Salesloft, one of the industry leading sales engagement platforms, has acquired Drift, the industry leader of conversational marketing (aka website chatbots). No financial terms were disclosed.

The merger combines Salesloft's AI revenue orchestration platform, including Salesloft Cadence, with Drift's premier AI chatbot. It's a move that - according to the official press release - will result in a powerful end-to-end AI revenue orchestration platform servicing the entire buying journey.

But what does this merger mean for the wider sales technology market? And what does it mean for B2B buyers?

What's our take on the Salesloft Drift acquisition?

Firstly, it's a sign from the market (and their investors) that individually they could not meet projected valuations and revenue outcomes, but when combined together, the synergies might stand a better chance. As Salesloft CEO David Obrand puts it, the acquisition "introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform."

Except they weren't the first. The category of AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform had already been claimed.

For years, other companies like 6sense and Demandbase had been building around the idea of combining the sales technology and the marketing tool stack into an all-in-one solution to automate workflows on top of. Similar to Drift, 6sense and Demandbase primarily focused on the enterprise.

Warmly was the first AI powered revenue orchestration platform purpose built for the SMB. And it does so by giving you the option to plug in your existing tech stack.

SMBs typically require more automation because they don't have the same access to marketing teams, sales people, and resources as enterprises do. So we adapted to that need.

We call it signal-based revenue orchestration.

Trends in Sales and Marketing Tech Stack Consolidation

The Salesloft Drift acquisition seemingly follows an ongoing trend of sales and marketing tech stack consolidation, where market leaders are trying to become the all-in-one unified go-to-market solution.

Here's what we mean.

SaaS Mergers: Improving Sales Development?

ZoomInfo acquired Chorus back in July 2021 for $575 million, allowing them to compete with Gong.io, the industry leader in call recording and intelligence. But it's part of their larger acquisition strategy to increase net retention revenue outcomes year over year by upselling existing customers on new offerings that keep them sticky to ZoomInfo's platform.

Apollo.io took a different approach of natively unifying the sales tech stack by building everything in-house. The company started as a B2B contact database, then combined that with email sequencing, and recently raised $100MM in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures in August 2023 to create the full-stack sales technology platform. 60% of the funds are invested into product development. They have a PLG sales motion which has saved them from having to invest as heavily into a large salesforce.

Hubspot, the SMB CRM of choice, went the reverse of Apollo and started as marketing automation software that then added CRM capabilities later. And in November 2023 Hubspot acquired Clearbit, one of the top B2B data providers. For the first time, CRM, B2B contact data, buyer intent signals, and workflow all came under one roof.

As Whitney Sorson, CTO of Hubspot, puts it, "Picture having complete data on over 20 million companies right inside HubSpot. All with over 100 rich data points about the companies and their decision-makers. Then imagine being able to easily find high-fit prospects natively within your CRM. Finally, imagine that once those companies and contacts are in HubSpot, being alerted when those companies are showing buying intent."

With the rise of AI and ChatGPT, you can start to see sales technology giants leaning into consolidating the tech stack not only to improve the entire customer experience, but also because it breaks down data siloes to seamlessly integrate data across systems.

Entering the Era of Revenue Orchestration

Data is the new oil. It's the lifeblood of the orchestration. But data alone is not enough to accelerate pipeline conversion rates.

It needs to be combined with action.

As we combine sales workflow, data, and AI and automation, we move into the new era of revenue orchestration. And that means an ongoing arms race to reach B2B buyers.

Drift and Salesloft: A Tale of Two Giants

Let's zoom into the Salesloft Drift acquisition for a second, because there's a deeper story here.

Back in in 2021, Vista Equity acquired a majority stake in Drift, which valued the buyer engagement platform at $1 billion. In 2022 Vista paid an estimated 23x multiple for Salesloft, which valued it at around $2.3 billion.

These were during the good times of SaaS. But SaaS has taken a turn for the worse as we headed into 2023.

Drift: The Hero of SaaS

There was a time when Drift was the darling of B2B sales technology. Initially, it was Intercom that started the real push of website chat, especially in B2B. But while intercom pushed more into support, Drift moved into marketing.

The eventually created the category and movement around conversational marketing and got chatbots to appear on all the websites. Their key pillar of its growth was B2B buyers from the SMB market.

Anybody could add a script tag to their site and you'd see the iconic Drift chatbot icon on the bottom right hand corner.

The Drift sales development team grew revenue quickly by doing one-call closes using their own product.

The sales team would chat directly to website visitors, post a Zoom Link in the chat, and close a $6,000 to $8,000 a year deal right on the website.

Drift grew from $6 million in revenue to $47 million in revenue in 2 years. It was insanity. It was around this period that that Vista Equity stepped in.

Enter Private Equity

After Vista Equity entered the proverbial chat, Drift was forced to move upmarket and stopped caring about SMB/the lower-middle market B2B buyers. SMB just isn't seen as a place to stay for an aggressive PE firm that wants predictable revenue outcomes. Small companies churned too quickly.

Plus, companies with high website traffic typically received the most value out of Drift, which by and large is a marketing tool designed to capture leads passively visiting the site. The more site visitors, the more leads.

Consequently, it was easier to prove ROI and justify a higher price tag. PE saw enterprise revenue as more stable, which meant a higher multiple could be attached to the conversational AI company.

Drift initially did have a vision to expand outside of its conversational marketing wedge and help service the entire customer experience from top of funnel marketing to bottom of funnel sales, as well engaging customer experiences post-sales .

But ever since Vista took over, Drift shut down all expansion and focused product development on enterprise features and sticking to the marketing use case.

Remember the days when you could add a Drift chatbot to your site for a couple hundred a month? Those are gone.

Today, Drift's lowest tier is $2,500/month ($30,000/year), which is ironically desc "For Small Businesses."

$2,500/month: Small Business?

For Drift's Advanced and Enterprise tiers, we've heard our customers being quoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to upwards of millions a year. For Drift, the economics of the lower end of the market didn't make sense.

This showed in the product and buyer experiences as well. Complicated workflows, long implementation sessions, high price tags. It became a best-in-class point solution instead of an end-to-end platform, which put a ceiling on its growth.

There was a point where Drift wasn't even integrated in the CRM, a gap that Qualified exploited by building natively on top of the CRM to streamline the sales use case.

But moving up-market proved to be more difficult for Drift. Growth started to slow. And at the bottom, new entrants started popping up everywhere.

Chatbot software listed on G2

At this time, sales technology company valuations dramatically decreased; many investors were told not to deploy capital and to hold; and B2B buyers stopped buying. And as a result, churn and downgrades increased across the board.

It's no surprise that Drift had layoffs, releasing 159 employees in 2023. Case in point: Drift's employee growth rate has regressed 20% in the last 2 years.

Drift's Employee Count For the Past Two Years

Drift and Salesloft: A Merger of Equals

It made sense for Vista to combine Drift with Salesloft, two complimentary market leaders in sales development and customer engagement that are struggling to keep their dominance and justify their valuation multiples individually.

Salesloft has similarly come up against stiff competition from entrants like Outreach.io, Instantly.ai, Gong.io, Hubspot, ZoomInfo, and Apollo, all of which have their own sales prospecting capabilities that rival Salesloft's.

Tack on the fact that 93% of outbound emails these days are automated, with response rates generally reaching less than 2%, and it's obvious: the category of email sequencing is reaching a point of diminishing returns for its buyers.

Salesloft's acquisition of Drift, which we see more as a merger, is an opportunity for both companies to decrease costs, improve revenue outcomes, and leverage new synergies, especially fulfilling both company's initial visions of expanding beyond their own stage of buyer journey.

Salesloft CEO David Obrand posted on LinkedIn “[The acquisition] introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform that serves the entire buying journey. By closing the gap between sales and marketing, which has long been a major pain point in the revenue motion, go-to-market teams can now orchestrate a hyper-personalized, omnichannel buyer journey at scale.”

Typically, marketing tools don't cross over into sales, outside of ABX platforms like 6sense and Demandbase, so this would be one of the first acquisitions of its kind.

Naturally, it will take time to fully integrate the two sales technology platforms to create the AI-powered revenue orchestration experience that David Obrand has promised. And it won't be cheap: the point of consolidation is also to upsell offerings, especially if you're aiming at improving the entire buying journey.

What would that look like?

Sales reps could do things like sequence prospects via Salesloft, then continue the conversation with the prospect when they visit the website using Drift.

Drift can cookie and track session activity for all website visitors, and once a target company is identified, teams can use Salesloft to multithread the conversation with all key stakeholders in that target account by adding them all to sequences.

All of this orchestrated by Conductor AI of course.

Salesloft and Drift: Legacy Software Under Fire

As Salesloft and Drift are sorting through the acquisition, there will be a window of opportunity for new entrants to claim the AI revenue orchestration category for themselves by adapting to the changing landscape of how companies successfully go-to-market. We predict that these companies will move quickly to establish themselves.

There will be companies like Apollo.io who will opt to build the unified go-to-market solution natively in-house. This is better than the acquisition approach because data can move seamlessly across all their sub products.

And there will be other companies that will keep themselves platform-agnostic and act as the unified API layer that stitches together the sales and marketing tech stack, resulting in the entire customer experience becoming more coherent. Call it go-to-market middleware.

It's difficult for a single platform to be #1 at every use case. There will always be niche use cases that are better served by specific tools.

In this scenario, you would be able to plug in your favorite tools that you're already using.

Maybe you like ZoomInfo data better than Apollo's, Outreach more than Salesloft, 6sense more than Demandbase. It would give you the opportunity to mix and mash the best-in-class point solutions for your specific market and revenue outcomes.

I think Zach Howland, a sales tech stack expert who has implemented multiple CRM and sales tools across various companies, said it best.

"Flexibility is enhanced utility. The market needs to be more nimble for the coming scramble to modernize sales technology as AI becomes more robust."

Warmly, the Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform

Hi! We're Warmly, the signal-based revenue orchestration platform, purpose built for the SMB market that Salesloft and Drift are neglecting.

Instead of building everything natively or consolidating, we give you the flexibility to plug in your favorite sales and marketing tools.

We then infuse your tech stack with the best-in-class intent and enrichment data from 6sense, Clearbit, and Bombora to automatically orchestrate the right sales workflows at the right time.

We're AI powered. We're free to get started. And you can be fully setup in minutes.

And you can save yourself the $30,000/year because we built a Drift competitor chatbot natively into our platform as well.

Find out how D2DExperts closed $80,000 in revenue from Warmly in the first 12 days of use.

From content creation and distribution to LinkedIn sequencing to customer advocacy, demand generation is a broad and varied practice.

This isn’t your classic sales playbook that just needs a mobile phone and email address.

We’re talking complex tech stacks, deep integrations, and the ability to run across sales, marketing, support, and success.

In short, to really succeed with demand generation, you need some powerful tools in your tool belt.

And let’s be honest. It’s not as if you’re short on options.

In fact, the bigger problem is wading through the huge demand gen software market and figuring out what software platforms are worth your time and money.

In this article, we’re going to help you with that.

We’re going to discuss 13 of our favorite demand generation tools, across varied disciplines such as podcast recording, lead routing, and B2B advertising.

1. Content Optimization - Positional 

For many companies, SEO and content are the backbone of demand generation.

And to succeed in this arena, you’ve got to make sure your SEO content is properly optimized. For that, we use Positional.

Positional is an AI-powered toolset for SEO and content teams.

The platform is centered around a content optimization solution, which is what we primarily use it for. 

Positional helps you ensure that each piece of blog content you create covers key themes, includes important terms and keywords, and meets user experience requirements, such as the inclusion of images and subheaders.

Positional also has a bunch of other great content production features built-in, such as:

• Content planning and keyword clustering capabilities
• Keyword tracking (powered by Semrush data)
• Internal link optimization
• On-page content analytics like bounce rates, in-depth page scoring, and heatmapping
• Auto-detection of AI-written content (ideal for when you grow content operations to include external contractors)

Positional Pricing

Positional is still in private beta, so you’ll have to book a demo with their Co-founder Nate to find out more.

2. Content Publishing - Letterdrop

Letterdrop is another content-related tool that we at Warmly use as part of our demand generation strategy.

This one is all about increasing the reach of the content you publish.

We use Letterdrop to publish directly to our website (on Webflow’s CMS), and automatically post on social media platforms like LinkedIn to expand our reach.

We also take advantage of Letterdrop’s LinkedIn social selling automation. Whenever someone from our company posts on LinkedIn, we can program the post to be liked and even shared automatically by other Warmly team members.

Letterdrop has a few features that overlap with Positional, such as internal linking and SEO monitoring.

One cool unique feature of Letterdrop, though, is their integration with Gong.

You can pull insights from Gong’s sales call recording feature to understand pain points and objections and use them to power blog and sales enablement content ideation.

Letterdrop Pricing

Letterdrop has a useable free option, and costs $995 a month for their Growth plan.

3. Video Content Production - OpusClip 

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When it comes to content formats to fuel a demand generation campaign, video is perhaps the ultimate option.

We use video for podcasting, webinars, explainer videos, and case studies, which we house on our media page.

For all of these video formats, we use OpusClip to create shareable videos.

OpusClip is an AI video editor. You give it a long video, and its AI engine scours the recording for the best parts that it can turn into viral clips.

It has a GPT-enabled portal, so you can make requests in plain English, like “Give me a 30-second clip from the first hour of the video.”

You can also add contextually-relevant B-roll to longer videos or cut between two cameras with active speaker detection.

OpusClip Pricing

OpusClip has a free option, with paid plans starting at $9 a month.

4. Video Editing - Capcut 

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Capcut is another video editing tool that we use as part of our demand gen content creation tech stack.

Where OpusClip is more of a unique tool that couldn’t do what it does without AI, Capcut is closer to a traditional video editing suite, but with AI built on top.

It has video editing and creation features like text to speech and animations, AI editing tools like video upscaling or auto video generation, and even some photo editing tools for visual content creation.

It also has a handy mobile app, which is cool for editing content on the go from a tablet or phone.

Capcut Pricing

Capcut doesn’t appear to advertise pricing, but sources say you’ll pay in the range of $8 a month for the most basic plan.

5. Visual Content Creation - Canva 

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When it comes to demand gen tools, few companies have been as disruptive as Canva.

Canva is an online graphic design tool.

It offers a ton of great templates, hundreds of fonts to use, and an easy-to-understand drag-and-drop editor.

But perhaps the best thing about Canva is that it's free.

Well, there are paid plans available (it's a freemium tool), of course, but the free version is seriously usable.

If you’re looking for the right demand generation tools for visual content creation, Canva should be at the top of your list. 

Canva Pricing

As mentioned, Canva has a seriously functional free plan.

For more advanced content creation features, though, you’ll want to upgrade to a paid plan, starting at $15 a month.

6. B2B Advertising - Metadata 

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Metadata is one of the few exclusively B2B demand generation software solutions on this list.

Metadata came up on the back of a great B2B advertising toolset, catering specifically to an audience running account-based marketing campaigns.

That’s still definitely where they excel. Metadata has fantastic ad automation functionality, a deep reporting and analytics suite, and some powerful audience targeting features.

Now, Metadata is expanding its offer, positioning itself as a B2B marketing OS. The idea here is that Metadata sits at the center of your demand generation marketing tech stack and helps orchestrate and automate demand generation campaigns.

As such, the solution now offers features and developments like:

• A huge range of integrations with marketing automation tools like Salesforce Pardot
• Website personalization functionality
• Lead data enrichment 

Metadata Pricing

Metadata costs $60,000 a year, with a $540,000 annual ad spend limit.

If you want to spend more than that on ads, you’ll need to chat directly with the sales team to organize a custom deal.

7. Podcast Recording - Riverside 

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Riverside is one of the best demand generation tools for anyone using podcasts as a content format.

We use Riverside primarily for recording remote podcasts, where the hosts and attendees are recorded using the webcam or phone.

Beyond that, Riverside has a tonne of great features that make it a seriously powerful inbound marketing tool, such as:

• AI-powered show notes
• Captions and transcriptions in over 100 languages
• A teleprompter and media board to enhance your hosting abilities
• Video editing capabilities 
• Bite-sized clip generation powered by artificial intelligence 

Riverside Pricing

Riverside comes in at $15 or $24 a month, depending on the plan you choose.

There is also a free plan, though it comes with limitations on content length.

8. Interactive Website Content - Outgrow 

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Outgrow is somewhat unique in the demand generation software space, serving the need to create interactive website content like quizzes, calculators, and forms.

Outgrow has a bunch of different use cases.

You can use it to enhance on-page engagement, gather critical insights about customer buying preferences, or simply as a lead capture tool.

To help you get started quickly, Outgrow offers a number of helpful templates across formats like polls, surveys, and assessments.

Outgrow Pricing

Outgrow pricing starts at $14 a month, scaling up to $600 a month depending on the features you require.

9. Programmatic SEO - The.com 

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The.com is an interesting tool. It uses AI to spin up web pages very quickly to target long-tail keywords.

