What are Sales Intelligence Tools?

Sales intelligence tools are software that work by crawling millions of public websites, gathering data and matching it to their database.

It's designed to help businesses increase sales by providing sales reps with intelligent insights from internal and external data.

There are three types of sales intelligence tools:

1. Profile databases: As the name suggests, it's a database of contact information for different customer profiles, segmented by industry. Sales reps can sort and filter through this database, and use this information to reach their target customer.
2. Analytics platforms: These tools work by providing a neater place to view the data. They allow teams to easily view the dataset, and analyze it to gather important insights. Once the data is analyzed, good tools allow reps to quickly create reports and dashboards for presentation.
3. Outreach platforms: These allow sales reps to take action on their data. They offer features such as mass emailing, personalization and email sequencing.

Companies often use sales intelligence tools to optimize their sales pipeline stages, boosting close rates, sales velocity, and improve the quality of leads coming into the pipeline.

Self-service sales intelligence tools allows sales reps to self analyze, sort, filter and gather insights from their data without the help of a data analyst or developer. In essence, these tools turn company data into actionable insights. 

Top 10 Sales Intelligence Tools (Updated Jan 2023)

1. Polymer Search

Polymer Search is a self-service, collaborative sales analysis tool that integrates directly with popular CRMs and spreadsheets like Salesforce, Excel and Google Sheets.

The tool uses AI to help reps analyze their data and find the right customer profiles for their business. You simply connect (or upload) a dataset, and the tool will transform the dataset into an interactive, intelligent application where everyone on the team can sort, filter, visualize and analyze the data without the help of developers or data analysts.

Sales managers can import their leads and CRM contacts into Polymer, as an easier way to view the data and get access to powerful sorting, filtering, visualization and data analysis features.

The tool can be used to optimize sales pipelines to improve deal size, sales velocity and conversion rates, analyze and improve team performance, and optimize the sales prospecting process i.e. deciding who are the best customers to focus the resources on. 

2. ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is the largest B2B database of over 100 million companies’ contacts, addresses and industry. They offer not only the largest database of companies, but their data is by far superior to other competitors.

When it comes to prospecting tools, ZoomInfo is the gold standard. It offers one of the largest database of contacts available, and provides top data accuracy and ease-of-use.

However, their pricing isn’t for everybody. ZoomInfo’s pricing is private, but it has been estimated to be around $15,000/year.

Still, I believe ZoomInfo to be an incredibly powerful sales intelligence tool and worth the cost. It allows you to reach high spend accounts that otherwise would’ve been inaccessible. Any serious sales organization should be using ZoomInfo.

3. Seamless.AI

Seamless.ai is also a prospecting tool that contains a database of companies’ contact information (email, cell phone and direct dials) and is a cheaper alternative to ZoomInfo.

It costs a fraction of what ZoomInfo offers + they also offer a 50 free credit trial. However, I also found the quality of data and search engine’s ease-of-use to be much worse than ZoomInfo. Even though their database is just as big, if not bigger than ZoomInfo, expect the data quality to be hit or miss. 

Still, with Seamless costing a fraction of ZoomInfo, it could be a decent budget solution to smaller companies. Sign up for their free trial and test it out yourself.

4. LeadIQ

LeadIQ is another budget prospecting tool for finding leads. It’s similar to ZoomInfo, offering a more reliable database than Seamless AI, however it has a much smaller database than both ZoomInfo and Seamless AI.

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives sales reps the power to track and filter leads from the LinkedIn database to acquire new customers or strengthen current relationships. There are various filtering methods such as company size, position, industry, and recent job changes. 

Once you’ve found your lead, you can add them directly as a CRM contact and set notifications for them whenever there is something newsworthy like a promotion or job change. This allows you to send immediate, personalized outreach messages.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator also integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365

6. 6sense Revenue AI

6sense Revenue AI is an account-based marketing (ABM) platform designed for B2B organizations to uncover demand and hidden buyer intent. It provides sales and marketing teams with everything they need to know about their customer profiles to ensure that they are prioritizing the audience who are interested in the product being offering.

I found 6sense to be really useful for sales prospecting, predicting which leads are likely to turn into customers, and precision targeting for B2B advertisements. 6sense has exclusive display network advertising data and AI-driven predictive analytics to help B2B organizations get their product to the right audiences. It can save unnecessary spending of budget on uninterested audiences.

7. Apollo

Apollo.io offers a highly accurate list of email contacts for businesses that use email as their first engagement priority. For phone numbers, it can be hit or miss though.

Emails are verified and it can run your email sequences within the app. 

8. Hubspot Sales Hub

Hubspot Sales Hub is a sales intelligence CRM tool that integrates with other Hubspot products. It offers multi-tiered pricing:

• Free: Basic CRM features including email tracking and notifications, email templates & scheduling, call and meeting scheduling
• Starter ($45/month): Includes simple automation, goals and SDR productivity performance
• Professional: ($450/month): Gives you the ability to send email sequences, automate deal stage, task and lead rotation, and get custom reporting
• Enterprise ($1200/month): Custom objects, predictive lead scoring and playbooks.

Hubspot Sales Hub is a great all-in-one tool for CRM and pipeline management, with some features built for outbound prospecting.

9. Outreach

Unlike Hubspot Sales Hub which is an all-in-one tool, Outreach is built specifically for what its name implies - outreach. It’s much more feature rich than Hubspot for this and is generally better for mass personalization and batch emailing. You’ll generally need a separate CRM tool on top of Outreach though.

10. Salesforce

Salesforce should need no introduction. It’s by far the most popular CRM tool for sales teams, used by almost every Fortune 500 company, and offers many sales-focused features outside of just being a CRM, including dashboarding, visualizations, marketing automation, and analytics.

Due to its price though, it's only affordable to large enterprise, but nonetheless, it's a tool that any serious sales organization should be using.

Get your free Salesforce report template from Polymer.