Updated February 10, 2025: We’ve refreshed the article with a more comprehensive approach to using LinkedIn and ZoomInfo alongside new AI tactics, plus added a few real-world applications.
Sales prospecting is hard.
Anyone who uses a conversion funnel to find prospects knows that every closed deal requires dozens or even hundreds of sales calls or cold emails to new B2B prospects.
Which means you need a large, ongoing source of leads to prospect.
But looking for new ideal customers and the right decision-makers manually takes 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 of the most used enterprise sales intelligence tools by sales and marketing teams are LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo.
Let’s explore how ZoomInfo vs. Sales Navigator compare for company intelligence data and which one would suit your goals better.
Tip: While ZoomInfo and LinkedIn are powerful tools to find new prospects, what about all of the sales-ready visitors on your website that you're missing that require no prospecting at all? Lift AI analyzes the micro behaviors of every visitor and surfaces sales ready visitors for your BDR team to prioritize.
Overvie: LinkedIn Sales Navigator vs ZoomInfo
LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo are two popular tools used by sales professionals to streamline their sales efforts and improve their chances of closing deals.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a social selling tool that leverages LinkedIn’s extensive professional network to provide users with access to detailed profiles, mutual connections, and job titles. This allows sales professionals to identify and connect with potential customers more effectively in a relationship-building motion, while seeing up-to-date personal updates from the prospect that can be used to tailor a more personalized and topical message to them.
On the other hand, ZoomInfo casts a wider net. It's a sales intelligence tool that offers detailed B2B contact information and advanced search capabilities across multiple sources in one massive database. Unlike LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo is not based on a social network but instead uses a powerful data collection engine to gather information from various sources, including LinkedIn.
The Power of LinkedIn Sales Navigator for B2B Companies
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium sales tool from LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network with over 800 million users worldwide.
Sales Navigator makes it easy to find prospective companies within your industry and personally reach out to nearly any professional in any department.
The process starts with advanced search that can help you narrow results by geographical area, industry, company size, role title, and seniority. Then you can reach out directly or save the search criteria for later use and share it with your team.
Based on your target accounts, LinkedIn Sales Navigator proactively suggests potential leads to go after, which you can quickly save to your CRM or follow on LinkedIn for updates to be able to spark conversations with relevant messages.
In addition, the platform allows you to create and export lists of prospects for future marketing and sales campaigns.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is perfect for situations when you know who the decision-maker is and what company they work for. Its massive user base and the ability to see personalized updates from these prospects is critical, alongside the ability to send direct messages within the platform which creates a unique opportunity in the sales world.
However, while LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides valuable professional data and personal insights, it often lacks more direct contact information like personal email addresses or mobile numbers (which may or may not be more fruitful than LinkedIn's direct messaging feature).
Key features
- 800 million active users
- Powerful prospect search
- Direct messages with InMail
- Maps of network connections through TeamLink
- The ability to follow personal updates from companies and professionals
ZoomInfo's Unique Features for Potential Users
ZoomInfo is another universally-used company data platform. Unlike LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it’s not based on a social network. Instead, it’s a data collection engine that scrapes detailed information from all over the web, including LinkedIn.
What makes ZoomInfo special is a unique database of over 150 million verified email addresses and 60 million phone numbers. You can sort through all the leads by using more than 300 attributes, from job titles to industries to locations.
ZoomInfo then makes it easy to export large contact lists for use in your CRM and marketing automation platform.
That makese ZoomInfo a more complete solution and a one-stop shop for sales reps who are looking not only for contact details but actionable insights and other ways to develop customer relationships.
At its core, ZoomInfo remains easy to use and requires no corporate training. Your BDRs can sign up and start leveraging accurate contact data, including direct contact information, at any time.
Key features
- 150+ million verified email addresses
- 60+ million direct dial phone numbers
- 300+ searchable company attributes
- CRM integrations and marketing automation capabilities
- Easy to use, no training required
How should your company think about using ZoomInfo vs. Sales Navigator?
Data Quality and Sources
Both LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo prioritize data quality, but they differ in their approach to collecting and verifying data.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator relies on user input to keep data up-to-date, ensuring that the information is accurate, current, and personal. Therefore, if the user hasn't updated their profile to match their most recent shift in company, role, location, or other data it may not be useful.
In contrast, ZoomInfo casts a wider net across many sources including LinkedIn. It uses automation and validation techniques to try and protect data accuracy. For example, ZoomInfo scans 38 million online sources daily, while a dedicated 150-person verification team oversees algorithm performance and enhances data collection. This approach is commendable, but it suffers a similar problem to LinkedIn - if it's scraping data sources that aren't up to date or accurate to begin with, it may skew the accuracy for the end user.
