Sales prospecting is hard. Anyone who uses a conversion funnel to find prospects knows that every closed deal requires dozens of sales calls to new B2B contacts.
Multiply the number of sales calls for every new customer by your sales target, and you’ll realize that your sales reps need hundreds or even thousands of new contact details every month.
Looking up your ideal customers and key decision-makers manually would take too much time. That’s why you need a sales intelligence platform — to enable your sales professionals to focus on what they do best, which is selling rather than industry research.
Two examples of enterprise sales intelligence tools that many sales and marketing teams rely on are LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo.
Let’s explore how ZoomInfo vs. Sales Navigator works for company intelligence data and which one would suit your goals better.
How LinkedIn Sales Navigator Works for B2B Companies
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid sales tool from LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network with over 800 million users worldwide.
Sales Navigator makes it easy to target the right buyers and personally reach out to nearly any professional in any industry.
You start with advanced search that can help you narrow results by geographical area, industry, company size, title, seniority, and much more. You can also save the search criteria for later use and even share it with others on your team.
Based on your target accounts, LinkedIn would suggest potential leads to go after, which you can quickly save to your CRM or follow on LinkedIn for updates to be able to start conversations with relevant messages.
The platform also allows you to create and export lists of prospects for future marketing campaigns.
Overall, LinkedIn Sales Navigator works extremely well when you already know the decision-maker you need to reach out to. Its massive user base and the ability to send direct messages are unparalleled in the sales world.
At the same time, Sales Navigator is quite limited beyond prospect intelligence features and its capabilities are not documented comprehensively. Search suggestions also tend to include non-relevant results, especially when searching by name.
Key features
- 800 million active users
- Power prospect search
- Direct messages with InMail
- See how you’re connected with anyone through TeamLink
- Follow companies and professionals with the news feed
How ZoomInfo Works for Potential Users
ZoomInfo is another highly-rated sales intelligence platform. It’s not based on a social network, like Sales Navigator, but rather a powerful search engine that scrapes data from all over the web. In fact, lots of contact details in ZoomInfo are pulled directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
What makes ZoomInfo special is a unique database of over 129 million verified email addresses and 50 million phone numbers. You can also organize potential leads by more than 300 other attributes, from job titles to work histories and more.
Marketing professionals would be happy to find out that ZoomInfo has a robust set of features for display and ad campaigns that could be launched to directly target your contact lists.
Best of all, ZoomInfo remains easy to use, especially for sales engagement, and requires no corporate training — so you can start leveraging accurate contact data at any time.
Key features
- 129+ million verified email addresses
- 50+ million direct dial phone numbers
- 300+ searchable company attributes
- Extended sales and marketing automation capabilities
- Display and social advertising campaigns
So what’s the direct comparison of ZoomInfo vs. Sales Navigator?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator vs. ZoomInfo Comparison
The main difference between LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo is that the former works best for targeting contacts that you know you want to target, whereas the latter is great at finding key decision-makers for the accounts that interest you.
Even though both tools provide accurate contact data, Sales Navigator tends to be better when it comes to specific personal details (name, city, job title), whereas ZoomInfo usually has more up-to-date info on macro-level categories, such as company size, organizational structure, industry, etc. ZoomInfo also makes it easy to export contact lists for use in CRM and marketing automation platforms.
Sales Navigator is also more of a specialized tool meant to be used as a way to reach specific contacts. And its network tools and news feed updates frequently assist that goal.
ZoomInfo, on the other hand, in addition to prospect intelligence, has ZoomInfo Engage (sales automation), Chorus (revenue intelligence), Chat (conversational sales), etc. It’s a more complete solution and a one-stop shop for sales reps who are looking not only for contact details but also for actionable insights and other ways to develop customer relationships.
Who Are The Ideal Customers for LinkedIn Sales Navigator And ZoomInfo?
Traditionally, these tools are used by B2B companies who are trying to find and connect with accounts and contacts that are in their ICP (ideal customer profile).
Looking at user reviews online, you can discover that customer satisfaction with both LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo is quite high.
However, you might have noticed that both tools are more complementary to each other rather than being direct competitors.
Any sales team can leverage individual contacts on LinkedIn and dive into the depth of company data with ZoomInfo right after.
That said, these tools don’t tell you the whole story.
Finding your target accounts and contacts is important, but understanding their buyer intent through behaviour is essential for understanding where they are in their buying journey.
While ZoomInfo has buyer intent offerings, they are limited to in-market intent (locating accounts that are generally interested in the solutions that you offer) and surface level online behaviour (creating a hypothesis about intent based on website clicks, time spent on a given page, etc.).
What you’re missing is an accurate and reliable indicator of how qualified prospects on your website are and which ones are showing high purchase intent at any given moment. A tool that automates the qualification process and can identify the buyer intent of visitors based on their behavior in real-time.
That tool is Lift AI — a real-time buyer intent solution that shows how likely every single website visitor is to purchase your product or service — even if those visitors are known accounts or completely anonymous.
The magic of Lift AI happens behind a unique machine-learning model trained on the behavior of billions of profiled web visitors, plus over 14 million sales interactions. That’s why Lift AI buyer intent scores are assigned with over 85% accuracy — it knows the connection between behaviour and conversion, and can see it in real-time.
The way Lift AI works is by assigning buyer intent scores to every website visitor in real time and then segmenting those visitors into low, medium, and high intent categories. Visitors who exhibit high buyer intent can be instantly connected with your BDRs through chat, while medium and low-scoring visitors can be directed to a nurturing bot or a self-help guide.
Lift AI also works seamlessly with other tools, and its scores can be used for customer success on other platforms, such as ZoomInfo. All you need to do is combine their intelligence. For example, you may detect a visitor’s ID with a ZoomInfo and then see the same visitor’s buyer intent with Lift AI. If you combine both insights, you can create new strategies to convert known visitors who are demonstrating a high buyer intent for your solution in real-time.
Once you start using Lift AI, you can expect to see a two to 10-fold increase in your chat conversions in 90 days (based on other users’ results). PointClickCare, for example, increased its conversions by 400%, while Formstack grew its pipeline by 88% during that period.
Sign up for Lift AI and use it free for 30 days. No credit card required. You also don’t need an IT department to get started — just copy a small JavaScript snippet to your website and you’re ready to clearly see the intent of every visitor on your website.