It is ideal for demand gen efforts toward the bottom of the funnel, such as creating a bunch of “competitor vs. competitor” pages to increase your organic traffic.

The.com is more about AI-generated landing pages and programmatic website content than it is about SEO blog posts. For that, we still use human writers.

But you can use The.com for things like localized landing pages to hit local SEO requirements and to automatically generate personalized web pages that speak to the exact user on your site.

The.com Pricing

The.com doesn’t advertise pricing. You’ll have to speak with a sales rep.

10. Heatmapping - Hotjar 

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Hotjar is a behavioral analytics tool centered primarily around a web page heat mapping solution.

With this heat mapping tool, you can see exactly how users interact with content on your website: what draws eyeballs, what promotes conversions, and what causes users to leave.

You can view heatmap data based on movements like scrolling or clicks or even record full user sessions and watch how they navigate your site in real time.

Beyond the heatmapping functionality, Hotjar has a few cool features to understand the impact of your demand generation efforts, such as:

• Customer surveys and questions for real-time and contextual user feedback
• 1-on-1 customer interview functionality
• The ability to compare how user behavior changes depending on the device used 

Hotjar Pricing

Hotjar pricing is a little complex. You pick and choose the modules you want based on the features you require.

You’ll pay a minimum of $32 a month for the most basic heat mapping functionality.

11. Buyer Identification and Engagement - Warmly 

Much of demand generation is about bringing potential customers over to your website. But then what?

You’ve spent all that time, money, and effort on generating demand. You want to know exactly who it is on your site, so at the very least, you can attribute traffic to specific demand generation programs.

That’s where Warmly comes in.

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Warmly is our AI-powered account-based orchestration platform, and it’s the perfect demand generation solution for de-anonymizing website visitors.

Here’s how it works:

When someone lands on your website, whether its via one of your content marketing tools, social media efforts, or blog posts, Warmly identifies what company they’re from, and often provides you with the LinkedIn of the exact person who visited.

You’ll also get access to data like what pages they visited and for how long, so you can properly personalize sales efforts like email outreach.

From there, you can use a combination of Warmly’s engagement features to activate an omnichannel campaign, such as an AI-driven website chatbot or automated email and LinkedIn outreach.

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Warmly Pricing

We built Warmly for the small or medium-sized business looking to scale up account-based playbooks without having to invest 6-figures in an ABM platform.

Pricing for Warmly starts at $1200 a month, but we also offer a seriously-usable free plan. Get started for free (without having to talk to a sales rep).

12. Lead Routing - Chili Piper 

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Chili Piper is more or less considered the defacto lead routing tool.

On the back of a successful demand generation campaign, new leads enter the sales funnel, and Chili Piper helps you route that prospect to an appropriate inbound sales rep.

You set the routing rules so that leads get distributed based on factors that you choose, such as rep availability, territory assignment, or customer segment.

Chili Piper naturally integrates with popular lead generation tools such as Formstack and ClickFunnels, and they also offer a one-click scheduling tool to make it easy for prospects to schedule a demo or meeting directly with a salesperson.

Chili Piper Pricing

Chili Piper pricing starts at $15 per user per month.

13. Customer Knowledge - Deeto 

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Deeto is something unique in this space, billing itself as a “prospect empowerment platform.”

The idea here is that Deeto connects prospects in your sales pipeline to real-life customers who are currently using your tool.

That way, prospects don’t need to rely on tools like reviews and case studies (which, let’s face it, are often a little doctored). Instead, they can get the info they need right from the source.

There’s a smart-matching algorithm that uses factors like role and company size to help prospects find the right person to speak to, or they can browse a database of customers and schedule a discussion.

Check out our podcast episode Golan Raz, the Founder & COO of Deeto: Scaling Customer Advocacy.

Deeto Pricing

Deeto doesn’t advertise pricing.

Capitalizing on demand with Warmly 

If there’s one goal that all effective demand generation strategies share, it's building up enough demand for your product to produce quality leads that your sales team can actually close.

So, what happens when those warm leads come through?

Speed to lead is the name of the game here, so you need a robust solution that can help you jump on hot prospects immediately.

Warmly, our AI-powered account-based orchestration platform can help you deanonymize site traffic, funnel prospects into automated email and social outreach campaigns, and provide third-party buying intent insights to help you understand exactly when a sales rep should get involved.

But unlike other solutions, Warmly doesn’t need months of extensive onboarding, integration, and training sessions to start seeing results.

Many of our users see a positive ROI in a matter of days.

Check out Kandji booked two meetings with qualified leads in just eight minutes using Warmly.

One of the biggest challenges for B2B SaaS sellers is lead generation. Whether you choose to prioritize outbound or inbound leads, you’ll have to dedicate a lot of time and patience to nurturing prospects before they buy. 

Before digital tools transformed the sales funnel, outbound sales was the top dog. You’d build a team of salespeople whose job was cold calling and cold emailing in huge numbers until they hit on the right person who wanted to buy from you. 

Or, you’d send a few of your top salespeople to every annual SaaS conference in the United States, hoping they would contact your ideal customer. 

Today, however, SaaS brands recognize that this isn’t the savviest way to sell. Outbound marketing might get you airtime with potential customers immediately, but when only 5% of your market is ready to buy at any given time, you’re wasting your time more often than not.

Enter inbound sales. 

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Inbound sales focuses on understanding customer needs and consistently building brand awareness. This way, you can get your ICPs to come to you rather than wasting time reaching out to them, resulting in a cost per lead that is considerably cheaper than outbound leads. 

But how do you get the most out of your inbound sales strategy? That’s where an inbound sales representative comes in. 

At Warmly, we distinguish between our sales development representatives (SDRs) and our inbound sales representatives (ISRs). While both focus on identifying potential leads and closing deals, ISRs are uniquely positioned in the sales process. 

Understanding the Traditional Inbound Sales Funnel

In contrast with outbound sales, inbound sales are all about your customer: the pain points, goals, and sticking points they’re experiencing. 

As a result, because inbound is less about outreach, an effective inbound sales strategy relies on the strength of your brand awareness. Your ICP can’t connect with you unless they know you’re out there, providing them with the answer to their problems. 

Essentially, an inbound sales team aims to build an ample supply of ToFu leads—those who learn about you through social media, podcasts, and blogs—so that when they’re ready to buy, they instinctively come to you.

Research into buyer journeys and demographics of your ICP helps you identify the right MQL to pass on to your sales team, who begin converting ToFu prospects into MoFu and BoFu leads and, finally, new customers. 

Of course, if your sales strategy is based on account-based marketing, you’ll want to think of the funnel slightly differently. In both cases, the quality of the lead generation you accomplish is critical. 

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But inbound sales strategy also relies on effective sales reps. Distanced from traditional sales strategies like cold calling, your inbound sales representative must be far more agile.

Research from Gartner shows that B2B buyers spend 27% of their time researching solutions independently online and just 17% meeting with potential suppliers. Your ICPs will likely not reach out until they’re ready—in fact, 41% of B2B buyers view 3-5 pieces of content online before communicating with your sales team. 

With your marketing team focused on increasing brand awareness and your sales team intent on closing deals with those they’ve identified as SQOs, there’s a gap where your inbound prospects may be slipping through the cracks. 

Where Does an Inbound Sales Representative Fit?

Inbound sales representatives are sometimes called business development representatives (BDRs) or sales development representatives (SDRs). However, at Warmly, we consider inbound sales representative jobs to be crucial roles independent of other members of inside sales or marketing.

The traditional inbound sales funnel clearly distinguishes between marketing efforts and sales efforts. Inbound marketing brings leads into the funnel; sales focuses on conversion. 

In the current B2B buyer landscape, the line between marketing and sales is more blurred. With prospects increasingly taking a non-linear path through the sales funnel, marketing and sales teams must work collaboratively to nurture leads and get them ready to buy. 

Your inbound sales representative sits at this cusp between marketing and sales. With extensive product knowledge and traditional sales skills like objection handling, inbound sales representatives are the ideal people to nurture warm leads before passing them on to an AE. 

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At Warmly, inbound sales reps are an intermediary step between an SDR and an AE. ISRs are responsible for a combination of SDR tasks like prospecting and closing smaller deals as an AE would. 

For this reason, introducing ISRs into your sales funnel can speed up the sales path for junior team members, turning them into competent AEs far quicker than if they spent additional time as an SDR. 

Alternatively, the ISR role can be more of an inbound sales development rep: a permanent position that speeds up the process of qualifying leads and passing them onto AEs. 

Whichever strategy you choose for your inbound sales representative, implementing this position in your team accomplishes two things:

• Speeds up the process of identifying SQOs.
• Enables AEs to spend more time on potential customers with a higher ARPA.

The Role of an ISR: Nurturing, Booking, Closing

Inbound sales representatives are responsible for the three main types of lead during the sales process.

Unqualified Inbound

Leads that aren’t likely to fit the definition of an SQO. They may not have the resources to make a purchasing decision or simply aren’t ready to buy. 

Big Inbound

‘Whale’ leads that are usually the responsibility of an AE. 92% of B2B buyers report being likely to schedule meetings with a company they might buy from, so getting whales in front of an AE is critical.

Just Right Inbound (‘Goldilocks’ deals)

Smaller than whales, but still viable opportunities for revenue. These are the optimal leads for an inbound sales representative to cover from prospecting to closing. 

Consequently, we can categorize an inbound sales rep’s role comprising the following three primary responsibilities: 

Nurturing 

For those unqualified inbound leads, ISRs take the lead in asking challenger questions and direct leads to the free product tier if relevant. 

For leads where the SDR has indicated a higher likelihood of conversion, the ISR can conduct more extensive nurturing tasks using a combination of manual communication (emails or live chat) and automated tools. Traditional sales skills like active listening and negotiation skills, plus product knowledge, will come into play here.

Booking

It’s vital that the most lucrative of warm leads actually get in front of a talented AE. The inbound sales representative is responsible for filtering leads to ensure that only the most worthwhile leads are sent to the AE, reducing the likelihood of wasted calls. 

However, inbound sales representatives can also book calls with those ‘goldilocks’ leads, who are too small for AEs but have been qualified as solid prospects by the SDR. 

Closing 

In general, ISRs are only responsible for closing deals with ‘goldilocks’ leads. However, the extent of these more minor yet still viable leads means ISRs quickly get a feel for pitching and general sales strategy. 

Crucially, inbound sales representatives have a broad remit as far as sales development goes. But their role is more than just closing those smaller deals; they also allow SDRs to focus on discovering quality leads and AEs on closing deals.

And when B2B companies face a landing page visitor conversion rate of just 9.5%, it’s even more important to have a sales team in place that can get leads through the funnel as efficiently as possible.

KPIs for an Inbound Sales Representative

The performance of an SDR or an AE hinges on clear sales targets:

• SDR = Total # SQOs generated
• AE = Total # Closed Won deals 

In Warmly’s case, as they sit between the SDR and the AE, we measure inbound sales representative KPIs according to a mix of the above. 

Closed Won deals are worth twice as much as SQOs. So, a typical monthly KPI for an ISR may look like: 

• 6 Closed Won deals
• 6 SQO + 3 Closed Won deals
• 12 SQOs 

As outlined above, ISRs aren’t responsible for the largest ARPA deals. These go straight to AEs. However, an inbound sales representative can cover those all-important goldilocks leads—the prospects we know are in the right mindset at the right time and are just small enough to work as a training ground for ISRs. 

Because inbound sales reps are in-training for senior AE positions, we look for ISRs to be quickly improve their sales metrics. This might look like: 

• Q1: 9-12 SQOs and 1-3 Closed Won deals
• Q2: 3-6 SQOs and 2-4 Closed Won deals

Important Factors Affecting the Success of Inbound Sales Representatives

Quality of MQLs

Unfortunately, if your inbound sales representative isn’t being fed accurate leads from your SDR or marketing team, they’ll find converting much more challenging. 

While identifying MQLs will be the responsibility of the marketing team, to improve the quality of MQLs, your marketing and sales team should be completely aligned on the kinds of prospects you’re primarily seeking. 

This is one reason why many B2B companies are turning to account-based selling and account-based marketing, as it’s a strategy that considerably reduces the risk of imperfect data being passed between marketing and sales teams.  

Robust Understanding of Your ICP

If your inbound sales representative doesn’t understand your ICP, their sales metrics will suffer. 

Any leads that don’t align with your ICP will inevitably be a waste of time, whether that’s through conversations that don’t progress or prospects not bothering to attend booked meetings at all. 

To give inbound sales representatives the best chance of closing deals, they should only spend time with leads that match your ICP. 

Timing of Engagement 

In his observations on a month of working on inbound leads, Ernest Teh notes that “capturing all the demand” was one of his biggest learnings. ISRs must react quickly to every lead that qualifies, requiring integrated CRM software to alert inbound sales reps to opportunities. 

Research shows that sales reps who respond to leads within five minutes are 21x more likely to see conversion. The SQOs driven to your inbound sales representative might match your ICP exactly, but if your inbound sales representative doesn’t have the bandwidth to respond, you’re throwing away good prospects.

The Future of the Inbound Sales Representative 

We predict that inbound sales representative jobs will only grow in an increasingly automated B2B sales landscape. In a world of increasing SaaS competition and an emphasis on personalized experiences, inbound sales representatives are ideal to ensure consistent collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. 

For inbound sales representatives to work at their best, they need the correct data and resources. Intent is an essential factor in B2B buying decisions, and for inbound sales representatives to take advantage of every prospect they’re given, they must have the right tools to track and identify leads.

Conclusion

At Warmly, we consider inbound sales representative jobs pivotal to our inbound sales team. 

An inbound sales representative is an ideal stepping-stone position between an SDR and an AE. It’s a six-month boot camp in inbound sales, priming staff for more senior responsibilities in account management. 

Ultimately, we’re seeing two benefits to implementing ISRs within our inbound sales team: reducing the time between salespeople moving from SDR to AE and optimizing salespeople, so they’re ready for the challenge of account management from day one.

Inbound marketing has come a long way since HubSpot’s CEO coined the term back in 2005.

Today, in many circles, inbound marketing is not even called “inbound marketing.”

It’s just marketing.

Yes, traditional and outbound techniques are still used, but few highly successful organizations today are using them extensively. They are almost always combined with an inbound play.

Since inbound marketing is so broad and all-encompassing, it’s little surprise that the world of inbound marketing tools is a little overwhelming, to say the least.

I mean, we researched this article to bring you the best of the best, and we still came up with a “brief” list of 27 tools.

To help you choose the best software solutions for your tech stack, we’ve divided up our list into different categories, starting with content production, the backbone of most inbound marketing campaigns.

Inbound Marketing Tools For Content Production 

Content marketing and inbound marketing are so deeply intertwined they might as well be synonyms.

They aren’t, but here’s the thing:

Inbound doesn’t really work without content. 

You need content for social media posts, email marketing campaigns, webinars, and even to attract visitors to your site via SEO.

Naturally, the list of content-related inbound marketing software solutions is longer than all others. We’ve got 10 for you.

1. ClickUp 

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ClickUp is a project management software solution.

It’s where you'll orchestrate all of your content workflows, communicate and collaborate with freelance content creators, and maintain and manage content calendars.

In part three of our “Building A Content Factory” series, Developing Content Operations, we dove into blog writing workflows and how to use a solution like ClickUp—or an alternative like monday.com, Asana, or Trello—to manage content creation.

Automation is a standout feature for ClickUp.

You can automate tasks like the creation of task checklists, program routing rules, and create automatic notifications when a given action takes place.

2. Positional 

Positional is a toolset for SEO and content teams.

It's similar to alternatives like Surfer and Clearscope in that you can use it to optimize content for search engines.

We use Positional for that exact purpose (it's probably part of why you found this article), but it also has a few other cool features, such as keyword research and clustering functionality, as well as an AI content detector.

One of our favorite features is Positional’s Content Analytics. This allows you to see user heatmaps to understand where readers are navigating away from your content, as well as core metrics like bounce rates.

3. Semrush 

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Semrush is another SEO suite, though it's more commonly used for the research and competitive monitoring aspects of SEO content creation.

It's one of the big three in this space, sharing the limelight with Ahrefs and Moz.

We like Semrush because of its Keyword Magic Tool.

You plug in a keyword idea and it spits out a bunch of related keywords that people are actually searching for, along with data on monthly traffic and keyword ranking difficulty.

This is a solid feature for finding new keywords to add to your SEO content calendar.

4. Canva 

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Canva is an online graphic design tool.

This was a real game-changer a few years back. Before Canva, you had to shell out hundreds of dollars for something like Photoshop.

Canva is much more usable and way more affordable—they even have a solid and genuinely usable free version.

You—or your content creators—can use Canva to create custom images, graphs, cover images, and infographics, either for your written content like blogs or for social media posts.

Canva also has a bunch of pre-designed templates, taking design work off of your plate and making it easy to create professional-looking images without having a professional designer on board.

