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Salesloft Acquires Drift: The Race To AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
Salesloft Acquires Drift: The Race To AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
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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?

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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

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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

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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.

Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform
Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform
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This article is Part IV of the 4-part series on the shifting landscape of B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed.

Here, you can read Part III, which goes over what AI-powered revenue orchestration is and why it's important in the age of AI and automation.

As Part I of the B2B SaaS evolution explained, the world's digital transformation also transformed the importance of the website.

Some studies have noted that 70% of the buyer journey is completed by the time the prospect speaks with a salesperson.

Dark social, through the internet's scale and maturity, has created tons of word-of-mouth channels for recommending products that don't get tracked by attribution software and don't create intent data. 

These channels include social networks like LinkedIn, content platforms like podcasts, internal communications like Slack communities, DMs, and text messages. Word of mouth through dark funnel activities increasingly plays a more influential role in buying decisions.

The trickiest part is knowing when to reach out to the right person with the right question since buyers' attention always changes.

Sending out unsolicited emails and making random phone calls is like taking a shot in the dark, hoping to catch the buyers at the perfect moment. But people don't answer their phones these days, and their email inboxes are overflowing.

At some point in every B2B SaaS buyer's journey, they may not see our ad, they may not read our email, they may not see our G2 reviews, but they will go to check out our website. And for ~8 seconds when they hit our site, we know they're just thinking about us.

“The average digital attention span is 8 seconds, according to media analysts and data scientists,” says Aydin Senkut, Warmly Series A investor, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis. “So the opportunity to catch a prospect while they are actively engaged with your content is fleeting. There is no time to chat to the visitor, upload a lead into a CRM, enrich the data, and add to a follow-up sequence. Warmly provides real-time orchestration of these tasks within that 8-second window.”

From: Press Release: Warmly Series A Announcement

How do you ensure the right follow-up actions happen at this exact moment in time, every time?

We call the solution signal-based revenue orchestration.

The Issue With Most GTM Teams 

How often have you heard one of your sales reps use the phrase, “I just don’t have time for that.”?

This is one of the biggest issues among sales teams.

We’ve got all of these fantastic tools and a ton of great data to dig into, but we don’t really seem to get value out of it all.

Between firmographic data, conversation intelligence, and buying signals, sales reps have so much information to look at that it could take as much as an hour to absorb enough data to respond to a prospect with a sufficient level of context.

And by that time, a competitor has already responded and won the deal.

There is always a tension between speed-to-lead and contextual, personalized responses.

In most cases, speed wins out, especially since reps have lofty sales targets and activity goals. So they make mistakes. They don‘t do research as much as they could (or should). They stop personalizing outreach.

And, of course, conversion rates suffer.

The Last Defensible Marketing Moat Is Brand

In the hyper-saturated environments in which most companies operate today, brand is the last defensible marketing moat.

Competitors can copy and implement new features in weeks, if not days. Messaging can be replicated and improved upon even faster. So can the majority of your sales and marketing tactics and channels.

Brand is what distinguishes you from competitors. It's what creates an emotional connection with prospects before they are ready to buy. It's what allows you to influence buying decisions and to tap into the world of dark social and word-of-mouth referrals.

In our deep dive on warm leads, we spoke about a three-step process for driving qualified, high-intent leads to your site:

  1. Build a media brand (investing in content creation and distribution to position your brand as a leader)
  2. Create brand partnerships (working with likeminded brands in a similar space to increase reach and borrow brand equity)
  3. Engage with prospective buyers (get out there and talk with customers, rather than talking at them with outbound marketing communications)

All of these efforts lead back to one place:

The website.

Website As The Choke Point To All GTM Investments

The opportunity lies in the fact that as the world becomes more digitized, the website serves as the digital store, while the landing page acts as the digital shopfront.

Imagine you are the marketing team for your store. You invest significant money to attract foot traffic, hoping that people will pass by your store (website) and take a closer look at your shopfront (landing page).

If we have done a good job designing our shopfront, some people may enter our store. Some who enter may be our target buyers.

Our target buyers walk through our store daily, showing interest in what we offer. But no one's there to greet them. 

Instead, they are instructed to write down their information on a post-it note and wait for a response in a few hours or days, only to get a call from a rep who asks many questions but answers none of theirs. This is the typical process of filling out forms.

Or they are directed to a kiosk where they can provide their information and receive automated answers. Most chatbots operate in this manner, but this is not how people make purchasing decisions.

It's not surprising that, on average, only 3% of website visitors fill out forms.

Step one of maximizing marketing spend is figuring out which qualified accounts are visiting our website, and from there, the accounts are actually in-market for our product but not raising their hand.