Even though both tools provide accurate contact data, LinkedIn Sales Nav tends to be better when it comes to specific personal details (e.g. name, city, job title), whereas ZoomInfo has more up-to-date info on macro-level categories (e.g. company size, organizational structure, industry). This is because LinkedIn details are updated by people themselves, and ZoomInfo constantly scrapes data from all over the web.
A Complementary Approach: Leveraging Both Tools for Maximum Benefit
Does your team have to choose between ZoomInfo and Sales Navigator? Why not use both? If you have the budget, using both tools can be complementary to your goals.
For example, you can find new companies that represent your ICP (ideal customer profile) with ZoomInfo and then go on LinkedIn to research people who work at those companies and follow them. After that, go back to ZoomInfo and get direct emails and phone numbers for those people, using the insights you've gathered from the prospect's latest LinkedIn update to personalize the outreach.
The downside of using both tools is cost. And depending on the type of customers you’re selling to, you might not benefit from ZoomInfo’s database as much as other sales teams. If your customers are small mom-and-pop shops, for example.
What ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Are Missing...
Both ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Nav are used by B2B companies that are trying to find and connect with accounts that fit their ICP.
But what about all of the sales-ready visitors on your website who could be converted right now, and require no prospecting at all?
The problem is this: sales teams are missing these potential buyers because they are completely anonymous, meaning there is no account or contact match available in their current CRM or prospect database.
And even if there is an account or contact match, sellers are not sure who to engage and prioritize because existing buyer intent data isn't accurate or useful enough to take action.
Which means sellers end up spending more time prospecting outside of the website while missing the opportunities under their nose.
For example, ZoomInfo has a buyer intent data offering but it’s limited to in-market intent (locating accounts that are showing interest in products similar to yours) and surface-level online behavior (thinking that visitors on your pricing page have high intent, when research shows that 88% of real buyers are on other pages of your website and being missed).
The solution to this anonymous visitor and buyer intent problem is hidden in plain sight. It's the micro behaviors of your website visitors.
Lift AI analyzes these micro behaviors in real-time using a machine learning model trained on billions of website visitor profiles and millions of live sales data. It then looks at the correlation of this data, using pattern recognition and accounting for co-occurrence bias to provide an accurate, real-time buyer intent score.
The Real-World Impact of Maximizing Website Prospects
Lift AI customers have seen game-changing results by switching to real-time website behavior as their primary buyer intent signal.
Payscale captured 54% of their pipeline from anonymous visitors that were being missed before, while Boomi doubled their website conversion rate from conversational marketing.
RealVNC increased web shop revenue by 13% in the first 60 days, and Chronus achieved 11.6x greater sales efficiency by adding Lift AI scores to their account data.
By analyzing micro-behaviors in real time, Lift AI helps businesses identify hidden buyers and engage them at the perfect moment—ensuring they don't slip through the cracks while the sales team is trying to find new prospects that might do the exact same thing.
So the Best Tool for Your Sales Pipeline Is…
It depends. While LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides more accurate and personal data on a micro scale, ZoomInfo allows to create macro contact lists that could be turned into effective sales campaigns by including direct contact information.
The easy to way to look at it is this:
For finding and enriching net new prospects outside of your website, use LinkedIn and ZoomInfo together.
To convert the prospects already in your funnel and are being missed, use Lift AI.
All of these tools allow for a free trial — while Lift AI has a proof of concept you can request. Sign up for them all and test which ones make your work more effective while providing a healthy return on investment.
FAQ
What is the difference between LinkedIn and ZoomInfo?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a sales tool built on top of the social network. ZoomInfo is a data intelligence tool that scrapes the web for valuable business data, including direct contact information.
Is ZoomInfo like LinkedIn?
Like LinkedIn, you can use ZoomInfo to find more prospects that fit your ICP. Unlike LinkedIn, ZoomInfo provides tools for extracting and working with large sets of contact data. Additionally, ZoomInfo is valuable for market research, providing detailed data essential for understanding target markets and competitors.
Is Sales Navigator worth it?
Nearly every sales team would benefit from using LinkedIn. If your team makes more sales from LinkedIn leads than it spends on subscriptions — it's worth it.
What is the difference between Sales Navigator and Sales Insights?
Sales Navigator is an enhanced sales tool for finding the right prospects. Sales Insights is a sales data analytics tool for planning new sales strategies and monitoring trends.
How does the pricing compare between the two?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers a tiered pricing structure with discounts for annual payments. The platform has three plans: Sales Navigator, Sales Navigator Plus, and Sales Navigator Advanced Plus, each offering different levels of access and features to suit various business needs.
ZoomInfo, on the other hand, provides custom pricing based on the specific requirements of the business and the number of users. The platform offers three main packages: SalesOS, SalesOS Pro, and SalesOS Enterprise. However, ZoomInfo’s pricing information is not publicly available on their website, and users must schedule a demo with an account executive to get a quote.