5. Grammarly 

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Grammarly is the most well-known of all spelling and grammar checkers.

What a lot of people don’t know, however, is that Grammarly is much more powerful than that.

Yes, it will tell you if you spelled something from or formulated a sentence with bad grammar. But it can also provide recommendations for making content more concise or otherwise more readable.

It can identify tone of voice, mood, and attitude, helping you stay in line with brand guidelines.

Grammarly also has a ton of integrations, so you can use it directly within content creation tools like Google Docs or Notion or on social media platforms like X and Facebook.

6. Letterdrop 

Letterdrop is another tool we use for our own inbound marketing efforts. We use it for two things:

1. Content management
2. Social amplification 

In Letterdrop, you can draft a new piece of content (or copy it in from Google Docs), do some search optimization and internal linking, and publish it directly to your CMS (if you’re on Webflow).

Where things get really cool is Letterdrop’s automated social amplification feature.

Every piece of content we publish gets automatically shared on LinkedIn, and we can also have our team like and comment on posts without having to actually jump on the social media platform.

7. Riverside

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Riverside is a remote podcast recording tool.

We use it to capture video and podcast content when we’re speaking with subject matter experts over video.

Riverside offers really high-quality audio and video recording functionality, as well as some cool additional features like:

• AI social clip creation
• Transcriptions
• Captions
• Show notes

It also has a built-in editing suite, though we use Capcut for video editing.

8. Capcut  

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Capcut is our preferred all-in-one video editor.

Once we’ve recorded a podcast or webinar with Riverside, we upload it into Capcut for fast and free video editing.

Capcut has a ton of AI editing features such as video upscaling, to improve detail and resolution in your video content.

Then, there’s the standard functionality like filters, transitions, and auto-captions.

9. Vidyo.ai  

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Vidyo.ai is a super helpful AI-powered solution for turning long-form videos into shorter-form clips for repurposing across social.

For example, we use it to throw in a podcast episode or webinar, then ask it to spit out clips that we can use to accompany a post on LinkedIn promoting the full video.

Vidyo.ai has a few other cool features to help amplify your video marketing, as well:

• SEO optimized captions
• Direct posting to social
• Animated subtitles
• Virality prediction score 

10. Wistia 

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Wistia is a video hosting platform.

It allows you to host videos on your own site rather than having to use a third-party solution like YouTube or Vimeo.

Those platforms have their own benefit in that they can help your videos get found. But you’re also at the mercy of their algorithms and community guidelines.

For that reason, we post on both YouTube and host videos on our own website using Wistia.

Some of the other unique features that Wistia offers include:

• SEO optimization functionality
• The ability to add CTAs to videos and sync that to your CRM
• Interactivity tools like annotated links
• A dedicated content management system for storing, searching, and finding video content 

Inbound Marketing Tools For Social Media Marketing 

Beyond the creation of the actual content you’ll publish on social media—be it video, imagery, written word, or a combination thereof—you'll need some form of software to manage the whole campaign.

This includes aspects of social media management such as audience creation, topic ideation, and reporting and analytics.

Here are our three favorite inbound social media tools.

11. Buffer 

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Buffer bills itself as a social media toolkit for small businesses.

It’s priced accordingly—you can get started for just $6 a month—and offers a decent selection of features that SMBs and even mid-market organizations can use to make social a part of their inbound marketing strategy.

Some of our favorite Buffer features include:

• A content publishing calendar
• AI post generation
• Automatic video content distribution to multiple channels 
• Deep social media reporting and analytics suite 
• Customized landing pages with pre-built templates 

12. Hootsuite 

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Hootsuite is another social media scheduling and marketing suite.

What makes Hootsuite a better option (particularly for larger companies) is:

• A single inbox for answering all social media questions and queries 
• A larger range of integrations with other inbound marketing tools
• Advertising capabilities across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
• An AI-powered hashtag generator  

13. BuzzSumo 

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BuzzSumo is a unique tool in the social media space.

It's a social media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions across various media channels, handle crises, respond to customers quickly, and reshare UGC (user-generated content).

Beyond that, BuzzSumo can be used to find unique new ideas for inbound marketing campaigns.

You can dig into what’s trending across different platforms and demographics, find real questions to answer in your social and blog content, get tips on how to promote and distribute your content for maximum engagement and dive into competitor activities.

BuzzSumo also has an influencer marketing suite, so you can find the right influencer for your next campaign based on real performance results.

Inbound Marketing Tools For Email Marketing 

Email is a key channel for inbound marketing campaigns.

Many inbound lead generation efforts—things like gated webinars, ebooks, and guides—funnel prospects into an email cadence.

Here are our two favorite inbound marketing software tools for managing email campaigns that convert.

14. Mailchimp 

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Mailchimp is pretty much the name in email marketing.

Yes, there are a ton of other great email marketing tools, but Mailchimp has been around for a while now and has expanded beyond simple email marketing automation.

They’re now offering features like:

• Branded content creation
• Customizable website landing pages
• Social media publishing and engagement
• Audience management and segmentation 

15. ActiveCampaign 

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ActiveCampaign, like Mailchimp, used to just be an email automation platform.

That’s still their core competency, but ActiveCampaign has a number of other cool features for inbound marketing.

They’ve got sales automation (like lead scoring and routing), a CRM, website visitor and event tracking, and even e-commerce integrations and features like:

• Cross-selling emails and automated abandoned cart reminders
• Personalized coupons and discounts
• An e-commerce reporting and analytics suite 

Inbound Marketing Tools For Reporting, Analytics, and Optimization 

Without solid analytics tools to report on the effectiveness of your campaigns, you won’t know what to invest more in, and you’ll probably just be spinning your wheels.

These three reporting tools, whether used separately or as an analytics tech stack, will be your perfect partner for optimizing inbound marketing efforts.

16. Google Analytics  

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Google Analytics is the defacto analytics tool.

The biggest win is that it's entirely free (though there is a more advanced paid version called Google Analytics 360).

Also, being Google, it obviously has great data related to organic search and PPC ad performance and integrates perfectly with other Google tools like Google Search Console (GSC).

With Google Analytics, you can map user journeys on your site, understand what’s driving traffic and what content is converting, and build automated marketing reports.

17. Hotjar 

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Hotjar is a website heat mapping and behavioral analytics solution.

Bit of a mouthful, but what this really means is that Hotjar helps you see what people are doing on your website so you can further optimize.

Heatmaps show you how people navigate and click on your web pages—helpful for UX and design improvements—and screen recordings allow you to actually see how users interact with specific pages, even if they aren’t clicking on anything.

Hotjar also has some survey and interview tools for gathering explicit feedback from users and a ton of useful integrations with the likes of Jira, HubSpot, and Unbounce. 

18. Optimizely

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Optimizely is a website optimization solution.

This is built primarily around A/B testing, so you can try out different approaches and see what converts best.

However, Optimizely is a lot more complex than that, offering features like:

• Website personalization (ideal for account-based marketing campaigns)
• AI-generated content recommendations
• Content distribution functionality 

Inbound Marketing Tools For Marketing Automation 

Inbound marketing campaigns generally work best at scale, and scale brings with it repetition.

To take some (or a lot) of that draining and repetitive manual work off of your plate, you’ll want to add a marketing automation tool to your inbound marketing tech stack.

19. HubSpot 

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HubSpot is the granddaddy of inbound marketing tools. 

The brand pretty much invented the term inbound marketing, and having been around for years now, it’s little surprise that they run the whole gamut from a free CRM to a deep suite for customer service and support.

Where HubSpot really excels, though, is in marketing automation for the SMB.

You can get in for free or on a relatively cheap monthly plan and start automating emails, website chat, sales playbooks, and more.  It can also be integrated with revenue intelligence platforms for better sales insights and related forecasts.

You can even build and run your site on HubSpot for a single-supplier solution.

20. Pardot 

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Pardot is somewhat of a legacy tool, dating back to 2007, but it's still super widely used.

This is in part because Pardot got acquired by Salesforce back in 2013, making it the de facto marketing automation solution for Salesforce-centric teams.

Aside from the obviously tight integration with Salesforce, Pardot boasts features like:

• Multi-channel marketing campaigns
• Email marketing
• Audience segmentation
• Forms for capturing warm leads 

21. AdRoll 

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AdRoll is an ad-focused digital marketing automation solution.

While ads themselves aren’t typically considered an inbound marketing tactic, they are often used to supplement inbound campaigns, particularly when retargeting prospects who’ve already landed on your site. So we’ll allow it here.

AdRolls offers ad buying and automation across display, video, and social media. It can run brand-focused ads or acquisition-focused retargeting ads and integrates neatly with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce.

Inbound Marketing Tools For Website Engagement 

Many inbound marketing efforts, from social media engagement to blog content, are designed to drive potential customers over to your website.

What happens then?

You use one of these three website engagement solutions to capture attention, start a conversation, answer customer questions and objections, and capture a warm lead (or close a deal directly!)

22. Warmly 

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Warmly—that’s us, by the way—is an account-based orchestration platform.

Revenue orchestration is all about surround-sounding prospects with timely, personalized, intent-based content and communications across all channels, from website chat to email to LinkedIn.

We've thrown our hat in the ring amongst three other website engagement solutions (Drift, Zommo, and Intercom) because we, too, offer conversational website chat.

But here’s where our solution is different:

Our chat is human-led and AI-augmented, meaning your prospects aren’t engaging with a simple “if-then” chat workflow. 

The AI engine knows exactly who it’s talking to (because the prospect is deanonymized and their data enriched through Warmly) and what level of interest they have expressed (via third-party intent data from Bombora).

The chatbot then caters the conversation to those exact needs.

And, once it's time for a rep to take over—because the prospect has demonstrated a given level of intent—the salesperson gets an automated notification via Slack and can jump into the chat live. They can even turn it into a live video call without having the prospect leave the site.

Learn more about Warmly, the signal-based revenue orchestration platform.

23. Drift 

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Drift is one of the most widely used chat solutions for lead generation. What Drift does in comparison to its many competitors is play the numbers game.

Drift is a pre-programmed chatbot, and they’ve started implementing a few AI features, too. 

It's not a human-led tool. It's much more about high-volume traffic plays, where a small percentage of the traffic you pull to your site can be enough to feed your sales team.

At that, though, it's really good.

It also provides sales teams with engagement history and lead scores so they know who to prioritize and provides insight into audience makeups.

24. Intercom 

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Intercom is similar to Drift in that it offers a chat solution.

But while Drift hits the marketing use case, Intercom is much more focused on customer support service.

For that reason, you’ll also find features like:

• A unified inbox for managing helpdesk tickets
• An AI summary of long customer complaints
• A self-serve content repository for helping clients resolve their own issues 
• Automated workflows for support ticket management 

25. Kommo

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Kommo is a messenger-based CRM that offers an interactive website chat button. Equipped with an AI chatbot that responds to messages automatically, it gives customers a conversational experience. 

This tool is a good option for leading customers to direct messages such as Live Chat and WhatsApp, especially when customers feel personally unconnected with the business.

With a website chat button, customers no longer juggle between communication channels to get virtual assistance. Along with it, Kommo provides features like: 

• A unified box for managing messages from a lot of communication channels.
• Lead cards to give information about customers.
• Templates to make engaging personalized messages.
• Sales pipeline for organizing lead cards.

Inbound Marketing Tools For Lead Routing 

All of those inbound efforts have to lead somewhere.

For most companies, the output of inbound marketing campaigns is to generate leads—prospects who’ve expressed some level of interest in your brand, product, or service.

To make those warm inbound leads make it to the right sales rep, install one of these two lead routing solutions.

26. Chili Piper

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Chili Piper is the defacto inbound lead routing tool.

Essentially, once a new lead comes in from one of your various inbound marketing activities, Chili Piper figures out which salesperson the lead should go to based on the likes of territory mapping, availability, deal size, company vertical, or any other factor you plug into its automation recipes.

27. LeanData 

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LeanData started off as a CRM orchestration too, primarily for Salesforce.

It allowed sales teams to plug in a bunch of “if this, then that” automation and to clean up their CRM, remove duplicate data, and refresh outdated account information.

Recently, they rebranded a little and expanded their offer.

Now, LeanData is more about CRM orchestration for the revenue team whose goal is to increase sales velocity.

So, we’re starting to see features come through like:

• Lead matching and routing
• Integrations with data providers like 6sense and sales enablement tools like Outreach
• Improved user access control

Warmly: The ultimate tool for reaping the fruits of inbound marketing campaigns 

We’ve just covered 27 of the best inbound marketing software tools you can use to deliver high-quality warm leads to your sales team.

All of them have one thing in common:

They’re just tools.

Tools are only as good as how you use them, meaning your processes and workflows need to be set up in a way that can leverage all of that hard work.

Many inbound marketing teams fall over at this part. They build great engines for generating demand but don’t really do any demand capture.

That’s where Warmly comes in, with features like:

• Website visitor deanonymization
• Data enrichment 
• AI-powered emails and LinkedIn outreach
• Live AI or human-led chat
• Routing and alerts  

Want to see just how big of an impact Warmly can make?

Learn how D2D Experts drove $80k in revenue in their first 12 days using Warmly.

For centuries, salespeople have cast a wide net, then worked to convince individuals to exchange money for goods and services. Unfortunately, the one-to-one model no longer works for B2B SaaS in 2024.

According to a 2023 report by Gartner, "the average enterprise B2B buying group consists of 5 to 11 stakeholders" representing "an average of 5 distinct business functions." That means instead of selling to one person, a sales rep has to convince half a dozen people to sign off.

Salespeople focused on closing specific leads are missing the forest for the trees. Account-based selling is both the opposite of—and the solution to—traditional sales strategies.

What is Account-Based Selling?

Account-based selling is inseparable from account based marketing. They both represent a shift from casting a wide net for any fish that will bite, to focusing on a few specific value accounts that require more specialized tools and strategies to capture. Marketing and sales teams need to work closely to identify the accounts and create a personalized experience for each of the stakeholders on the buying committee. Instead of one-to-one, it's team-to-team.

Key Differences Between Account-Based Selling and Traditional Sales Strategies

While the traditional sales strategy was finding a single lead who has sway over buying decisions, account-based selling takes a more holistic view of the entire purchasing committee. It's not about getting any prospective customer to 100%. Account-based sales teams suss out all the stakeholders involved and try to get everyone engaged and on board at the same time.

Benefits of Account-Based Selling for B2B Sales

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute estimates that only 5% of customers are "in the market" for new services at any given time. This estimate is based on corporations changing their bank or law firm every five years on average. i.e. 20% of customers are in market per year, or 5% a quarter. The figure is likely lower for B2B SaaS where the average contract length is shorter and churn rate is higher.

If most of your ICP isn't in the market right now, carpet-bombing all prospects indiscriminately is a waste of resources.

Account-based selling is about understanding where prospects are in the buyer's journey and positioning your product so you already have a foot in the door when the prospect goes to open it.

While it can increase customer acquisition costs, it often pays off in higher ROI, customer lifetime value and revenue potential. It also means that sales reps are not wasting time cold calling. Instead, they are investing their time in long-term customer relationships and increasing the conversion rate.

Implementing Account-Based Selling in B2B Sales

‎Account-based selling is inseparable from account based marketing. The entire revenue operation has to be aligned at every stage from identify to close. The ABS team works together to identify the ideal client profile and narrow down the target list. The marketing team gathers account intelligence and figures out where customers are in the buyer journey. Account-based sellers are ready to engage at the moment that prospects come in market. Customer success is also primed to give the prospect the same level of personalized attention at onboarding, ensuring a smooth sales cycle from start to finish.

A. Identifying High-Value Target Accounts and Key Stakeholders

There are a lot of ways to figure out an initial target account list. The first step of account selection is putting together an ideal client profile. Ideally, you will be looking for larger high-value accounts that will bring enough revenue to justify the high-touch focus.

You may also look at accounts that serve other company goals. Do you want to land a Fortune 500 company for the social proof? Are you looking to break into an industry, or work with a company that will allow you to expand to connected subsidiaries?

Putting together a target account list is part-art, part-science. You should use all the data at your disposal, including firmographics, technographics (what else is in your customer tech stack), behavioral data and intent signals for current customers and closed won deals. You can also analyze closed lost deals for what went wrong.

Once you have your target account list, you have to figure out how the target companies makes purchasing decisions, and who are the stakeholders involved. If you typically sell to the same customer profile, there's a good chance the buying committee will look roughly the same as your target companies. Reviewing past deals is one way to get a framework for all the stakeholders involved.

B. Creating Personalized and Targeted Marketing Campaigns

The idea of account-based selling is to surround-sound all the decision makers of an account with the right message, at the right time, through all the right channels.

That might mean:

• Publish personalized content on blogs, LinkedIn, and social media geared toward their unique needs.
• Putting together case studies from existing customers similar in size and business model to strategic accounts.
• Connecting a stakeholder at a prospect company with the person in the same role at a current customer account.
• Hosting webinars or workshops geared to your ideal customer profile or target audience.
• Individualized phone and email messaging for specific stakeholders.

