different people or companies.
    • Cons:
      • The information isn’t always logically arranged and sometimes seems inaccurate. For example sometimes companies will be split up into every individual regional location and this makes overall revenue and employee account unclear for our organization.
      • One of the items that we dislike about the product is how it requires the administrator to take up a seat or license in order to manage the users. This isn’t very efficient use of a license as the administrator does not perform any queries or searches with D&B Hoovers.
      • The number one negative part of using D & B, is that sometimes we get a “bad match” with familiar names such as Davis or Jones or Smith, but that happens with most similar resources we have tried to use for our company.

To Sum it All Up

To reiterate, I always encourage you to check out these platforms for yourself, especially depending on the goals and objectives of your business. Sales intelligence tools can be very powerful and also very basic depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Do you have any other sales intelligence platforms you’d recommend? Let me know!

Next up: tbd – still thinking. Are there any categories you’d like to see?