How does your outbound sales team find new prospects? If you’re like most companies in the B2B space, your BDRs spend hours every day on search engines, trying to match names, companies, email addresses, and phone numbers.
A better way to source contact details from your market and leverage them in your sales and marketing campaigns would be to use a sales intelligence platform, such as the ones offered by Clearbit and ZoomInfo.
Both Clearbit and ZoomInfo offer ways to identify qualified leads and guide them through the whole buyer’s journey. However, each platform approaches the problem of finding new B2B contacts from a different perspective.
Should your company use Clearbit vs ZoomInfo? To give a qualitative answer, it’d help to define both offerings and compare them side by side.
What Is Clearbit’s Real-Time Data Enrichment?
Clearbit is a data activation platform for sales and marketing teams at B2B companies. It helps you define your ICP (ideal customer profile), discover similar prospects in the market, and design a custom buyer’s journey for them.
To provide tailored results, Clearbit combines its B2B database of over 200 million contacts at 40 million companies with your own CRM data. The software allows for more than 100 firmographic, demographic, and technographic attributes to be specified, and refreshes all the records automatically every 30 days.
With Clearbit, your sales reps can quickly build prospecting lists, see all the high-profile companies visiting your website, and easily launch retargeting campaigns on Facebook and Google to initiate engagement.
Clearbit is especially popular with cross-functional teams in mid-sized B2B companies as a way to turn large datasets into actionable information for sales and marketing campaigns.
What Is ZoomInfo’s Business Intelligence Database?
ZoomInfo is another platform that sales teams can use for real-time email verification (with over 129 million verified email addresses) as well as direct dial phone numbers (over 50 million) and 300-plus other attributes (e.g. employee names, job titles, work histories, company websites).
This simple tool for lead generation requires no training, so your sales reps can get up and running in no time and rely on accurate data that gets continuously updated (from millions of unique sources). For easy reference, any data can be added to your CRM of choice.
Besides helping with outbound sales, ZoomInfo makes it easy to launch display and social ad campaigns that target high-value accounts. To increase conversions, marketers can also use auto-adjusting website forms that maximize completions while enriching buyer profiles at the same time.
So how does Clearbit compare to ZoomInfo with regards to both basic and special features?
How Clearbit’s Solution Compares to ZoomInfo
At first glance, both Clearbit and ZoomInfo are company intelligence software solutions designed for businesses with dedicated sales and marketing teams. But there are also some distinct differences.
Database Size & Accuracy
Clearbit provides data on over 200 million contacts and 40 million companies. Any contacts you’re interested in get automatically enriched in your CRM and all data is updated every 30 days. Judging by online user reviews, the quality of the data is high, although not the best in the industry.
ZoomInfo gives users access to more than 129 million verified email addresses and 50 million direct dial phone numbers. The app verifies contacts through its own users and generally makes its data quality hard to match.
Marketing Capabilities
Clearbit helps businesses get the maximum out of the data it provides. The app has strong sales analytics features, ad retargeting for key decision-makers, tailored email campaigns, dynamic web content, chatbots, and more.
ZoomInfo also offers omni-channel marketing features, from technology tracking to display advertising, chatbots, website form optimizations, etc. The platform also allows sales teams to write user-friendly marketing automation workflows that can integrate multiple third-party apps.
Pricing and Reviews
Clearbit doesn’t use standardized pricing and offers custom quotes to businesses based on volume as well as the selection of packages and add-ons. Judging by customer stories, Clearbit could cost around $20,000 a year.
ZoomInfo does have more standardized packages — such as Advanced+, Elite+, and Professional+ — but requires leaving business emails to see exact pricing. Even though sales reps online generally praise the quality of ZoomInfo’s data, they all agree it comes at a steep cost.
Should B2B Customers Use Clearbit or ZoomInfo?
Clearbit and ZoomInfo are great choices for modern sales and marketing teams. While they have overlapping features, they also target slightly different market segments.
Large and mid-sized teams that want more end-to-end marketing capabilities to develop strong customer relationships might consider Clearbit first.
Sales-oriented teams that see the biggest advantage of data activation tools in large databases and powerful search criteria would benefit more from ZoomInfo, which lets anyone quickly find the account they are looking for with accurate contact details.
The most common downside user reviews mention that’s associated with Clearbit and ZoomInfo is cost. Both tools could end up costing hundreds or thousands of dollars per month per user, depending on the size of your team.
Regardless of whether you use Clearbit or ZoomInfo, both of them have very limited capability when it comes to real-time buyer intent — actually knowing when someone visiting your website is ready to buy. To get accurate buyer intent identification, you should combine Clearbit or ZoomInfo with a tool like Lift AI.
Lift AI is the only real-time buyer intent solution that determines the buyer intent of every single visitor landing on your website, even if they are completely anonymous and aren’t recorded in your CRM or other marketing tools.
What makes Lift AI different is a unique machine-learning model trained on billions of data points and more than 14 million live sales interactions. As a result, Lift AI’s assessments are correct in over 85% of cases.
The way Lift AI works is by assigning a buyer intent score to every visitor in real time and then segmenting them into high-, medium-, and low-intent categories. High-scoring visitors get connected with your sales reps right away through chat, whereas medium- and low-scoring visitors are greeted with a nurturing bot or a self-help guide.
Scores in Lift AI are not siloed and can be used in conjunction with other tools, such as Clearbit and ZoomInfo, as well. When you are able to reveal the ID of a visitor from one of these tools and determine their real-time buyer intent based on their website behavior with Lift AI, you can combine the insight and create playbooks that are designed to attract, engage, and convert known visitors who have a high buyer intent score.
Using Lift AI, you can expect to increase your online chat conversions anywhere from two to 10 times within 90 days. PointClickCare, for example, grew its conversions by 400% during that period, while Formstack increased its pipeline by 88%.
Try Lift AI free for 30 days. No credit card required. No technical installations — just copy-paste a small JavaScript snippet to your website and you’re ready to uncover every valuable lead that lands on your website.