It's important to define all the different buyer personas in your target accounts. A VP of Marketing will have different priorities, job objectives and KPIs to hit than the VP of Sales. The more you can tailor your content to the role, or the individual, the higher the chance your outreach will resonate. This alignment on messaging starts with marketing, all the way down to the AE and Customer Success.

‎The goal of account based marketing is making sure your product is in the running when the target company identifies a need your product can fill. The account-based selling team's job is then a multi-threaded, omni-channel approach to get all the stakeholders to buy in.

C. Leveraging Technology and Data for Effective Account-Based Selling

Once the target companies are funneled in with ABM, Warmly's sales teams uses third-party intent data to find out who is currently in market and reconciles that information with contact databases. Our SDRs then send personalized outreach and feeds stakeholders into automated email or LinkedIn sequences. The sequences drive prospects to the website, where our Warmly chat bot can engage users, and pull in human salespeople for the warmest leads.

The success of account-based selling hinges on putting all the technological puzzle pieces together to get an accurate image of the target company, then using what you learn to close the sale.

For example, Warmly might find out from a conversation with one of our "champions" at a prospect company that there is another stakeholder we haven't targeted—but who has veto power. That person is added to our account plans.

Warmly's software alerts our salespeople in real-time when someone on our VIP list is visiting our website. A sales rep can then engage with the target stakeholder at the moment they are thinking about us, and tailor their messaging based on what we know about them. If the software has identified that user as the CFO, we can offer testimony from the CFO of a customer company. The next time this stakeholder attends a round-table meeting about whether to buy our product, this highly tailored and impactful interaction will be top of mind.

StackOptmise put together a comprehensive list of the sales tech landscape.

D. Mutual Action Plan

With the ubiquity of account-based selling also comes specialized tools to make the process easier. Instead of closing deals on a massive email chain that includes every stakeholder, sellers can use a tool like Aligned to pull together collateral and documents in a single workplace. The platform offers full visibility, so buyers and sellers can see who has looked at what. It also informs sellers which stakeholders haven't engaged—i.e. what leads need to be warmed.

Transforming B2B Sales Strategies with Account-Based Selling

Evolution of Customer-led Growth

As a buyer, would you rather talk to a salesperson that may have their own agenda (e.g. to grow their commission), or an existing customer who is already using the product and has no incentive to lie?

At Warmly, we often let our customers speak for us through Deeto.ai. It helps our sales teams identify customers with similar firmographics to the target company and makes it easy to reach out for a referral. Having the prospect jump on a call with the customer is especially powerful. The prospect gets hyper-specific testimony from someone with a similar job title at a similar company—which really drives home your product's usefulness.

‎The Importance of Timing for Increasing Conversion Rates

The number one factor in ABS is figuring out everyone who needs to be sold on your product. The second is using all the tools in your arsenal to capitalize on opportunities to connect with those stakeholders. Timing and being able to respond quickly plays a huge part. Just being a subject matter expert in the right place at the right time can sometimes make the deal. Often, it is not about having the best product on the market, but creating a better, more personalized, seamless and timely experience for prospective customers. Another company may be able to solve their problem too, but you were able to get there first.

Building Long-Term Relationships with Key Accounts for Enhanced Customer Loyalty

Account-based selling does not end when the contract is signed. Everything you learned about the account can continue through ongoing customer relationship management. For example, if you know who the detractors were in the initial buying process, nurturing those contacts can help you get their business again at renewal time. Account-based feedback can also go back into developing other features and use cases that fit the account's needs—which can lead to upselling.

Overcoming Challenges in Account-Based Selling

Addressing Resource Limitations and Scalability Issues

Account-based selling works best for large contracts that justify the extended, high-touch sales cycle. It's also difficult to implement for early-stage companies that may not have achieved product-market fit, or don't have a clear picture of their ideal customers.

However, gathering as much account intelligence as possible helps minimize the risk your company will invest in a personalized sales approach for the wrong company.

Predictive analytics can help companies parse data for clues about what accounts to target.

You can also save yourself several steps by using a signal-based revenue orchestration platform like Warmly that brings together intent data, behavioral signals, analytics and visitor identification—along with automated chat/email/LinkedIn sequences.

Then once those leads have converted into calls, you can use tools like Fathom, Spiky.ai, Gong, or Attention to analyze call transcriptions to understand the health of your deals, where deals are being blocked, and how best to handle objections.

Managing Complex Sales Cycles and Multiple Stakeholders

The ABS strategy works well with complex sales cycles or product needs, because your revenue team is taking the time to really understand the account's unique needs and challenges. Having a well-rounded team is crucial to make this successful. An account planning team should include sales reps, sales development representatives, marketers, and customer support. This enables them to understand each of the buying personas, tailor their messaging to the individual, and give the prospect the best possible experience throughout the sales cycle.

Measuring and Tracking the Success of Account-Based Selling Efforts

Given the investment of resources that goes into each account, you ideally want to build long-term relationships that will pay off in revenue over time. Good metrics for gauging the value of account based selling are average contract value (ACV), customer lifetime value (LTV), average deal size and customer retention. Account engagement scores and progression rate can also help marketing teams gauge effectiveness.

Conclusion

At it's core, account-based selling is about giving all the stakeholders in the buying committee the best possible experience at the time that the company could be interested in buying. It's an extremely effective B2B sales strategy that focuses resources on key accounts when they are in market. However, it involves commitment and collaboration across the entire firm, from marketing to customer success and account management.

With the traditional, lead-focused sales process, deals can easily be scuttled if your main contact changes jobs or goes on leave—which is especially dangerous with a long sales cycle. For companies with an ICP that can sustain it, account based selling is a relatively low-risk selling strategy that can generate bigger deals, higher conversion rates, and long-lasting customer loyalty.

Traditional sales funnels simply aren’t effective anymore. Here’s why B2B sales must embrace the Account Based Marketing (ABM) funnel. 

The days of traditional B2B sales funnels are almost over. With so many more products on the market today than there were 10 years ago, selling has become a more complex process for sales and marketing teams—and buying more difficult for customers.

For years, it’s been about lead generation: casting a wide net for the maximum amount of potential leads, in the hope that at least a few of them will eventually convert. 

That doesn’t work anymore. Particularly not for B2B business selling.

We’re talking about a market where B2B buyers spend 50% of their time researching solutions independently, both online and offline—and just 17% of their time meeting with sales reps.

With more conversations happening offline, and more buyers influenced by external factors, it’s getting more and more challenging for B2B marketers and sales teams to be a part of the selling journey. 

And that’s where the Account Based Marketing funnel comes in. 

What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

Whereas lead generation focuses on building a huge base of potential leads, then refining them, ABM harnesses technology like a marketing automation platform and sales/marketing collaboration to target a specific account and increase the likelihood of conversion. 

Primarily, ABM relies on B2B sellers being able to strategically identify their target market and thus the corresponding key accounts that will be a focus for marketing and sales work.

ABM works because it instinctively acknowledges that buyers aren’t just visiting your company website to make a decision. According to a Gartner study, B2B buyers actually value third-party interactions—such as word-of-mouth advice, online reviews, and other third-party content—1.4x more than online supplier interactions. 

The Benefits of ABM

There’s no hiding it: ABM is a huge undertaking. Close collaboration between sales and marketing leaders might be alien to most companies, and without agreement on key accounts to target, your efforts at ABM can fall at the first hurdle.

However, there’s more than enough evidence to prove that tackling ABM is a worthwhile challenge. 

Focuses Resources On the Accounts That Matter

Traditional lead generation has no other expectation than to simply send a bunch of MQLs through to a sales team. Not only does this gives sales the difficult job of selling to people who really aren’t ready yet, but it’s also a tremendous waste of marketing resources. 

Meanwhile, an effective ABM strategy ensures that the accounts that your sales and marketing team focus on are really the ones that are going to buy in the end. 

It might be less of an impressive lead pay-off (what are one or two leads compared to thousands?) but with a target account list, your budget is inevitably going towards higher-quality leads.  

Develops Foundations for Stronger Customer Relationships

When does a lead become a customer? That’s not a trick question—but the answer is very different for lead gen versus ABM.

Within a traditional sales funnel, your lead stays a lead right up until the moment of purchase. Boom, they’ve graduated from lead to customer.

An ABM program, meanwhile, doesn’t make such a concrete distinction between leads and customers. Instead, every lead is named an account from the beginning. 

As a result, each account is treated as if they were a customer from the first moment of discovery, with personalized sales and marketing efforts designed to build a relationship before purchase. 

ABM Increases ROI

In the world of data-backed marketing, this is really the only benefit that matters. And maybe it’s against all logic: more leads should mean higher ROI, right? Not exactly. 

Research conducted by ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA found that 76% of marketers saw a higher ROI with an ABM marketing strategy than any other. 

In another study, almost 9 in 10 organizations reported that accounts supported by ABM achieved higher ROI than those without ABM support.

How Relevant Are Traditional Sales Funnels B2B Marketing Today?

The traditional image of the sales funnel as an upside-down triangle is a stubborn one. It’s one of the first things that beginner marketers and sales teams are introduced to—and yet, it doesn’t quite work today, particularly if you want to harness the benefits of an ABM campaign.

For starters, the traditional funnel assumes that the B2B buying journey is linear—as demonstrated by HubSpot’s diagram below. Customers are dragged into the top of the funnel using effective demand creation and inbound marketing strategies (building awareness through social media presence, videos, or blogs), and they progress down through each stage. Before you know it, they’re buyers.

(Image Source)

Unfortunately, this model doesn’t reflect the true reality of a B2B buyer’s journey, which is oftentimes far more non-linear and wayward. 

The traditional funnel would have you believe that you can guide a customer through distinct stages until they’re ready to buy. In reality, that’s no longer the case.

In today’s sales cycles, buyers might revisit each stage of the funnel more than once, and even interact with other suppliers simultaneously. It’s not a case of identifying a MQL and then passing them onto sales to bring home the sale; it’s far more unpredictable.  

(Image Source)

In fact, much of the B2B cycle happens without your company ever being involved at all. According to research from Harvard Business Review, B2B customers are on average 57% of the way through the buying process before they even engage with your sales reps. 

The offline nature of the B2B sales cycle also means that tracking customers is more difficult. It’s impossible to see the conversations that your customers are having at their workplace, at networking events, or informally on sites like Twitter or Reddit. 

All of this precipitates a new way of thinking about the traditional sales funnel, in light of changing B2B buyer cycles. 

How to Develop an Effective Account Based Marketing Funnel 

Fundamentally, the ABM funnel is:

• Non-linear,
• More difficult to track,
• Engaged with sales and marketing simultaneously.

With that in mind, we like to think of the ABM funnel as more of an incubator than a funnel. Rather than a 2D funnel, the ABM funnel is a complex, 3D system, in which multiple elements (for example, inbound and outbound marketing, content creation, field marketing) interact to produce the preferred outcome: conversion. 

Crucially, within the ABM funnel, marketing and sales strategies don’t work alone, but in tandem with each other (for this reason, many companies are abandoning sales and marketing departments altogether, in favor of a ‘go-to-market’ department or equivalent.)

To make this incubator work, though, you have to feed it the right energy. And that starts with your key account selection.

Creating the Right Target Accounts List 

39% of B2B marketers say that choosing which accounts to target is the biggest challenge of developing an effective ABM strategy. So many organizations ignore this step, or, even worse, do it badly.

The Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is the foundation of any effective ABM funnel. But you can’t just add anyone who’s ever visited your site or signed up to a sales demo to your SAM. 

An effective ABM funnel relies on those target accounts being the right fit for your company. 

Evaluating fit acco‎unts requires analysis of key variables including the demographics of your existing customers, a breakdown of how profitable they are (if you can get this data), and whether they are going to have the problem you're solving. 

To start evaluating fit, pull up your current customer list and filter to show only those customers with 100% net revenue retention. B2B expert Scott Martinis describes this segment as a 'retainable addressable market': the proportion of your existing market who is willing to buy from you again and again.

The most effective way of finding best fit accounts is to search for organizations similar to those in your retainable addressable market - people who want to continue buying from you. So, build a lookalike segment based on this portion of your existing customer list, and you've got a list of key accounts to start targeting.

As well as segmenting existing repeat customers and building a lookalike list, sales teams can look at closed won deals to find best fit accounts. Focus on the different variables that make up that customer: the size of the company, geography, what the team looks like, how many sales reps they have. 

Equally, closed lost deals can also provide insight into the companies who don’t need your product, which could be for reasons that you can capitalize on (for example, if they’ve recently closed with a competitor for a specific length contract.)

Once you’ve established the key accounts that you want to target with your ABM strategy, you have to pair fit with intent. 

Determining Intent

Sales teams are well aware that the B2B buying process takes time. There are multiple stages and often multiple key decision makers. But contrary to that, the buying window is actually very small. If you miss that window, you might not get another chance to sell. 

Intent is often more difficult to scope than fit, especially as it requires almost constant buying behavior tracking. But you don’t want to waste time on prospects that simply aren’t ready to convert. 

There are some crucial factors that will help you identify intent, most of which will require third-party data. For example, you can use ABM tools like 6sense and Bombora to explore key accounts’ recent keyword searches, ad engagement, and recent website visits. 

Integrating first-party data like website visits, email responses, webinar sign-ups, and sales rep engagement, can help you build a bigger picture of key account intent, and understand the right time for your sales teams to reach out. 

Building Brand Awareness 

Because the ABM funnel is non-linear, the process of creating your TAL and analyzing intent has to co-occur with brand awareness work. It’s all well and good identifying key accounts, but if they’re not aware of you, then you’re not going to be able to effectively sell to them anyway.

Demand generation is key if you want to get your company in front of your key accounts. By creating educational content around specific pain points and investing in personal branding for your key company leaders, you can ensure that you’re the company they think of when they need a solution. 

Remember, 60% of B2B buyers end up choosing the brand they thought of at the beginning of their search.

Your brand awareness must be both far-reaching and strategic. You want to build a general awareness among your market as well as target relevant content to the right people at the right time. 

Conducting Creative Campaigns

Your TAL, intent insights, and demand generation work all work together to create targeted campaigns with one goal: converting those accounts that are ready to buy. 

There’s really no limit to the kinds of campaigns you can run once you’ve identified a key account. To give one example, data cloud company Snowflake partners with Sendoso to build key account loyalty through gift programs. The organization also runs strategic, one-day events with key accounts to generate interest and build relationships. 

(Image Source)

But you don’t have to go that far if your budget doesn’t allow it. Targeted social content, referral programs, gifts, email campaigns: there are plenty of ways to develop your key accounts into customers, and your strategy will be informed by your brand.

TL;DR

• Create your TAL.
• Look for intent signals.
• Build brand awareness alongside.
• Create strategic campaigns that convert.  

Top Tips for Optimizing Your ABM Funnel

Now that you know how to build the foundations of an ABM funnel, it’s time to look at how to optimize. A great way of thinking about ABM is as precisely the opposite of a copy-and-paste marketing campaign. As Hillary Carpio, head of ABM at Snowflake says,

“The key to success in ABM is you have to build a program that suits the need of your business.” 

The strength of your resources and your unique goals will inform how you conduct an ABM strategy. 

1. Understand that demand capture and demand creation go hand-in-hand.

Educating key accounts doesn’t happen overnight. Building effective brand awareness requires long-term digital marketing campaigns, and a rejection of traditional cold sales tactics. 

At the same time, demand creation is useless without demand capture. Both of these elements must work together to warm up your key accounts, and that’s where ABM software comes in. 

Effective ABM software can reduce the risk of you making assumptions about accounts, resulting in relevant demand creation and personalized campaigns. 

2. Prevent data silos.

Coordinating a successful ABM strategy inevitably involves a lot of different software—intent tracking, email marketing, CRM, web analytics. And because your marketing and sales team are effectively working in tandem on your ABM, all of that data has to be available for multiple stakeholders to view.

Better decision making will happen when your entire team has access to the right data. If you’re not on the same page on your ABM strategy, you’re setting yourself up to fail. 

3. Find tools to help you react instantly. 

In an ideal world, you want to engage with your target account when you know their intent to buy is there. However, in the real world, that can be challenging. 

Using ABM tools like Warmly can help you react instantly when your key accounts are active on your website and showing intent, helping you convert faster. 

Our AI chatbot can proactively chat with target accounts when they’re on your website, educating them and even booking meetings. And when an account really needs a helping hand from a human SDR, Warmly AI can loop them into the conversation.

