Traditional sales prospecting is incomplete in the fast-paced modern era. It ought to be backed up with technologically-equipped sales tools that are innovative and futuristic in their orientation.
Sales professionals who rely on sales technology outperform their peers. There's a vast ocean of tools available today that all promise to help salespeople skyrocket their numbers. There are multiple sales tools categories that sales professionals should be acquainted with. One of these, sales intelligence, empowers salespeople to organize relevant searches for companies with a specific set of updated data points.
Note that sales intelligence tools differ greatly from customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM software doesn't usually have sales intelligence data, so companies use sales intelligence tools to get the data they need for sales and marketing, into the CRM. Sales intelligence tools provide data to the CRM, such as company data (size, location, industry etc.), contact data (phone numbers and emails) or intent data (market information that could open a sales opportunity for you).
In this article, we'll go through the fundamentals of sales intelligence and take a closer look at ten vendors that stand out from the crowd.
TL;DR: Jump straight into the Top 10 Sales Intelligence Vendors.
What is sales intelligence?
Imagine picking up the phone for a cold call, getting the right decision maker on the line, delivering your sales pitch and then hearing this: “Thanks for calling, your timing is great! We’re just in the need of what you’re offering. Tell me more.”
This little dream scenario might sound silly here, however, the idea of reaching out to a company that can clearly benefit from your offer just as they’ve seen an increased need for your product or service can definitely happen. And, it’s not just about getting lucky.
You will have a significantly better timing in your sales outreach and win more deals when you
- Include the right buying signals in your ideal customer profile, and
- Find out how you can (use a sales intelligence platform to) track these relevant changes that reveal a window of opportunity in your target accounts.
Sales intelligence refers to a wide range of technologies that help salespeople find, monitor, and understand information on prospects’ and existing clients’ daily business.
Sales intelligence software allows salespeople to conduct pointed searches for companies with a specific set of real-time data points, including firmographics, technographics, and buying signals. In other words, this type of technology helps salespeople find companies that match their ideal customer profile in one easy search.
Sales intelligence technology works around the clock to collect and make sense of company information from millions of data sources. There are two parts to the sales intelligence market: 1) company data, and 2) contact data. However, sales intelligence software includes more than just vendors providing phone numbers and emails. Sales intelligence is about the contextual information surrounding these contacts, such as purchase history, current contracts, business objectives, and digital footprints.
What are buying signals?
Buying signals are occurrences that open up a sales opportunity.
They can be company relocations, new hires, closed funding rounds, mergers or acquisitions, or launching of a new product, among other things.
Most buying signals are, in other words, not as obvious or easy to detect as a LinkedIn or Twitter post stating I’m looking for a new vendor for [purpose]. Any suggestions?
Tracking buying signals can help you:
- Be more timely in your sales. You can find out what companies are in the market for a new vendor like yours and reach out to your prospects even before they begin researching. This ensures your message will be received with much more interest.
- Prioritize the right companies out of a longer list of prospects. When you already have a long list of leads, signals can help you know what companies to prioritize now.
- Carry out smarter conversations with your prospects. By knowing what’s going on inside of an organization you’re targeting, you can tailor your pitch based on their current situation.
What buying signals should you track?
Short answer: That depends on your sales organization and what you’re offering. I’m sorry to have to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here.
Selling translation services?
Then knowing when a company is expanding to a new market overseas is probably relevant for you.
Working as a salesperson for a real estate company offering office spaces?
You’re probably interested in knowing what companies are recruiting heavily right now or what businesses recently announced significant down-scalings as they might just both need a new office space suitable for their current organization.
Finding out what buying signals you should look for works similar to knowing your ideal customer profile. You’ll have to do some legwork on your end to understand what signs to look for that would indicate an uptick in buying probability.
A first step to determine what buying signals to keep an eye out for is to look closer at your existing customers. What happened in their organizations before they became customers? If you know your customers well, you might already know the answer but, even if that’s the case, make sure to validate your gut feeling with data-insights before you make this hunch your truth.
One way is to have your Customer Success team carry out short interviews with your most happy customers. Another way is to import a company list into a Sales Intelligence software like Vainu and have it help you detect what buying signals occurred in the majority of the companies right before they signed a deal with you.
If you can identify an actionable lead through one, or a series of signals, using this data should be the basis of your prospecting.
How should you track buying signals?
The answer is no longer to subscribe to hundreds of company newsletters, read numerous printed media outlets every day or spend hours and hours scrolling through your social media and Google Alerts.
Today, the most easy and efficient way to track buying signals is to invest in a smart sales intelligence tool that tracks buying signals for you.
Working around the clock, sales intelligence software collects real-time information about companies faster than human team could ever do. With the help of Artificial Intelligence and advanced Machine Learnings, the right company event is tied to the right business entity in a dynamic company database like Vainu. This then allows you as a salesperson to search for companies that recently send out selected buying signals, or track when a specific event occurs in one of your target audiences. You then receive an instant notification telling you about the news.