Otherwise, how do we know what marketing efforts are working and where to double down?


~3% of your site traffic converts (and not always the traffic you want)

Quality Data Delivers Qualified Leads

When it comes to B2B buyer intent data, first-party data is always the most reliable source, followed closely by best-in-class third-party intent data from the likes of Bombora.


With these warm buyer intent signals in hand from website visitor behavior, you’re going after the lowest-hanging fruit because these are the companies that are familiar with your brand.

That’s why we’re starting with website intent because only 3% of website visitors fill out a form, so you’re missing out on a huge chunk of what could be qualified prospects,

As the state of signal-based revenue orchestration develops, we’ll be adding additional data sources like job change alerts and job posts.


Introducing Warmly: AI-Supported Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration

Warmly is our signal-based revenue orchestration, born out of the need to respond to warm leads fast and to ensure that as much context and personalization as possible are present at every touchpoint.

Warmly is designed specifically for the SMB, with a flexible pricing structure to suit. Most ABM and revenue-focused solutions are out of range for this market segment; they’re targeting enterprise buyers.

As such, those platforms generally take a human-first approach since enterprise companies with enterprise budgets for enterprise tools also have the budget for a huge GTM team.

SMB buyers don’t have that luxury.

So, we built Warmly with an AI-first approach. This way, you get the best out of what modern machines can offer (speed, scale, and data-driven contextual communication) and only loop your reps in when the human touch is needed to close the deal. This allows humans to focus on what they do best which is building relationships and being strategic.

These tools are also largely forcing customers into a specific ecosystem. ‎Salesloft acquired Drift and is focused on building an all-in-one GTM solution. Same thing is happening with ZoomInfo, and with the HubSpot acquisition of Clearbit.

But SMB buyers need flexibility. 

So, our approach to revenue orchestration is about being the middleware that orchestrates the best-in-class tools that you choose so you can have flexibility. 

How Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Works

You Run Demand Gen As Normal 

All of this begins with the various demand generation strategies you’re running.

Remember, only around 5% of your total addressable market is actually ready to buy. By the time they get to one of your lead generation devices, they’ve already done the majority of their research.

If you’re not present during that whole customer journey, educating the prospect and guiding their buying decisions at every turn, you’re unlikely to be in the final consideration set.

So, keep on doing what you’re doing. Build that content machine, publish and distribute, and drive traffic back to your website so prospects can learn about how you solve their common problems.

Warmly Deanonymizes Visitors To Your Website 

Once a potential buyer lands on your website, Warmly kicks into action.

This begins with website visitor deanonymization.

We can uncover 65% of the companies who visit your site and 15% of the actual people without you having to do anything.


In some cases, we can provide LinkedIn accounts and even email addresses for these buyers, all of which are then quickly synced back to your CRM and sales engagement tools.

Best-In-Class Data Integrations Help Identify Buying Committees 

We then pull in firmographic data from best-in-class sources such as Clearbit and 6sense, both at the company level and at the contact level.

This helps you to identify who might be on the buying committee and who else at that company might be responsible for the purchase decision.

For example, a marketing associate might have visited your website, but Warmly has identified (based on your ICP information) that the CMO would more likely be the decision-maker here.

This data is also routed to your sales tech stack, helping to build out the account and allowing you to understand more about who you need to talk to in order to influence a purchase.

This comes from a proprietary data waterfall strategy designed to ensure you have the best coverage and accuracy (better than anyone else). We layer together the best data for you so you don’t have to go through the headache.


Warmly Orchestrates Multi-Threaded Omnichannel Outreach 

Here’s where the power of AI really kicks into gear.

We’ve enriched your CRM and sales engagement tools with all of the account data related to the prospect in question. We’ve combined metadata and tech stack data with best-in-class buying intent data to translate buying signals into meaningful and actionable sales actions that can be automated.

We call this multi-threaded outreach.

By multi-threaded, we mean that our AI engine isn’t just communicating with one person.

It’s using powerful sales and marketing automation to push personalized email and LinkedIn messages to multiple stakeholders, all of which appear to be coming from a member of our sales team.

As all good revenue teams know, each stakeholder in the B2B buying team has different buying motivations. The CMO is going to want to see results or proof of concept that are different from what the marketing associate might see.

So, our AI outreach engine crafts contextual messaging based on those roles and the value your product can provide them.

All of this is orchestrated via a single platform connected to your existing sales engagement tech stack. It’s high-value work being done in the background that your reps don’t have to worry about.

Use Case Examples For Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration

Top of Funnel Orchestration

If a qualified ICP account visits the website for the first time without any associated CRM deal, we automatically create the account in the CRM. Then, we enrich new CRM fields to track the account's digital footprint and analyze trends. We automatically source the buying committee via Apollo, PeopleDataLabs, and ZoomInfo integrations.