Warmly's success in social selling has played a crucial role in propelling our brand's growth and lead generation strategy. Focused mainly on LinkedIn, our social selling endeavors have proven highly effective, contributing significantly to both lead acquisition and scheduled meetings. Take a look at the lead volume that we bring in from LinkedIn alone: 

We’re not alone in our social selling success. The strategy:

• Gives sales professionals 45% more sales opportunities
• Makes sales professionals 51% more likely to hit their sales quotas
• Helps sales professionals outsell 78% of their peers

In today’s social media centric world, social selling isn't merely an option; it's a smart and increasingly necessary way for sales teams and marketing professionals to connect with customers via the platforms they use the most. Consider — over 5 billion people are using social media today, and that number is steadily rising. 

We are here to help you embrace the power of social selling for enhanced results in the digital era. We’re covering: 

• What Is Social Selling?
• Best Practices, Social Selling Tips, and Tricks
• What Is Social Selling the Inbound Way?

Let’s dive in. 

What is Social Selling? 

Diverging from traditional sales methods, social selling places a premium on dynamic and personalized interactions across social media profiles. This approach goes beyond transactional sales, which might feel pushy and forced. Instead, social selling strategy concentrates on meaningful relationships and understanding audience needs and preferences. The goal is to establish a robust online presence, foster trust, and cultivate genuine connections to enhance sales opportunities. 

Key Elements of Social Selling

While social selling tactics differ, they share fundamental commonalities: 

Dynamic Interactions

Engage with prospects through real-time conversations on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

Personalized Engagement

Tailor content and interactions to cater to the specific preferences and interests of your audience.

Audience Understanding

Utilize social media insights to comprehend the needs and behaviors of your target audience.

Building Trust

Establish credibility by sharing valuable insights, industry knowledge, and addressing customer queries.

Creating Connections

Actively connect with potential customers, industry influencers, and peers to expand your network.

The Growing Popularity of Social Selling

Social selling is already a linchpin strategy for top sales reps:

• Leveraging social selling streamlines the process of obtaining referrals within LinkedIn networks, a strategy employed by 74% of sales professionals for prospecting and acquiring new leads.
• The effectiveness of individuals in establishing a professional brand on LinkedIn is measured by the Social Selling Index (SSI). High-performing salespeople who leverage the SSI consistently outperform their peers who are less inclined to embrace social media in their sales strategies.
• Social media plays a pivotal role in the sales landscape, with high-performing salespeople being 12% more likely to incorporate these platforms into their strategies, showcasing the integral role of social selling in enhancing overall sales performance.
• Approximately 56% of sales professionals actively integrate social media platforms into their sales efforts, underscoring the crucial function of social media in identifying and engaging potential prospects.
• In 2022, a significant 31% of sellers successfully closed deals surpassing half a million dollars without relying on face-to-face meetings. Deals influenced by LinkedIn's Sales Navigator were notably 209% larger compared to those not impacted by this influential social selling tool.
• According to LinkedIn research, a remarkable 90% of top sales professionals actively embrace social selling tools, illustrating the widespread recognition and adoption of social selling practices among successful sales experts.

The Intersection with Marketing

It’s not just sales professionals leaning into social selling. There is also a notable upward trend in marketers embracing social platforms. In the US alone a whopping $72.3 billion was spent advertising on social media networks in 2023. As of January 2023, Facebook was the most utilized platform among marketers (ranked first amongst 89 percent of global marketers). Instagram and LinkedIn followed closely, while TikTok was utilized by one-quarter of marketers for advertising. 86 percent of industry professionals noted increased exposure as the primary benefit of leveraging social media in marketing, with 76 percent emphasizing the significance of enhanced traffic.

Best Practices, Social Selling Tips, and Tricks

Top-performing salespeople are social sellers, prioritizing cultivating quality connections over a high quantity of unknown leads. 76% of these high achievers consistently research their prospects before initiating contact, emphasizing the importance of a personalized and informed approach. So how do you emulate these kinds of tactics within your own sales team?

LinkedIn stands as a powerful platform for effective social selling strategies. Therefore, Understanding the intricacies of the LinkedIn algorithm and employing best practices that align with its dynamics is essential for successful social selling. The algorithm rewards content that sparks engagement and keeps users on the platform, making it crucial to create compelling and shareable posts:

Here are some of our favorite best practices, tips, and tricks for working with the algorithm to optimize your LinkedIn activity for social selling:

Improve your SSI

Enter the LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI). The SSI measures one's effectiveness in utilizing LinkedIn for social selling, assessing key factors such as establishing a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building strong relationships. A high SSI indicates a robust social selling presence, emphasizing the importance of crafting a compelling profile, connecting with relevant prospects, sharing valuable content, and actively engaging with the LinkedIn community.

• Optimize Your Profile: Ensure your LinkedIn profile is complete, highlighting your skills, experiences, and a professional photo as your profile picture. Craft a compelling headline and summary that showcase your expertise.
• Connect Strategically: Expand your network with relevant connections. Connect with colleagues, clients, and industry professionals to enhance your visibility and reach on the platform.
• Share Valuable Original Content: Regularly post and share content that aligns with your industry and interests. Providing insights, articles, and updates showcases your expertise and engages your network.
• Engage Actively: Comment on, like, and share posts from your network. Engaging with others' content demonstrates your interest and involvement in industry discussions.
• Request Recommendations: Seek recommendations from colleagues and clients to build credibility. Positive testimonials enhance your professional reputation and contribute to a higher SSI.

Be Strategic with your Posting Habits

Strategic posting on LinkedIn involves choosing the right time and creating a memorable personal brand. To optimize your posting habits, identify peak times when your audience is active. Aim for mornings or early afternoons when professionals often browse LinkedIn. 

Remember:

• Timing is everything: Leverage analytics tools to identify when your LinkedIn connections are most. Then, time your LinkedIn post to correspond with heavy online traffic.
• Consistency is key: Ensure consistent use of your chosen moniker across your LinkedIn profile, posts, and interactions.
• Be #strategic: Implement a tactical use of relevant hashtags to increase the discoverability of your posts within specific professional communities or trending topics.
• Lean into your network: Actively engage with your network by participating in discussions, responding to comments, and sharing insights. This builds rapport and strengthens your professional connections.

Craft Quality Content That Resonates with the Audience 

Crafting quality content is pivotal for effective social selling. Focus on delivering what your audience wants, whether it's humor, valuable insights, or revealing personal anecdotes. Incorporate storytelling techniques to make your content relatable and engaging, as people naturally connect with stories. 

Establish a regular posting schedule to maintain a strong online presence. Plan your content in advance, utilize scheduling tools, and stay attuned to trending topics to keep your posts relevant and compelling.

Try sharing:

• Industry Insights: Share your perspective on current trends, challenges, or emerging technologies within your industry.
• Expert Advice: Offer valuable tips, tricks, or insights related to your expertise. Position yourself as an authority in your field.
• Behind-the-Scenes: Provide a glimpse into your work life or company culture. Humanize your brand by sharing behind-the-scenes content.
• Interactive Content: Pose questions, conduct polls, or host quizzes to encourage audience interaction and gather feedback.
• Educational Content: Create informative content that educates your audience on relevant topics or addresses common industry misconceptions.
• Event Highlights: Share highlights from industry events, conferences, or webinars you've attended. This establishes you as an active participant in your field.
• Thought-Provoking Questions: Pose thought-provoking questions to stimulate discussions and engage your audience in meaningful, relevant conversations.

Be Memorable

Crafting a memorable moniker adds a distinctive touch to your personal brand. Create a title that reflects your personality or professional strengths. Memorable monikers, such as "Click Through King" or "Sales Khaleesi," create a unique and intriguing identity that lingers in the audience's memory. 

For example:

Or

This initial interest often leads to increased profile visits. Not only does this provide an opportunity to showcase expertise, build brand recognition, and establish connections within the professional community, but it also creates opportunities for profile visitors to become inbound leads by clicking through to your website (more on this later).

Lightning Strike Posts 

Lightning strike posts are impactful and attention-grabbing announcements or content shared on social platforms, particularly LinkedIn, with the goal of quickly generating widespread engagement. 

These posts have the potential to go viral, increasing visibility and driving profile visits. By leveraging the heightened exposure gained from such posts, individuals can channel the increased traffic towards their profiles, subsequently encouraging visits to their websites. 

Take a look at a lightning strike post from our CEO Maximus Greenwald about a Warmly milestone: 

To create effective lightning strike posts, individuals can consider:

• Series A funding announcements
• Major product launches
• Groundbreaking industry insights
• Recognition or awards received
• Top achievements or milestones
• Participation in influential events or collaborations
• Exclusive behind-the-scenes content
• Trending or controversial topics within the industry

Engage with Influencers 

Engaging with influencers can significantly amplify your social selling efforts. Influencers hold sway over a substantial audience, and their endorsement can enhance your visibility and credibility. To foster engagement with influencers:

• Identify Key Influencers: Research and identify influencers in your industry who align with your brand.
• Post Thoughtful Comments: Instead of generic comments, provide thoughtful and insightful contributions to the influencers' posts. 
• Engage in Personalized Outreach: Send personalized messages expressing appreciation for their content and highlighting specific aspects you find valuable.
• Audience-Centric Content: Tailor your content to address the interests and pain points of the influencer's audience.
• Collaborative Content: Propose collaboration ideas, such as co-authored articles, joint webinars, or interviews, to create content together.
• Tag Influencers: When relevant, tag influencers in your posts to increase the chances of them noticing and engaging with your content.
• Regular Engagement: Consistently engage with influencers' content by sharing, commenting, and reacting to their updates.
• Social Listening: Monitor their conversations, respond to their queries, and actively participate in discussions related to your industry.

Pro-tip: Comment early on viral posts

Engaging with influencer posts early on by commenting strategically positions your input at the top of the comment section, garnering increased visibility. When influencers' posts gain traction, your comment becomes more likely to be seen by a broader audience, contributing to heightened profile views. This visibility boost is crucial as users perusing popular posts are more inclined to explore your profile, thereby driving potential connections, increasing network reach, and enhancing overall profile visibility on LinkedIn.

What Is Social Selling the Inbound Way?

Social selling isn’t the only highly effective approach to the modern customer profile. In contrast to traditional sales methods, inbound selling is a customer-centric and less intrusive strategy. Inbound selling focuses on attracting and engaging potential customers through content and interactions that align with their interests and needs.

The similarities between the two strategies make them symbiotic, and there’s a natural path from social selling into inbound lead status.

Tactically, the transition from engagement via social selling into an inbound lead can look like this:

• Engagement on Social Media Profiles: Social sellers initiate personalized engagement on platforms like LinkedIn, responding to comments, messages, and participating in industry discussions.
• Compelling Content: By sharing valuable and tailored content, social sellers capture the lead's interest. This content addresses the lead's needs and concerns, making them more likely to explore further.
• Curiosity Sparked: The engaging interactions and compelling content pique the lead's curiosity, prompting them to seek more information about the brand and its offerings.
• Visit to LinkedIn Profiles: Intrigued by the social media engagement, the lead navigates to the LinkedIn profiles of the individuals involved, seeking insights into the people behind the brand.
• LinkedIn to Website Transition: Social sellers strategically guide the lead from LinkedIn profiles to the company's website, where they can find detailed information, product/service offerings, and additional resources.
• Conversion Opportunities: Once on the website, there is an opportunity for that person’s information to be captured, therefore converting them into an inbound lead.

Social Selling the Inbound Way with Warmly

Warmly provides a comprehensive set of features to help companies capture inbound leads driven to their website through social selling efforts. Here's how Warmly can contribute to this process:

Access The Best Data

Utilize native integrations or add your API key to de-anonymize and enrich visitor data.

Automatically reveal the stage of a visitor's buyer journey when they explore your website.

Contextually Aware

Connect your CRM to automatically gather and understand relevant context around the prospect. Enhance personalized conversations with inbound website visitors through automated context assimilation.

Autonomous Chat

Warmly's AI initiates personalized sales conversations on your rep's behalf with site visitors meeting segment filter conditions. Engage in real-time with potential leads, providing immediate assistance and information.

Automatic Follow Up

Automatically enroll high-intent inbound visitors into personalized follow-up sequences using popular platforms like Outreach, SalesLoft, or LinkedIn. Nuture leads on auto-pilot, ensuring consistent engagement with your brand.

Sync Data To CRM

Break down data siloes by centralizing data in your CRM. Automatically create or update CRM records with enriched information, engagement insights, and buyer intent data.

By integrating Warmly into your social selling strategy, companies can convert more qualified accounts visiting their site. The platform enables proactive engagement, efficient qualification, and seamless conversion of warm inbound leads. This streamlined process not only captures leads effectively but also enhances the overall efficiency of turning website visitors into meaningful connections.

Conclusion

In today's digital world, where more than 5 billion people use social media, the importance of social selling is clear. Whether you're in sales or marketing, adding social selling to your strategy isn't just a choice; it's a practical and necessary step.

As you start engaging in social sales, we encourage you to share your experiences, challenges, and successes. Social selling is a changing field that requires continuous learning. Join discussions, share your thoughts, and help shape the evolving world of social selling. Your input is crucial for collaborative exploration in the digital age of sales and marketing.

Cheers to building meaningful connections and unlocking business potential through the strategic use of social selling!

Web analytics have existed almost as long as the internet. Even in the early 90s, anyone who cared could look up their website's server logs and get the IP addresses of anyone who visited.

The ability to read those jumbled numbers as people has come far, even in the last few years. Some website visitor identification software like Warmly now claims to identify up to 65% of anonymous website traffic.

What is the point of website visitor de-anonymization?

Website traffic is an incredibly rich source of information for B2B companies. Knowing who is coming to your site or looking at the pricing page lets sales teams know who is already interested in their product and streamlines the process of finding qualified leads.

For marketers, knowing what website visitors are reading and where they came from can tell the team if campaigns are driving visitors from the right ICP.

If prospects are already on your website, it’s also a naturally good time to engage with them, which can further increase conversion rates across your funnel.

Tools and Techniques for Identifying Anonymous Website Visitors

When a company is on your site, there are a couple of different ways of getting information about them.

IP location is the most common way of identifying broad stats such as the probable company. Visitor intelligence companies can then get a more complete profile of contact-level information through forms, outbound emails, logins, and chat.

Forms

When anonymous users fill out a form with their contact information, the site can attach a cookie that associates that email address (a unique identifier) with the browser. The website will then be able to tell when that same browser returns. To comply with GDPR, the user must give opt-in consent to be tracked by cookies (e.g. by checking a box).

Outbound Emails

When a sales team sends an outbound email with links, they can set a query parameter that hashes a unique identifier connected to the prospect's email address. This query parameter passes that information through to the website, which can then use cookie information to link the person to their activity.

Logins

When web visitors sign in with a third party like Google, Microsoft, or Facebook, the verification service passes the person's email onto the website. Both the website and the third party can also attach cookies to track activity.

When anonymous users make a request on a website, such as logging in, the site also gets the user's IP address, which, combined with email and cookie information, helps with visitor identification.

Chats

When unique visitors use the live chat on a company's website, the person or machine behind it may ask for emails or contact information. This data can then be attached to cookies, browsers, and other digital locations to form a more complete profile of unique visitors.

IP Location

Before remote work, it was easy for visitor identification software to use firmographic data and IP location to guess what company was visiting. For example, the algorithm might know where Amazon is headquartered and where the servers are located and safely assume what IP addresses belong to Amazon. Now, with so many users working remotely, IP location is most useful in combination with other data points and methodologies.

How Visitor Identification Tools Work to Identify Anonymous Visitors

Unless the user has given their explicit permission to be identified, contact-level information will be the result of a probabilistic waterfall. Most website visitor identification software is based on running data points through this waterfall to reconcile them and spit out the algorithm's best guess of who the visitor may be.

For example, a customer logging into Facebook from a certain IP address and then visiting a different website from the same IP address gives the company a strong guess that these individuals are likely the same person.

There are also data aggregator companies that integrate with different platforms that tell them in real time when someone uses one of those services. They can then pair that login information with other engagement data to determine the IP address most closely associated with a user. This can be incredibly accurate to find employees working remotely. The aggregator can also strip away the PII and compliantly sell that data to other companies.

Ethical Considerations for Anonymous Website Visitor Identification

‎Laws like Europe's GDPR prevent companies from getting personally identifiable information (PII) unless the person has explicitly opted into sharing that information.

Visitor intelligence companies can collect contact-level anonymous visitor identification, but they are only able to share company-level information. Some companies are skirting the laws by revealing some detailed information, such as the division where the visitor works or their job title. However, that can be considered PII in some jurisdictions.

Identifying Contact vs. Company (Protecting PII)

Personally identifying information is not uniformly defined in the United States. The Privacy Act, which regulates how PII can used by federal agencies, notes that PPI "is not anchored to any single category of information or technology. Rather, it requires a case-by-case assessment of the specific risk that an individual can be identified."

For European users, the GDPR protects any information that relates to a living person "who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person."

Since the GDPR applies only to natural persons, not companies, most anonymous visitor identification companies will provide company-level information by collecting some form of outbound emails, logins, and chats and then stripping away the PII.

How can companies access this data?

