Having access to the right data in sales can make all the difference between closing and losing an opportunity. At the same time, doing research on prospects is one of the most challenging, frustrating, and labor-intensive tasks and sales reps tend to delay that for as long as possible.
With the rise of big data, AI, and machine learning, it’s now become possible to analyze vast datasets for patterns and predict future behavior in ways no one could just a decade ago. In sales, software that is able to take advantage of such types of analysis is often referred to as sales intelligent tools. And now your team can use them too.
What Are Sales Intelligence Tools?
Sales intelligence tools differ from other sales software, such as CRMs. While CRMs provide you with information and reminders based on past actions, sales intelligence tools help you make future decisions — when and how to contact prospects, what to say, which accounts to focus your efforts on, etc.
There are two unique capabilities of sales intelligence tools:
- Tracking how closely leads follow the buyer’s journey
- Predicting your sales pipeline
Sales intelligence tools also differ in scope. Some provide all-in-one solutions; others specialize in prospecting, nurturing, forecasting, or buyer intent. While it’s tempting to go for all-in-one solutions by default, it’s not always the best idea. Most sales teams have quite unique strengths and weaknesses. So it makes more sense to choose specific sales intelligence tools that your sales team can benefit from the most.
Here are 8 top sales intelligence tools on the market today that cover a full range of B2B use cases.
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn is the largest social network for professionals today, with everyone volunteering their own professional history data and keeping it up-to-date themselves.
Most sales teams already use LinkedIn to find prospects. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium version of the service that gives your team the ability to conduct more granular searches as well as reach out to anyone, even people with whom you don’t have common connections.
2. HubSpot Sales Hub
HubSpot is a great starting place for teams that want to manage their whole sales process in the same environment while leveraging aspects of their work with sales intelligence features at the same time.
The work in HubSpot centers around their powerful CRM that provides sales automation (e.g. personalized emails and follow-ups) as well as conversation intelligence (e.g. automatically capturing call details), sales analytics, and ABM.
3. Vainu
Sales prospecting takes a lot of time and gets more difficult as the pool of your ideal customers starts to dry up. That’s where automation and sales intelligence can really shine.
Vainu sources accurate data on over 65 million companies across 300 attributes so your sales team can build a better pipeline faster. Your watchlist gets automatically updated based on specific criteria, so you can engage new prospects just at the right time.
4. Leadfeeder
Sales intelligence tools not only help with outreach, they also analyze companies that are already interested in your solution, even if they haven’t contacted you yet.
Leadfeeder detects which companies are visiting your website by leveraging its proprietary database of static and dynamic IPs. It then helps you assign a score to those companies depending on their web activity. Finally, Leadfeeder suggests the best people to contact and syncs them with your CRM.
5. Datanyze
Sales intelligence tools use different approaches to sourcing data on new prospects. One of them is technographics, or the technology that companies use. If a company is using similar software to your ICP (ideal customer profile), there’s a chance it might be a good fit.
Datanyze started by specializing in technographics and later expanded into other ways of identifying sales opportunities. Now they offer a free Google Chrome extension that surfaces contextual prospect contact data as you browse the web. They also offer refunds to paying users for any inaccuracies in their database.
6. UpLead
BDRs always need lists of prospects to go through, and most companies buy B2B datasets of contacts with various levels of accuracy. If quality matters, and you’d rather avoid your sales team wasting a lot of time on crafting messages for non-existent email addresses, try UpLead.
UpLead is a B2B contact database with over 100 million email addresses and 14 million company profiles that promises 95% data accuracy. You can use 50 search filters to find your perfect target audience and UpLead will automatically verify that their emails are active.
7. Bombora
Most sales intelligence tools offer static data, such as demographics. Unfortunately, it doesn’t significantly improve predictability. What you need to see is actions, even if they happen outside of your website.
Bombora is a solution that identifies in-market buyer intent. In other words, they continuously monitor B2B journeys of prospects across 5,000 websites and are able to predict what those prospects are actually looking for, which makes it easier for your sales team to approach them.
8. Lift AI
Tools that use in-market buyer intent generally have better results than those with static data. However, they don’t go far enough because they rely on third-party data (which is often outdated, inaccurate, and available to all of your competitors) and they can't predict buyer intent in real time.
If you want a fully automated buyer intent solution that leverages behavioral data and creates first-party data on your website in real time, you should use Lift AI.
Lift AI is the most advanced real-time buyer intent solution on the market. Its unique machine-learning model is trained on billions of data points and over 14 million live sales interactions to achieve consistent and accurate results.
In fact, Lift AI can identify the buyer intent of every single visitor on your website, even if they aren’t recorded in your CRM and are completely anonymous to you.
It does this by using its pre-trained machine-learning model to assign buyer intent scores to each and every visitor as they navigate your website, with over 85% accuracy.
With real-time buyer intent data for each visitor in hand, you can now target and engage high intent, medium intent, and low intent visitors with different experiences.
For example, high intent visitors can be directed to a sales resource using chat (who have the highest chance of converting those visitors), while medium to low intent visitors can be sent to automated experiences such as chatbots to nurture them - sparing your sales team from spending time with the wrong visitors.
So, Lift AI brings sales intelligence to the completely anonymous visitors that no other tool can uncover - resulting in net new revenue streams, higher conversion rates, and a more productive sales team.
However, it can also integrate with each and every other sales intelligence tool to layer real-time buyer intent on top of their own data. For example, you can use LeadFeeder to identify target accounts using IP lookup, then layer Lift AI real-time buyer intent on top to determine which of those accounts are showing high buyer intent right now on your website, prioritizing them first for engagement and outreach.
Lift AI’s integration is also easy to use. A simple snippet of code is pasted into your website, which then begins scoring visitors.
Within 90 days, customers that use Lift AI report increasing their chat conversions by up to 10 times. For example, Formstack grew its chat pipeline by 88%. PointClickCare — by 400%.
Lift AI is free for 30 days. You don’t need a credit card, and starting is as easy as pasting a JavaScript snippet to your website.
As you can see, sales intelligence tools differ in both scale and scope. The key is to know what your sales team needs at the moment and give the best solution a try: from B2B contact databases to in-market intent to the automated real-time buyer intent of Lift AI.
