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LinkedIn Sales Navigator is often the tool that rolls off people’s lips when you mention B2B sales prospecting research solutions but lately there’s been a contender that’s getting people Googling with the versus comparison - ZoomInfo.
Platforms like ZoomInfo has been growing and gaining popularity as more businesses add intent data into their marketing strategies. ZoomInfo promises to cross-reference over 300 attributes within a company to “find out who’s who in your market” and, with so much readily available information promised, it’s not surprising that we’ve recently been fielding questions about the difference between the two platforms.
But while they share some overlaps (as we’ll see), they’re not really alternatives. (At least not in our opinion!)
Here’s what ZoomInfo offers, where the overlaps have caused the “ZoomInfo vs LinkedIn Sales Navigator” searches and why we believe it’s more of a compliment to LinkedIn Sales Navigator than a versus option.
What ZoomInfo Offers
ZoomInfo has a very decent tool stack for sales professionals, offering:
- Contact and company data that can be cross-referenced against 300 attributes to help you find out who’s who in the ever-growing B2B buying circle.
- Buyer intent data that enables you to discover who is researching topics related to your business.
- Conversation Intelligence that highlights the critical insights gathered from analysing conversations betweens sales and prospects (whether that’s by email, meeting or calls).
- Relationship Intelligence that provides an at-a-glance visualisation of previous engagements and an engagement score with a prospect.
With these features, it’s certainly an attractive tool and one that has turned many heads!
ZoomInfo And The Overlap With LinkedIn Sales Navigator
While we don’t believe that ZoomInfo will ever replace LinkedIn Sales Navigator (more on that below), it does share similar features to those that you would find within the Account Overview and Growth Insights tools.
If you’re not already using the Insights tool, you can find out more about all the powerful Insights features in this blog: Why Sellers and Marketers Will Love LinkedIn Sales navigator’s New Account Overview For Their Account Based Activities.
In brief, here’s what you will find on LinkedIn Sales Navigator vs Zoominfo:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Insights
Account Map
This provides an at-a-glance view of where your existing leads and recommended leads “sit” within the buying circle of any account you search for. Leads are placed in tiers according to their seniority.
Growth Insights
This tool is packed with maps, graphs and charts to help you quickly identify key sales triggers within target accounts, including:
- Employee count
- Distribution and headcount
- New hires
- Job openings
Alerts
The alerts feature helps you ensure you never miss a sales trigger, with both account and lead alerts.
Account Alerts
- Account Growth
- New decision makers
- Account News
- Account Updates
Lead Alerts
- Career changes
- Buyer interest (according to their activity)
- Lead News
- Lead Shares
- Suggested Leads
ZoomInfo Insights
Zoom Info provides detailed information about:
- job responsibilities
- professional certifications and accolades
- work experience
- education
- web mentions
- links to social media profiles
However, it does provide access to phone direct dial numbers (who does cold-calling anymore?!), email addresses and “other essential prospecting intelligence you won’t find elsewhere”.
Buyer Intent: Where ZoomInfo Shines Over LinkedIn
ZoomInfo is really a Buyer Intent tool and a competitor of the product that we use - Bombora. We wouldn't be without it and nor would our clients.
Most marketing teams have to rely on their website or social media analytics to tell them when someone consumes their content, where it sits within the buyer journey and how many times - leading to a higher or lower prospect lead score.
Sales buyer intent tools will tell you what websites they’re visiting that relate to your product or services. (With Bombara we love how its machine learning will look for the meaning of each web page to give it an intent value too.) And you’re not limited to whether they’ve consumed your content (which there could be any number of reasons for.)
Why You Need Both ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Whilst ZoomInfo is great at mapping who is searching for relevant keywords, identifying decision makers and even mapping buyer circle, LinkedIn currently has 750M contacts vs ZoomInfo’s 100M direct emails (of which many are based in the US). And so even for buying circle identification alone, it would be best to use ZoomInfo alongside Sales Navigator.
But as we said above, LinkedIn’s Insights and Alerts features also help ensure your team never misses a sales trigger again.
But ultimately, we would never recommend any business stops with LinkedIn Sales Navigator because it’s the place where introductions happen, content is found and referrals are made easy viaTeamLinks.
When you combine the two - a Buyer Intent tool alongside LinkedIn Sales Navigator - you can much more accurately predict whether a prospect is actively in the market - instead of being a potential information junkie/non-fan of your content. And identify prospects outside of your current CRM data much more quickly.