The most common way of getting the data for website visitor identification is by buying it from vendors. Some service agreements include clauses that allow the provider to collect information through third-party cookies and sell that data to other companies.

CRMs like HubSpot allow users to turn on link-tracking on forms and outbound emails. Similar to the visitor "hit counters" of the 1990s, companies can also put a discrete pixel on the website that lets you know when somebody comes through from a website link and cookies them.

Interestingly, some visitor intelligence companies are able to read natively in HubSpot cookies. For example, if you use Warmly and HubSpot together, your Warmly dashboard can use the cookies HubSpot has already added to the prospect's browsers to identify them without the need to send out additional outbound emails to get that information.

What is the difference between IP vs. Cookie vs. Browser Fingerprinting?

There are a few broad categories for gathering data that feed into the algorithms and waterfall processes that can then spit out a probable guess for anonymous users. The three main types are IP addresses, cookies, and browser fingerprinting.

Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses

Internet Protocol addresses are unique strings of numbers that identify the device you use to connect to the internet and the general area from which it is connected. It can be used with other firmographic information, such as where a company is headquartered, to triangulate who might be visiting your website.

Cookies

Internet cookies (also known as HTTP cookies) are small pieces of data saved by your browser that identifies you to websites. The technology has been around since 1994. They enable many of the features we expect from websites. Session cookies keep track of what you put in your online shopping cart and are generally considered "necessary" cookies. A "persistent" cookie might help websites remember user settings such as language preference.

When you log into a website and check the box to "Remember me on this computer," you consent to the website using a first-party cookie to keep you logged in. While first-party cookies are limited to one website, third-party cookies can track your browsing history around the web.

In order to be compliant with the GDPR and California's CCPA, websites have to offer people a chance to opt out of non-essential cookies. Google began testing restricting third-party cookies for a subset (1%) of Chrome users in January 2024 and plans to phase them out by default completely by the middle of the year.

Contact-level cookie tracking will always be more accurate than IP address because a single IP can be used by an entire company or all the employees sharing the public Wi-Fi network at a WeWork.

Browser Fingerprinting

Browser fingerprinting is a method of tracking that involves taking basic essential information about your computer and remembering that unique combination of features as a "fingerprint" of an individual.

Device fingerprinting is incredibly accurate. A study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that 83.6% of browsers had a unique fingerprint. In browsers that enabled Java or Adobe Flash, it was 94.2%. In a recent study, researchers trying to de-anonymize cybercriminals who use the antitracking browser Tor found their "proposed Tor anonymous traffic recognition method achieves 94.37% accuracy."

What is the future of visitor de-anonymization?

There's been a big push in the last two decades towards data privacy and ownership. The GDPR and ePrivacy Directive regulate how websites are allowed to track users in the European Union, disclose their activity, and ask for consent. However, most regulations surround the use of internet cookies. Browser fingerprinting remains largely unregulated, especially since it uses publicly available information. The industry shows signs of moving in this direction in a post-cookie world—which seems imminent.

Google Chrome accounts for 63.56% of internet browsers worldwide and 52.31% of browsers in the United States, followed by competitors Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox, which already block third-party cookies by default. Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies by mid-2024 will take significant air out of the market for cookie tracking.

In addition to browser fingerprinting, marketers are experimenting with grouping people into cohorts of similar interests or demographics in order to gather information free of PII. Google is already promoting the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC) as an alternative tracking mechanism.

Conclusion

The last few decades have been a dance between B2B intelligence companies and privacy regulation, both by the government (GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act) and the market (e.g. browsers like Tor, Apple's ATT protocol on iPhones).

As the market moves away from third-party cookies, B2B go-to-market teams have to find new ways of identifying anonymous website visitors to boost conversion rates, supported by a growing industry of website visitor identification software and methodologies.

Website Visitor Tracking with Warmly

‎Our website visitor tracking software and deanonymization tools enable B2B teams to identify 15% of contacts and 65% of the companies that visit your website. These tools are just one part of our signal-based revenue orchestration software that helps GTM teams make smarter decisions on lead qualifying and sales strategy.

Interested in seeing how you can streamline B2B lead generation with web traffic deanonymization, intent signals, and automated sales outreach?

You can start using Warmly for free today. Or, book a demo with a sales rep to get additional insights on making Warmly work for your team.

Clearbit is one of the biggest and most respected names out there when it comes to quality B2B data.

But like most companies that make it to the top, it isn’t exactly what it used to be.

Clearbit came up primarily as an API that you could plug into your existing tech stack to access high-quality contact data.

Now, they’re part of the HubSpot suite (or at least will be once the acquisition and integration process is complete).

If you’re on HubSpot, this is great news.

If you’re not, and you’re using some other CRM (Salesforce, for example), then you’re likely to find that Clearbit isn’t your ideal solution going forward, and it's time to start looking for an alternative.

This article will help you through that exact process. We’re going to dive into eight powerful Clearbit competitors that you can use to fuel your omnichannel sales and marketing playbook.

Top 8 Clearbit Competitors and Alternatives 

1. ZoomInfo 

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ZoomInfo is one of the most widely used and all-encompassing GTM software solutions.

Not only do they compete with Clearbit in terms of contact data and sales intelligence, but they also have advertising, lead routing, and website chat functionality.

Why Choose ZoomInfo Over Clearbit?

The main reason to choose ZoomInfo is its breadth.

Of all of the Clearbit alternatives covered here, ZoomInfo does the most.

For example, if you’re already using ZoomInfo’s MarketingOS for account-based ads or web form enrichment, it makes sense to add on their contact data module.

This limits the number of vendors you’re paying but also means there is no need to sort any integrations since everything comes from the same supplier.

Main Drawbacks of ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo’s breadth is also its biggest weakness.

First, solutions that offer such scale are almost always expensive, and ZoomInfo is no exception. You’ll be paying six figures for a full ABM stack.

The other major drawback is a lack of focus.

ZoomInfo has primarily expanded its service offering through acquisitions. They aren’t really focused on building a best-in-class product. 

Rather, their goal appears to be to continue increasing ACV through the acquisition of new bolt-on features that they can then upsell to existing customers.

ZoomInfo Pricing 

ZoomInfo doesn’t advertise pricing, but we know from conversations with customers who’ve moved over to Warmly that you’ll pay at least $40k annually for workflows and $100k+ for a full GTM tech stack.

2. Demandbase 

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Demandbase is the grandfather of the ABM space. They, like ZoomInfo, have a broad offering.

Why Choose Demandbase Over Clearbit?

Demandbase’s big strength is buying committee identification. 

In the world of B2B sales, you’re often dealing with more than one stakeholder and decision maker.

The person interacting with your content may or may not be one of them. Demandbase helps you uncover the rest and enriches your existing data with a solid contact database.

Compared to Clearbit, it's a more robust tool with much more workflow functionality, making it more suitable for account-based marketing and sales sequences.

Main Drawbacks of Demandbase

Demandbase, like the other full-stack ABM solutions, is expensive. 

It’s a little cheaper than ZoomInfo but more expensive than Clearbit. Then again, you’re getting more products for your money.

Advertising functionality isn’t as strong with Demandbase. 

They came up on account intelligence and bolted on advertising through an acquisition later. Their ad offering is fine, but there are better solutions for this, such as 6sense.

They also rely heavily on bidstream data for buying intent signals, which is generally not as reliable as other sources (we use Bombora’s intent data, for example).

Demandbase Pricing

Pricing for Demandbase is built on a per-customer basis.

Anecdotally, however, we can say that Demandbase is generally cheaper (but less robust and user-friendly) than 6sense and ZoomInfo, though you’ll still be paying into the high five figures.

3. Apollo.io 

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Apollo.io is another big name in the contact data category.

They came up on best-in-class data and have been growing quickly while expanding their offering toward an all-in-one solution.

In my opinion, they’re a seriously good contender, at least for email data.

Why Choose Apollo.io Over Clearbit?

Apollo.io has a lot of functionality to offer.

They’ve got best-in-class data, have some prospecting and engagement functionality, and website intent enrichment.

A few years back, Apollo.io was just a data solution—and one of the best in the field. Recently, they’ve grown super quickly and have become somewhat of a ZoomInfo (but more user-friendly).

A unique feature for Apollo.io is AI email writing, which you can use to respond to more basic prospect communications. This can significantly increase your response speed, helping your reps resolve objections while improving your speed to lead.

Main Drawbacks of Apollo.io

While Apollo.io has moved beyond just data and into sequencing, their sequencing functionality isn’t as good as, say, Outreach or SalesLoft (best-in-class tools for sales engagement).

Intent data isn’t as good as 6sense or Bombora, and B2B phone data is better from ZoomInfo or Seamless.AI.

B2B email contact data is where Apollo.io excels.

Apollo.io Pricing

Apollo.io is refreshingly upfront with its pricing model (which is probably a big part of why they’ve grown so quickly).

You’ll pay $49 per user per month for their Basic plan, or up that to $79 a month for the Professional plan with higher credit limits.

They also have a usable free plan, and you can get started without talking to a sales rep (another growth lever).

4. 6sense 

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6sense is another ABM platform with a seriously strong data offering.

In fact, they’re one of the data sources we use here at Warmly to power our account-based orchestration platform.

Why Choose 6sense Over Clearbit?

6sense runs the gamut from account intelligence to B2B advertising, helping ABM teams reap the full benefits of an account-based marketing motion.

Account intelligence, though, is 6sense’s biggest strength.

The idea here is that 6sense provides insights into how prospects interact with competitor websites to give a better idea of the level of intent shown and where they are in the buying funnel.

They also have one of the best advertising offerings in the market, with their own demand-side platform (DSP) empowering personalized ads for an omnichannel approach.

Main Drawbacks of 6sense

You’ve probably already gathered that 6sense is expensive. For end-to-end orchestration, you’re looking at $120k+.

As such, 6sense is more focused on the enterprise market, meaning it's not really a suitable solution for SMEs or startup sales.

It also requires a lot of time and resources at the implementation stage. Again, fine for larger organizations; not so much for the small business.

6sense Pricing

6sense builds custom packages based on your specific needs, but budget for at least $100k a year for a full ABM setup.

5. Lusha 

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Lusha was a big name in the B2B data space a few years back, though they seem to have fallen off the map a little bit since they raised their Series B back in 2021 and started moving upmarket.

Why Choose Lusha Over Clearbit?

Reports are that, compared to Clearbit, Lusha is a lot easier to use and much easier to set up. 

They, too, have been expanding their offering outside of data and now have some prospecting, enrichment, and intelligence functionality.

One cool feature that Lusha offers—and Warmly does, too—is job change alerts. If a stakeholder at a current customer jumps ship, you’ll be notified and can use that relationship as a warm lead of sorts and open up a conversation.

Main Drawbacks of Lusha

Like Clearbit, Lusha is more about the data side of the equation than actual sales execution. 

If your problem with Clearbit is that it doesn’t give you any playbooks to actually do anything with the data, then Lusha probably isn’t your solution.

Lusha Pricing

Lusha has a free plan, but it's seriously limited and best thought of as a trial.

From there, you’ll pay $29 per user per month and upward.

6. Seamless.AI 

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Seamless.AI is one of the best sales tools and data providers out there.

We use it ourselves. The data is some of the best around, and pricing is pretty reasonable.

Why Choose Seamless.AI Over Clearbit?

Seamless.AI has been around since 2014, and just about everyone in the space reports that their data is incredibly accurate.

For phone numbers, they’re unbeatable and certainly a great alternative to Apollo.io.

Their standout feature, though, is Autopilot. It’s an automated list-building solution to help feed an outbound sales pipeline.

Main Drawbacks of Seamless.AI

The biggest drawback of Seamless.AI is that they don’t have an API. They’re kind of behind on the “integrate with everyone” thing that is becoming an industry standard.

This makes them quite limited for anyone looking to create their own bespoke tech stack.

For example, you can’t integrate Seamless.AI with Clay, Warmly, or Coupler to unify data sources and automate sales workflows off of.

Seamless.AI Pricing

Seamless.AI doesn’t outwardly advertise pricing, but we know as customers that they are seriously affordable.

They also offer a (limited) free plan for those who want to give it a spin first.

7. Cognism 

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Cognism is another solid solution for phone numbers, particularly B2B numbers.

Why Choose Cognism Over Clearbit?

Cognism is kind of like Apollo.io, except they’re based in Europe.

So, if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution as an alternative to Clearbit, but Apollo.io doesn’t work for you because you’re targeting European companies, Cognism is probably a good option.

Main Drawbacks of Cognism

Some customers report minor usability issues with Cognism, along with a few complaints about data accuracy.

They also don’t offer a free plan or even appear to provide a free trial.

Cognism Pricing

No pricing information at all is available for Cognism. You have to fill in a form and speak to a sales rep.

8. Warmly 

The biggest problem with Clearbit (other than their recent HubSpot acquisition eliminating them as a possibility for non-HubSpot users) is that they don’t do anything beyond data.

Clearbit was really built for the developer-heavy GTM team who have their own sales engagement tech stack in play and the resources to deeply integrate a data provider like Clearbit.

This has long put Clearbit out of the running for most SMEs, who not only don’t have the dev resource but also aren’t able to afford to stitch together a number of different tools.

Warmly—our account-based orchestration solution—is designed to change that.

Why Warmly Is The Ideal Clearbit Alternative

Warmly is not a data provider.

We pull best-in-class contact data from the likes of Clearbit and 6sense, then supplement that with buyer intent data from Bombora.

But that’s just the beginning.

Website visitor identification helps you deanonymize traffic, attribute visitors to demand generation campaigns, and launch sales cadences to interested parties.

From there, all of your prospect data is enriched, helping you identifying the right people at the right time, and launch AI-driven personalized outreach across email and LinkedIn.

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Plus, an AI chatbot handles on-site customer engagement, until the right level of intent is demonstrated and an automated notification in Slack triggers a sales rep to take over the conversation.

Of course, all of this is deeply integrated with your existing tech stack.

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Why Warmly Might Not Be A Good Fit For You

We built Warmly specifically to help small and medium-sized businesses execute account-based sales and marketing playbooks, without the need for typical ABM budgets, tech stacks, or resourcing.

Our approach is, in our opinion, the perfect balance between artificial intelligence’s speed and scale and the personalized human touch.

We are, however, AI first, meaning established enterprise organizations with large GTM teams who want to run a human-centric motion might not find the right value in Warmly, and may be better off with a solution like ZoomInfo, 6sense, or Demandbase.

Additionally, since we aren’t focused on the enterprise market, there are a few features and integrations that we don’t currently offer that such organizations would typically look for.

Warmly Pricing

Pricing for Warmly is simple (we, too, are tired of GTM software companies hiding pricing behind a sales rep).

You’ll pay $850 a month (billed annually) for our standard Business plan. 

That works out to about $10k a year, which is around one tenth of what you’ll pay for something like ZoomInfo or Demandbase.

Comparing to Clearbit is a little harder, because their pricing model is complex.

Clearbit charges for a certain number of “credits” each month, which you use for the various activities Clearbit offers. For example, a “Sales Alert” costs two credits, and enriching a CRM record costs one.

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Considering 1,000 credits cost $275 under the Growth plan, you’ll likely be paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 for 25,000 credits, which is the number of warm leads revealed and enriched per month you can access on our $850 a month plan.

If you need more than that, we also offer a custom pricing tier. Or, you can get started for free today, without talking to a sales rep.

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Why consider an alternative to Clearbit? 

Clearbit has long been one of the best data providers in the game.

But data has been commoditized, and there are now many solutions with better data (6sense, for example) that also offer sales engagement functionality.

Clearbit has never pursued this area, meaning you’ve always had to connect it to an existing tech stack, making it more of a developer-focused tool.

Recently, they were acquired by HubSpot, which is a double-edged sword.

For HubSpot users, this is great. It means you get your CRM enriched (once the integration process is through) and connect Clearbits data to a software tool that can actually execute playbooks.

For anyone using any other CRM (95% of the market), this essentially means Clearbit is no longer a viable solution. 

While, right now, Clearbit still integrates with CRMs like Salesforce, logic dictates that they’ll neglect such connections in favor of improving the Clearbit>HubSpot link.

Warmly: The Clearbit alternative for SMBs 

Clearbit has long been one of the biggest and brightest names in the world of B2B data.

But as data has become a commodity, and sales teams are looking for more integrated tools that can not only provide contact and intent data, but execute playbooks based on that information.

Their acquisition by HubSpot could well change all of that for Clearbit, but it does mean that anyone working in Salesforce or any other CRM is eventually going to run into problems.

Warmly, our account-based orchestration suite, is the perfect partner for SMB sales motions and a great alternative to Clearbit.

We pull data from best-in-class sources (Clearbit is just one of them), enrich contact details with third-party buying intent data, and help you run automated and AI-driven outreach sequences.

Discover how Inbox Pirates, just 4 weeks after implementing our free plan, closed a 4-figure deal using Warmly.

How many people are visiting your website each month?