Identify warm leads through negative search
No matter how good of a fit your product or service is for a prospect, they’re not going to bite if you contact them right after they bought an expensive competitive product.
Not all signals indicate a good time to make contact. In fact, some signals will instead tell you the opposite and when you shouldn’t reach out. Modern Sales Intelligence and Sales Prospecting platforms not only allows you to filter companies with specific qualities, they also allow you to exclude those with a specific feature out of your search result.
Timing is everything
The best sales are those where you don’t have to grind too much to make the sales. Don’t you agree? By tracking and acting on buying signals, you can make sure to spend your precious time only on companies that are likely to purchase from you right now.
Bring relevance at scale
The average buying process now includes nearly seven people. Modern salespeople have to be relevant in every touch point, to build consensus among a larger group of stakeholders.
No matter how skilled in pitching you are, it’s always challenging to deliver a tailored offer to each company you contact, close sales, nurture leads, and move leads along the sales funnel. This is especially true when you're talking to companies that either don’t have a clear use for your product or where the timing to purchase is completely off.
Sales intelligence helps salespeople know precisely who they should be talking with, what they should be talking about, and when they should reach out to them, and put all the relevant information in front of them when they’re having that conversation. As a result, injecting data from a sales intelligence platform into your CRM can truly transform your sales process. A combination of company insights and a clean and tidy CRM has the potential to create a well-oiled sales machine that delivers relevance at a scale.
Automated sales intelligence
In a nutshell, sales intelligence eliminates the previously manual process of locating the relevant insights you need, while verifying them for accuracy and giving you a complete overview of every prospect. Most tools come with notification features, alerting the users of organizational changes that can open up a window of opportunity for them within one of their target accounts, or informing them of when a new company falls into the description of their ideal customer profile.
Local data plays a critical role
In sales intelligence, local data plays a critical role, which makes the category more fragmented geographically than others. Legislation such as GDPR makes Europe, for example, a more challenging market to have contact information on.
New datasets will constantly emerge, which will make prospecting more effective and specialized. Intent data is one new example, as well as industry-specific data sources such as real estate data, credit ratings, or vehicle information.
A young and evolving vertical
The sales intelligence vertical is still young and relatively undefined. This makes it far from easy for first-time buyers to compare sales intelligence solutions and decide which one is right for their business. To help you narrow down the search, we’ve listed ten powerful sales intelligence tools here.
The best sales intelligence platforms in 2023
- Vainu
- Dun & Bradstreet
- Clearbit
- Leadspace
- HG Insights
- Dealfront
- Apollo
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Cognism
- ZoomInfo
Vainu
Vainu makes salespeople relevant in every step of the sales process by providing them with actionable company information when and where they need it. Vainu is powered by technology to collect, read and understand all company information ever written, and make this easily consumable for the salesperson.
Dun & Bradstreet
Dun & Bradstreet has been helping businesses grow through the power of data, analytics, and data-driven solutions for almost 200 years. Their category-defining data, analytical insights, and end-to-end solutions guide businesses around the world to winning strategies and intelligent actions.
Clearbit
Clearbit is a marketing data engine for customer interactions. The software help users understand their customers on a deeper level, identify future prospects, and personalize every single marketing and sales interaction.
Leadspace
Leadspace boasts a wide range of solutions that can help B2B businesses with their data management, inbound and outbound processes, and account-based marketing through their customer data platform, which has advanced data integrations and management capabilities.
HG Insights
HG Insights focuses on website tech. The solution provides marketers with accurate technographic insights, based on advanced data science, to build better forecasts and precisely target their campaigns at scale.
Dealfront (formerly Echobot and Leadfeeder)
Dealfront offers extensive catered solutions for businesses, supporting B2B sales teams through four phases: sales preparation, initial contact, offer and close, and after-sales. Dealfront also helps companies uncover more about their anonymous website visitors to convert promising visitors into sales leads.
Apollo.io
Apollo.io offers a business contacts database, engagement analytics, and automation features to streamline outreach. The platform aims to enhance lead generation, engagement, and conversion for B2B sales and marketing professionals.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Most salespeople use LinkedIn, but only some utilize LinkedIn’s paid premium offering, Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator makes it easy to build prospect lists based on decision-makers’ job titles and responsibilities. Users can also monitor relevant discussions, allowing salespeople to find more meaningful ways to engage with both existing and new contacts.
business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/sales-navigator
Cognism
With their globally compliant database of 15M companies and advanced filtering options, Cognism makes it easy for businesses to find target accounts of a specific size, industry, or tech stack.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo collects most of its data by interviewing and researching companies systematically a few times each year. The solution is especially useful for business-to-business sales teams targeting IT departments
