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 ten 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.
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
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.
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.
Tap into automation
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 tools in 2022
- Vainu
- Dun & Bradstreet
- Clearbit
- Leadspace
- HG Insights
- Echobot
- Leadfeeder
- 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.
Echobot
Echobot offers extensive catered solutions for businesses, supporting B2B sales teams through four distinct phases: sales preparation, initial contact, offer and close, and after-sales. Their database of 12+ million companies makes it easy for businesses to find and select their most suitable prospects.
Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is a sales intelligence tool that helps companies uncover more about their anonymous website visitors so that they can convert promising visitors into sales leads. Leadfeeder shows who visits your website, how they found you, and what they’re interested in.
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