Most marketers can answer that without a lot of trouble. You jump into Google Analytics or Google Search Console (or basically any other website analytics tool), and it's likely to be one of your top reports.

But what about this one:

Who are the people visiting your website each month?

That, for many, results in a question mark.

That’s also what visitor identification software is designed to answer. 

Being such a valuable asset, it's of little surprise that the market for visitor identification software is teeming with options.

Which one is best for your use case?

That’s what we’re going to help you find out with our guide to the top 11 visitor identification software solutions for identifying prospects and capturing warm leads.

What Is Visitor Identification Software And What Is It For? 

Visitor identification software tells you who is browsing your website, when they’re doing it, and what pages they’re looking at.

The degree of precision with which a given software platform can achieve this goal varies. The “What content are they engaging with?” question isn’t so difficult. Uncovering the exact person who is on your site is a little harder.

It's not a perfect science, but there are ways for you to improve your visitor identification.

For instance, with Warmly enabled on your website, you’ll be able to uncover 15% of contacts that visit your site and 60% of companies. That’s without you doing anything.

If you start sending outbound emails with Warmly with a bit of tracking code embedded, you’ll be able to identify even more.

11 Best Visitor Identification Software Platforms 

1. Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) 

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Dealfront is a European-based go-to-market platform, perhaps better known by its previous name: Leadfeeder.

In fact, Leadfeeder was acquired by investment firm Great Hill Partners, who also acquired Echobot, merging the two solutions into Dealfront.

Leadfeeder brought the website visitor intelligence side of the equation, while Echobot’s sales intelligence, prospecting tools, and CRM integrations round out the suite.

Why Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) Is A Good Option

Dealfront is popular in Europe, which makes sense, given they’re based there.

Basically, it looks like they’re trying to create the ZoomInfo (more on them later) of Europe. All of their contact data is in the EU, and even commentary from leadership is pretty ambitious:

“We want to be the biggest in Europe….It’s going to take a few years, but I think we’re succeeding…We have long had customers all over the world.  After the merger, we will be able to offer something that no one else can.”

Unique(ish) in the market is that Dealfront offers a free tier rather than a trial, though it comes with some severe limitations:

• You can only seed data from the last seven days
• A maximum of 100 identified companies monthly

Where Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) Falls Short

It’s tough to predict what’s going to happen from here on out.

Mergers like this occasionally produce market-leading whales. More often, they lead to a halt in innovation and just another clumsy product in an already busy market.

We’ll wait and see, but here’s what we can say in terms of cons right now:

• Website deanonymization is very limited, with no timelines or further information other than “this company visited.”
• Company data isn’t as good as market leaders like 6sense

Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) Pricing

As of writing, Dealfront’s pricing model is still broken down into the two tools.

For Leadfeeder, it's either the not-that-usable free plan, or the paid plan at €139 a month. For their “Sales Intelligence” stack (so, Echobot), pricing is custom-built.

2. Lead Forensics 

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Lead Forensics is another point solution for website visitor identification. Starting up back in 2009, they seem to have been around the longest.

Why Lead Forensics Is A Good Option

Lead Forensics is a well-known name in the visitor identification software space, mostly because they’ve been around so long.

They’re London-based, so data across Europe and the UK is a strength compared to US-based solutions, but that’s about it.

Where Lead Forensics Falls Short

The fact that Lead Forensics is a legacy platform tends to work against it more than it does for it.

In sales conversations at Warmly, we’ve heard a lot of complaints about Lead Forensics’ data quality being poor and not super detailed.

Their integrations aren’t up to scratch, and it appears they aren’t really innovating.

Also, being a tool that dates back to 2009, the UI feels a little clunky and dated.

Lead Forensics Pricing

Lead Forensics has two tiers (Essential and Automate) but doesn’t share any details about what they cost—common among legacy tools.

3. Clearbit 

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Clearbit is one of the most well-respected names in contact data and intelligence.

They were recently acquired by HubSpot, which is a bit of a game-changer for Clearbit (for good and for bad).

Why Clearbit Is A Good Option

Clearbit does a lot more than just website visitor identification; they’re also a best-in-class sales intelligence platform and have seriously good contact enrichment.

They also have a fantastic prospecting tool for identifying buying committees.

What’s most intriguing about Cleabrit right now is that they were recently acquired by HubSpot.

If you’re a HubSpot user, this is great news. It means you pretty much get your CRM enriched (once the whole acquisition and integration process is complete).

But it does have a downside.

Where Clearbit Falls Short

Using Clearbit now pretty much requires you to use the HubSpot CRM.

For example, as soon as you sign up for a free trial, it asks you to integrate your HubSpot account. This is a huge departure from where Clearbit came from, which was essentially just an API for data access.

If you’re using any other CRM, then Clearbit is unlikely to be a valid contender for you into the future.

The other big drawback with Clearbit as a standalone tool is that it lacks strong out-of-the-box playbooks for sales workflows. It’s always been a developed-focused tool, which you can then plug into your existing enablement and engagement tools.

This might change with the HubSpot acquisition, however.

Clearbit Pricing

Clearbit has a really basic free plan and charges between $50 and $275 a month, depending on the number of “credits” you need.

4. Leadinfo 

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Leadinfo is another visitor identification tool undergoing a lot of changes.

They were recently acquired by team.blue, who describe themselves as “an ecosystem of successful brands working together across regions to provide customers with everything they need to succeed online.”

Take from that what you will.

The “ecosystem” has been steadily gobbling similar companies:

• Leadinfo acquired intent-based sales engagement platform Leadcamp to expand lead engagement functionality 
• WebProspector.de was added to the mix to expand the company’s integrations to well-known tools like Slack, Salesforce, and SalesLoft

This is clearly a space that’s undergoing a lot of consolidation right now. Point solutions that only deanonymize traffic are no longer sufficient; companies need engagement features and intent data as well.

Why Leadinfo Is A Good Option

The truth is that Leadinfo doesn’t look all that different from the Leadfeeder component of Dealfront.

They’re Europe-based, offer basic visitor identification, and have been recently acquired, which brings with it the rocky territory of having to stitch multiple tools together.

Pricing is super transparent, which is a nice change in this vertical.

Where Leadinfo Falls Short

As of writing, Leadinfo doesn’t do much other than simple website deanonymization.

That might change with the merges in play, but right now, customers are still left with the problem of what exactly to do with the information they’ve gained.

Leadinfo Pricing

Leadinfo offers transparent pricing and operates on a usage-based model.

This is great for smaller organizations, who’ll pay €49 per month for 100 website visitors. But it does mean that your costs scale quickly as you do. At 10,000 visitors, you’ll be paying €499 monthly.

5. VisitorQueue 

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VisitorQueue is a somewhat unique solution here in that it’s focused more on the marketing than the sales use case.

Why VisitorQueue Is A Good Option

VisitorQueue has two main cards to play:

1. Website visitor identification
2. Website personalization

The second one is what makes them unique in this space: you can personalize website content based on demographic information (once you’ve identified the visitor, of course).

Other pros include a decent number of integrations for building a connected tech stack and decent visitor data that’s more granular than solutions like Leadinfo or Dealfront.

Where VisitorQueue Falls Short

Being marketing-focused, VisitorQueue isn’t the ideal solution for the sales team.

It doesn’t offer any sales automation or engagement functionality. You’ll have to stitch it together with a sales engagement solution like SalesLoft or Outreach.

VisitorQueue Pricing

VisitorQueue pricing is complex but transparent.

You pay based on the number of monthly visitors you’d like to deanonymize (from $31 to $239 a month), then add $159 a month if you want website personalization functionality as well.

6. Snitcher 

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Snitcher is another website visitor identification software solution based out of Europe.

The unique difference with this tool is that it is primarily used by agencies who want to identify website traffic on behalf of their clients to attribute traffic growth to marketing campaigns.

Why Snitcher Is A Good Option

Snitcher is quite affordable, starting at just $39 a month. They have a usage-based model, so you pay based on the number of visitors you identify.

They also offer an IP to Company API, so you can just use Snitcher as the data source for your self-built tool.

Where Snitcher Falls Short

Like many of the visitor identification tools mentioned on this list, Snitcher doesn’t offer any data enrichment, third-party buyer intent data, or sales workflows and playbooks.

Snitcher Pricing

Pricing starts at $39 a month for up to 100 company identifications and scales up from there based on usage.

7. Happierleads 

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Happierleads offers four products:

1. Reveal - Visitor identification
2. Prospector - Contact database
3. Engage - Email and LinkedIn outreach
4. Enrich - An API for contact data enrichment 

Interestingly, it's also available as a white-labeled tool built for the agile B2B marketing and sales team.

Why Happierleads Is A Good Option

The unique thing about Happierleads is that they appear to offer LinkedIn sequencing.

I say appear because they say they do, but don’t really offer any insight into how they do it.

For example, Warmly offers LinkedIn sequencing as part of our sales outreach functionality, and that’s sequenced through our partner Salesflow.

Beyond that, they’re another option for website visitor identification but don’t really offer anything unique in that regard.

Where Happierleads Falls Short

The biggest issue that appears with Happierleads is that their database is quite small, at just 180M contacts and 70M.

Best-in-class tools have contact databases in the billions.

They are an English company, so it's likely to be Europe or just UK-focused data. 

In any case, the database is limited for teams past a certain size, though Happierleads appears to be targeting the SME market anyway. 

For example, they don’t have any integrations and seem eager for you to use their own engagement platform rather than integrate with a point solution. 

They’re missing the AI chat functionality to round out sales engagement.

Happierleads Pricing

Happierleads is relatively cost-effective, with pricing starting at $120 a month.

8. Factors 

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Factors is a solid website visitor-tracking software with some unique revenue attribution functionality.

Why Factors Is A Good Option

Factors is built for the marketing team.

You start out with optimizing ads and learning about the customer journey. Factors also offers some solid reporting and marketing campaign attribution.

Marketing intelligence and contact data come from Clearbit, so it’s best-in-class, and they also have some seriously good integrations (such as G2 and 6sense).

Where Factors Falls Short

Being focused on the marketing use case, Factors isn’t ideal for sales teams.

For example, they don't have sales engagement functionality like email outreach.

Factors Pricing

Factors has a fairly usable free plan (actually free, not a trial), with more well-equipped paid options starting at $149 per month.

9. ZoomInfo 

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ZoomInfo is a beast in the account-based marketing space. Anonymous website visitor identification is just one arrow in their very stocked quiver.

Why ZoomInfo Is A Good Option

ZoomInfo is a full-stack GTM solution.

They’ve got visitor identification, intent data, marketing and sales ops features, and even a talent outreach and hiring suite.

The short answer to why ZoomInfo is a good option for visitor identification is this:

You’re already using ZoomInfo for something else.

Beyond that, it's not really a place to begin, and it’s certainly not suitable for startup sales plays or most small businesses.

Where ZoomInfo Falls Short

Aside from the fact that ZoomInfo is by far the most expensive tool on this list, a big drawback is that the buyer identification doesn’t actually tell you the exact person unless they’ve clicked a form or other link you’ve sent them.

Other solutions—Warmly, for instance—can help you identify exact site visitors without using previously-installed tracking code.

ZoomInfo Pricing

ZoomInfo creates custom pricing packages, which is pretty much the standard for such large tools.

What we do know is that most companies are paying at least $40k to set up workflows in ZoomInfo, with many annual bills digging into six figures.

10. Albacross 

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Albacross is yet another European visitor recognition solution. It does well at that, but not a lot else.

Why Albacross Is A Good Option

Albacross is a very widely-used tool for capturing warm leads. Many of our own customers have come over from Albacross.

Their integrations are good on the CRM front (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.), but they don’t connect with outreach tools, which is a challenge for sales teams.

They also have a unique LinkedIn ads integration, and partner with Bombora (like Warmly) to enhance visitor identification with buyer intent data.

Where Albacross Falls Short

The biggest complaint we hear about Albacross is that their filtering isn’t as good.

For example, when Inbox Pirates approached Warmly to solve visitor identification, they found that Albacross would tell them someone visited from a company like Apple when it simply wasn’t true.

Beyond that, reports are that their data isn’t as robust as other solutions, and the big issue is that there is no SDR layer with sales outreach functionality. 

You can uncover who is on your website (with varying accuracy), but where do you go from there?

Albacross Pricing

Pricing for Albacross begins at €139 per month.

11. Warmly 

Warmly (yours truly) is a unique solution in this space.

Yes, we do visitor identification, but that’s only the beginning.

We believe that point solutions like Albracross and Leadfeeder don’t provide enough value to modern GTM teams. They tell you who is visiting your site but don’t give you much in the way of what to do with that information.

Warmly changes that.

Why Warmly Is The Ideal Visitor Identification Software Platform

Let me walk you through a typical workflow using Warmly, to help you understand the difference between us and other alternatives discussed here:

• A prospect from a target account lands on your website and is automatically anonymized using Warmly
• Contact data enrichment from best-in-class sources like 6sense and Clearbit, as well as third-party buyer intent data from Bombora tell you the makeup of your target account, who is involved in buying, and what intent signals they’re showing
• All of this data, along with insights into what content the visitor is engaging with, is synced back to your CRM and sales engagement stack
• The prospect is added to email and LinkedIn outreach sequences, tailored and personalized based on the data you’ve gathered
• AI chat on your website takes care of instant visitor engagement. When buying intent looks hot, a sales rep is notified via Slack integration and can take over the chat and even instigate a live video call.

Naturally, Warmly integrates with all of the tools you’re already using to execute sales playbooks.

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Why Warmly Might Not Be A Good Fit For You

At Warmly, we’re creating a new category: 

Account-based orchestration.

It’s about surround-sounding a prospect using an omnichannel approach, driven heavily by AI and automation and best-in-class contact and intent data.

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The key is that account-based orchestration is accessible to the SME, who typically doesn’t have the budget for all-out account-based marketing plays.

Which brings us to our drawback. 

Since we serve the SME market, we aren’t yet fully supporting the enterprise market with some of the features and integrations they’d ask for.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly offers 3 different plans:

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The majority of our customers are on the Business plan at $850 a month (billed annually). 

However, we know that many SMEs just want to get up and running. That’s why we built a seriously usable free tier.

You can get started with a free account right now without having to speak to a sales rep, so you can dive in and start seeing revenue growth immediately. 

Get started for free here.

In the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape, content marketing and SEO marriage emerge not as a mere partnership but as a harmonious symphony. It's a strategic alliance that blends the artistry of content creation with the analytical precision of search engine optimization.

In this article, we'll talk about the partnership between content marketing and SEO to understand how these two work together to help businesses grow.

Understanding Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic digital marketing approach that involves creating, distributing, and promoting valuable, relevant, and consistent content to a specific audience. 

The primary goal of content marketing is to attract, engage, and retain a target audience. Below are the critical goals of content marketing:

Building Brand Awareness - By consistently delivering valuable content, businesses can enhance their brand recognition and establish a distinctive identity in the minds of consumers.

Establishing Authority and Credibility - Creating high-quality content contributes to establishing authority and credibility, fostering trust among the audience, and making the brand a go-to source for information.

Engaging and Educating Audiences - By providing content that is not only interesting but also informative or entertaining, businesses can capture and maintain their audience's attention.

Nurturing Customer Relationships - Regularly delivering valuable content keeps the brand at the forefront of the audience's mind, fostering loyalty and turning one-time customers into repeat customers and advocates.

Content marketing is a long-term strategy that revolves around storytelling, building a brand narrative, and creating a positive customer experience. It is intricately connected with other elements of digital marketing, such as search engine optimization (SEO), working synergistically to achieve broader marketing goals and drive sustained business growth.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy aimed at improving the visibility and ranking of a website in the organic (non-paid) search results of search engines. It is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring, adaptation, and optimization.

One of the key components of SEO is content creation and optimization. Create high-quality content that is relevant to your audience. If you produce valuable content that satisfies your user intent, people are more inclined to link to your material, which will help your website rank higher in search engine results. You can optimize your content using keywords in your title tag, meta description, and content for search engines.

How Does SEO and Content Marketing Benefit from Each Other?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and content marketing are highly complementary, each playing a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of the other. Combining SEO and content marketing leads to a holistic digital marketing strategy. Here's how each benefits from the other:

How to Craft SEO-Optimized Content

Creating SEO-optimized content involves a strategic approach that considers both the needs of search engines and the preferences of your target audience. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you create content that is well-optimized for search engines:

Keyword Research

Start by conducting thorough keyword research to identify relevant terms and phrases. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to discover keywords that align with your content and have a reasonable search volume.

Understand User Intent

Analyze the intent behind the keywords. Consider whether users seek information, products, reviews, or solutions. Tailor your content to meet your target audience's specific needs and expectations.

Create a Compelling Title Tag and Meta Description

Craft a compelling title tag and meta description that includes your target keyword. Keep it concise (title around 60 characters and meta description within 155-160 characters ) and make it engaging to encourage clicks.

Optimize Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)

Use clear and descriptive heading tags to structure your content. Include your target keywords in relevant headings to signal the hierarchy and topic relevance to search engines.

Craft High-Quality, Informative Content

Develop content that is comprehensive, valuable, and addresses the needs of your audience. Google rewards content that satisfies user queries effectively. Aim for longer-form content when appropriate, but prioritize quality over quantity.

Internal Linking

Include internal links to relevant pages within your website. This helps search engines understand your content's structure and improves users' navigation. Many internal linking tools, like LinkStorm, can help you. Use them to find broken links, identify opportunities for improvement, and optimize your site's internal linking structure. 

Optimize URL Structure

Create clean and descriptive URLs. Include your target keyword when relevant. Avoid using complex or lengthy URLs, as simplicity is preferred.

External Linking

Incorporate external links to authoritative sources when relevant. This adds credibility to your content. Ensure that the external links enhance the overall value of your content.

Regular Content Updates

Regularly update and refresh your content. Search engines favor fresh and current information. Add new insights, statistics, or relevant updates to maintain the relevance of your content over time.

2023 was a year of partnerships in website visitor tracking software. Leadfeader completed its merger with Echobot to form a new GTM platform called Dealfront. Factors.ai partnered with ABM platform 6sense, and CRM platform Hubspot ended the year by acquiring Clearbit.

Before its acquisition, Leadfeeder was a market-leading B2B lead generation software that deanonymized website traffic. The company merged with sales intelligence platform Echobot to form a complete GTM platform called Dealfront, focused on the European market.

With Leadfeeder doubling down on Europe, North American customers may wonder what their best options are for visitor intelligence in 2024.

Here is our round-up of the best Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives for Visitor Intelligence in 2024.

7 Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives for Maximum Lead Generation in 2024

• Clearbit (acquired by Hubspot) – Best for Budget Users
• ZoomInfo – Best for Mobile Numbers and Enterprise ICPs
• Factors – Best for Marketers
• Albacross – Best for EU Alternatives to Leadfeeder
• LeadMagic – Best for Middle Market
• Koala (getkoala.com) – Best for Beginners
• Warmly – Best for AI Sales Orchestration

Clearbit – Best for Developers & Budget Users

‎Clearbit was recently acquired by Hubspot. As of now, it’s marketed as Clearbit by HubSpot and remains available as a separate service.

The company has over 400K users and enriches more than 500 million records monthly. Clearbit’s de-anonymization platform is called Reveal. It does not do contact-level identification, but has a function called Capture that adds contact information for key decision makers in an integrated CRM. It also offers Data Enrichment that uses machine learning and QA to find context on companies and contacts.

Strengths of Clearbit

Clearbit has long been the de facto choice for developers who work with GTM teams. They are the most API-developer friendly.

Clearbit pairs well with marketing automation software. It integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, Segment, Marketo, Pardot and Slack. HubSpot users have been able to use Clearbit as an app since 2019. Hubspot has indicated that it plans to integrate it natively through HubSpot’s CRM platform. As of now, Clearbit is still available as a standalone product.

Clearbit’s pricing structure has credit-based system which allows budget-minded teams to just pay for the features they need as they need it. It’s also rated highly for being easy to use and set up, as well as the quality of support.

Weaknesses of Clearbit

If you use Salesforce or any type of CRM other than Hubspot, there is some risk of your service being disrupted depending on changes the company makes going forward.

The main complaint for Clearbit users is pricing, which is not as upfront as Leadfeeder. Clearbit not have any unlimited plan. Customers pay for their usage, which can quickly add up at 2 credit per sales alert and even charges for CSV exports. There are also some features Clearbit does not yet track, such as contact-level website identification, Video tracking, File Download tracking, and Form tracking.

Clearbit Pricing

‎Clearbit has a different pricing structure than its competitors. The free level gives 25 credits a month, which can be spent on features like Sales Alerts (2 credits), CSV exports (1 credit per unique record) and Form Shortening (2 credits). Growth plans cost $50-275 for 125-1,000 credits per month. Companies that need more than that can contact their sales team for a custom arrangement. Clearbit is best for companies with a handful of very specific needs and would rather not pay a lot monthly for features they won’t use.

ZoomInfo – Best for Mobile Numbers and Enterprise ICPs

‎Compared to Leadfeeder, ZoomInfo has a much more involved setup plan and is significantly more expensive than its peers. While it has enjoyed a reputation of having the cleanest data, its high-end price structure is increasingly hard to justify with so many cheaper competitors coming up in the sales intelligence space.

Strengths of ZoomInfo

‎The ZoomInfo SalesOS platform claims to have the largest B2B database with more than 174 million verified emails and a relatively impressive 70 million direct dial numbers. For reference, Dealfront’s ICP-based targeting covers roughly 90 million contacts from 30 million (European) companies. ZoomInfo has a comprehensive data set with strong confidence and can be especially granular for some specializations. It does best with middle-market and enterprise-sized companies.

ZoomInfo started with contact identification and moved into other areas, like website ID, third-party intent data, and chatbot. This is likely because as a public company, they need to constantly increase their net retention revenue (NRR) and introducing new features is the best way to do that. Unfortunately, it’s swelled into a very big (read: expensive) bundled package.

In addition to SalesOS, their RevOS operating system also includes MarketingOS, OperationsOS, DaaS, and TalentOS, which may be helpful for customers who want an all-in-one solution. Given it’s white-glove sales process, ZoomInfo also offers the ability for more personalization than other LeadFeeder alternatives on this list.

Weaknesses of ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is easily the most expensive LeadFeeder alternative starting at $15,000/year for 3 seats. Their contract also requires that you delete all the data if you stop using them, so you will have to start all over with a new company if you switch over.

ZoomInfo is not useful for tracking companies smaller than 100 people. They also have a reputation for suing former customers who continue using data sets after they have stopped renewing their contracts.

ZoomInfo is not especially remarkable at website identification, which makes sense as it is not their bread and butter. Similar to Clearbit, ZoomInfo’s contact-level identification data comes through acquisitions. However, the service is integrated into everything else, so if a company comes to the website, ZoomInfo can simply pull up the contacts of all the buyers who work there. In this case, their extensive data set covers a hole in their data, but it will cost you.

ZoomInfo benefits from name recognition, which is a double-edged sword as they also have more exposure to lawsuits. Unlike many of its competitors, it is publicly traded which may limit its ability to move quickly. The multiplatform approach may also be a weakness as it spreads their customer care and product investment in multiple directions.

ZoomInfo Pricing

Pricing is only available by contacting the ZoomInfo pricing team. However, word on the street is that plans start at $15K a year.

‎ZoomInfo requires users to sign up and request pricing, but plans usually start at $15,000 a year for 3 seats. There appears to be no self-service option, which is fine if you prefer a high-touch sales process.

Factors – Best for Marketers

Factors started as a marketing and attributions product, a side of which is account intelligence. Their focus is figuring out which campaigns or content is bringing in the high-intent accounts and pushing it back into the marketing sequence.

There is, however, significant overlap in use for salespeople. Factors can offer context such as what channels the accounts are coming from, what the journey is for the account, and provide statistics. They can identify what campaigns and pages convert better.

Strengths of Factors

Factors has direct integration with 12 tools and softwares including HubSpot, Salesforce, 6Sense, Clearbit and Leadsquared. You can also connect to Webhooks like Make.com or Zapier to access other tools and integrations.

Factors has also recently partnered with Clearbit, which strengthens both company’s data sets. They are GDPR-compliant on principle, which can spare it from some of the roadblocks ZoomInfo has faced when going public. Factors also has an AI-powered feature called “Explain” that offers insights and root cause analysis.

Weaknesses of Factors

Factors is a “privacy-first, GDPR compliant solution” which means they only provide IP-to-company data and not individual website visitors, phone numbers, or mail IDs unless that user has filled out a contact form with that information.

Given its priority on privacy, Factors is more focused on understanding funnel conversions. Their website analytics tools track ad performance and users' journeys as they move through pages. It is an excellent tool for marketers who need analytics, but not as much for sales people and orchestration. They also do not have any automation for prospecting, unlike competitors Koala or Warmly.

Many users also complain about data export features, which does not currently allow sharing individual reports, customizing data formats, or even specific data fields. This may not be ideal if you intend to integrate Factors.ai with other systems.

They also do not have chat bot features and have not indicated they will move into the space, which may be a consideration for sales people who want more of an orchestration platform.

Factors Pricing

‎Factors has a free tier that allows up to 100 identified accounts and 5K visitors monthly. They have three tiers of paid accounts. The lowest paid plan is $149/month, allowing up to 500 identified accounts and 10K visitors. The Growth and Professional levels allow 5K and 10K unique accounts per month, respectively. Any needs greater than that requires contacting them for a quote.

Albacross – Best for EU Leadfeeder Alternative

Albacross is a top LeadFeeder alternative in the European market.

‎Albacross is an E.U.-based service that focuses on first-party intent data, which includes tracking account engagement such as the pages users visits and how long they spend there. It claims to have built the "largest proprietary IP-to-company mapping database globally" with "tens of thousands of users." For customers targeting the European market, Albacross is a great alternative to LeadFeeder.

Strengths of Albacross

Albacross claims their "database maps 3+ billion events monthly" and that internal tests show an identification rate "1.7x higher than most intent data platforms" according to their website.

Like Factors, Albacross is GDPR-compliant, which is a requirement for working with companies in Europe, where it is based.

Albacross offers native integration for HubSpot, and third-party integration with Salesforce, Google Sheets, Mailchimp, Intercom, HubSpot, Mailshake, lemlist, Slack, and Zapier. Their API had 100% uptime in 2022. Like many competitors, Albacross is working with AI and machine learning to refine their data accuracy.

Their tracking method uses a custom script while LeadFeeder uses Google Analytics, which is not specificially designed for lead generation. Albacross also keeps a lead history of up to 90 days compared to 30 days with LeadFeeder.

Weaknesses of Albacross

Albacross lacks options for automating the sales process. It also has relatively few and inefficient integrations with other tools. It does connect to Salesforce, but only via a third-party. API integrations are also only available on the higher-level Growth plans.

Like Leadfeeder, Albacross is based in the EU and better at segmenting for European ABM campaigns, which may not be ideal for North American ICPs.

Albacross also does not offer a free tier. Their lowest paid tier costs $79/month and offers what many of its competitors offer for free. If you want to identify more than 100 companies a month, you will also have to talk to their Sales team to put together a Growth plan.

Albacross Pricing

‎Unlike many of its competitors, Albacross does not have a free tier. However, it does offer a 14-day free trial. It’s basic tier costs $79/month and allows up to 100 unique accounts, which is equivalent to the free tier of both Leadfeeder and Factors.ai.

LeadMagic – Best for Middle Market

‎LeadMagic was started in 2022, and already has a good reputation for first-party intent data as a B2B lead generation tool. It is often compared to the Clearbit Reveal tool, but with a monthly plan that can yield significant savings with high usage.

Strengths of LeadMagic

LeadMagic has an API that works with Segment or Google Analytics, which makes it a good API developor-friendly option for companies that need more usage than they can get with Clearbit. They also claim to be "only Visitor Identification Software that will let you own our data" which means, unlike ZoomInfo, you won't get a cease-and-desist after cancelling your subscription for using any lists they generated.

Weaknesses of LeadMagic

LeadMagic can be integrated with your CRM, but only through Zapier. Their pricing is per seat, so costs can add up if you have a large sales team.

LeadMagic Pricing

Like Clearbit, ‎LeadMagic has usage-based pricing starting at $69 for up to 100 leads. However, they also offer unlimited premium plans starting at $139/month on an annual basis or $169 month-to-month. If your company is identifying more than 400 unique companies a month, you would save money by adopting either the monthly or annual plan.

Koala – Best for Beginners

‎Like Warmly, Koala offers a freemium product for small companies. The founders were the former Chief Product Officer and Head of Engineering at customer data platform Segment who wanted to apply the principles of Segment to lead generation on a website.

Koala is extremely PLG-driven. They have very little web presence (not even a G2 review profile) other than their website, though they do post frequently to their changelog. Their website also does not allow you to book a demo. Instead, they lean into the freemium model and prompt users to upgrade to the Team level in the program.

Strengths of Koala

Koala is known for having a very clean and UI. They do a good job of filtering and identifying visitors, which syncs easily back to your CRM. It hooks easily up to sales engagement software, so users can automate messaging via email. Koala also has some innovative features including real-time Slack alerts. Koala has a forgiving price structure, which makes it a great place to start playing around with a strategy for visitor intelligence and lead generation.

Weaknesses of Koala

Koala appears focused solely on visitor identification. They do not provide customer intent or job change tracking. While Koala is working on some cool features such as Outreach integration, they lack some splashier features such as chat bots or LinkedIn messaging automation. Koala also does not use third-party vendors for data enrichment, so they are not able to identify as many prospects at the contact level as some of its competitors.

Koala Pricing

Koala has a very forgiving price structure that is aimed at product-led growth. The free level gives 3 seats and allows users to see up to 250 identified accounts and 10,000 events monthly. The Team level starts at a relatively inexpensive $175/month and allows users to see up to 1,000 accounts and 500,000 events. If you need more than 3 seats, you will have to contact the sales team for a Business level plan.

Warmly – Best for AI Sales Orchestration

Warmly's AI Sales Orchestration comes with many innovative features that you may not need or be ready to integrate into your workflow.

‎Warmly is an AI sales orchestration platform that includes website identification. The company has been around for 5 years, but is a relative newcomer to visitor intelligence after a pivot in 2023. Warmly's use of third-party OMB partnerships allows it to identify a market-leading 65% of website traffic.

It's partners include 6Sense and Clearbit for enrichment data, though we may see the company move towards developing some of that internally. As of now, the partnerships seem symbiotic. 6Sense is the default enterprise service provider for intent data, but there is substantial market share in SMB and middle-market for Warmly to grow. In fact, 94.4% of Warmly’s reviews on G2 Crowd is from Small-Businesses compared to Leadfeeder’s 75.9%.

Warmly appears to be competing most closely with Koala for the SMB and middle-market customers. However, Warmly does have the advantage of an AI chat bot feature which puts them in the arena with Qualified and Drift. This makes Warmly an excellent alternative for non-Enterprise companies that want that sales channel, but are not big enough to use Qualified or Drift.

Strengths of Warmly

Warmly's use of third-party OMB partnerships allows it to identify nearly 65% of website traffic, just edging out Factors. It is also positioned to capture down-market clients for Qualified, Drift, and 6Sense, which is reflected in their symbiotic partnership with the latter.

Their AI sales orchestration platform has features sales customers may like, including automated LinkedIn and ChatBot messaging. They are also available to non-Enterprise clients with a generous free-level and a flat monthly subscription that will cover most customer needs.

Weaknesses of Warmly

While Warmly currently leads the market in identifying website traffic, it's accuracy depends on OMB partnerships for enrichment data that may change or go away—particularly with HubSpot's recent purchase of Clearbit.

Warmly's lowest paid level is also significantly more than all of the competitors in this list except ZoomInfo. This is somewhat made up for by a generous free-level that will allow most customers to try the software.

Some users complain it can do a better job of filtering out bots and noise from website traffic, though customers can currently set alerts to only let salespeople know when a visitor is within their ICP.

Warmly is also very much focused on signal-based sales orchestration and may not be a good fit for people who have very simple website identification needs or are not ready to/interested in automating their sales process.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly is one of the pricier LeadFeeder competitors, but its website intelligence is built into a full-scale AI sales orchestration platform.

‎Like Koala, Warmly offers a freemium model. The free level allows users to identify 500 leads/month, which is 5x more than Leadfeeder or Factors, and twice as much as Koala. For $850/month, users can go up to 25,000 leads a month, which should be plenty for most SMB/middle-market customers until they need to upgrade to a custom Enterprise plan.

LeadFeeder Competitor Pricing Chart

‎

‎Conclusion of Best LeadFeeder Alternative

A. Summary of Leadfeeder's Advantages

With the acquisition by DealFront, LeadFeeder now covers more than 66 million companies around the world, including 30 million companies and 83 million contacts in Europe. LeadFeeder (now DealFront)'s focus on Europe gives it a significant advantage to alternatives based in other regions.

B. Pros & Cons of Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives

If you are not in Europe or selling to European customers, you will not be able to take full advantage of LeadFeeder (Now DealFront)'s extensive database.

There are many competitors, including newer entrants like Warmly and LeadMagic, in the North American market that offers a interesting mix of features that may matter to sales teams, such as Outlook integration, automated LinkedIn messaging, chat bots, and more.

C. Final Recommendation for Best LeadFeeder Alternative

The best Leedfeeder alternative depends on your B2B data needs. SMBs who are new to website intelligence may prefer a slimmed-down plan like Clearbit or Koala. Sales and marketing teams that work closely together may be interested in website tracking with a marketing focus, such as Fathom. For companies looking to jump with two feet into AI may be interested in a sales orchestration package like Warmly.