The contacts are then synced to the CRM, assigned the appropriate account owner, and automatically added to an educational nurture sequence sent via email and LinkedIn (via our Salesflow integration).

As the buying committee members engage with the content, the signal on the account strengthens. Over time, we may see the account transition from the awareness stage to the consideration stage of the buying journey. And instead of just searching for your category in Google, they're searching for your brand.

Middle of Funnel Orchestration

The account's buying committee has started to show interest in your offering, as evidenced by repeat visits to your website from multiple IP addresses. They have shown interest in case studies and pricing pages and have recently engaged with marketing nurture emails. We bilaterally sync web activity associated with each buying committee member into the CRM, including the referral source, time spent on each page, and specific pages visited. This synchronization helps prioritize accounts, tailor experiences, and involve relevant parties.

As committee members are directed to your site via nurture sequences, we will send personalized messages through our AI chat. These AI chat messages are contextualized to the content consumed and the account's surrounding context. As the conversation progresses, your human seller will be notified through Slack and can engage with the prospect in real-time via video call on the website.


Bottom of Funnel Orchestration

When an account is in the decision phase and on your website, we alert the assigned Account Executive (AE) both audibly and via push notifications when these accounts visit our site. This enables the AE to meet the visitor where they're at, on the website via our live video chat. If the AE can't act immediately, the notification provides the phone numbers of the buying committee (when available) for a direct call.


Simultaneously, we draft personalized emails or LinkedIn messages using GPT and relevant data pulled from all integrated systems. The AE would approve these messages before they're sent, ensuring timely and relevant follow-ups with the prospect.

Lead Scoring & Revenue Orchestration

Signal-based revenue orchestration can (and should) be set up to run different playbooks based on the level of intent and warmth the prospect demonstrates.

Here’s how we score and route leads at Warmly, for instance:

As you can see, leads we judge as cold receive simple inbound chatbot workflows, whereas hot and medium prospects get a proactive AI chat playbook.

These distinctions are made using our proprietary warm lead scoring matrix.


A combination of ICP filters (for example, the size of the company) and intent signals (from third-party site activity and engagement on our own website) determines how hot the lead is, automatically filtering prospects into the relevant workflows.

PS. Our full-length article on Warmly implementation goes into detail on how to set this up.

Advantages of Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration

We only loop in sellers when an account is ready for a human conversation. Otherwise, we're continuing to deliver multi-threaded, omni-channel experiences across all your accounts automatically.

We think that human systems are inherently difficult to scale, especially as deals become more complex and involve more stakeholders, each with individual nuances.

The difficulty is in holding attention long enough to synthesize all the information collected on an account/individual to craft the right experience before their attention goes elsewhere. It takes time to research, time to draft, and time to send. When a rep reaches out, the window of opportunity might have closed, and the prospect is visiting a competitor's site. Or the rep never reaches out, and we would've missed an opportunity to build a relationship with the prospect earlier in their buying journey.

Orchestration's ability to reduce the relevant information from your systems into the right multi-threaded actions, combined with AI's ability to generate personalized messaging, has the following advantages over traditional Account Based Marketing:

  • Fit - To ensure that the best-fit companies (based on your ICP) get high-touch workflows, stopping low-intent leads from clogging up sales pipelines and speeding up sales cycles by acting as a filtering mechanism and stitching together various data inputs. 
  • Speed - To engage with the prospect through the right channel, with the right message in that ~8-second window when they're thinking about you
  • Scale - To engage with all accounts visiting your website across all stages of the buyer journey and across the entire buying committee, not just the person visiting the site at that moment
  • Consistency - To immediately mobilize and scale up an army of AI SDRs to deliver consistent messaging that would resonate with the right buyers so you can test and iterate what works best at scale
  • Personalization - To deliver the right messaging at the right time, via the right channel, AND being human while doing so
  • Reduction - To measure the value of each of the dozens of buying signals you have access to, and weight them based on how strongly they indicate intent, and reduce it to an overall intent score

Consolidate Tools to Create a Seamless Buyer Experience

To stitch together these event-driven systems, you would need ZoomInfo or Clearbit to enrich the data, 6sense to gather the website intent, and Drift to engage with them live on the website. Now you can do it all in one.

Layering data from disparate systems and reducing the complexity through orchestration leads to derived insights. You can skip analysis done by a human toggling between three screens and pinpoint critical moments in a buyer's journey. You don't need to ink deals with 6-7 vendors and spend time getting systems to talk to one another. You can focus on one core vendor and push them to innovate to create seamless buyer experiences.

That will allow you to save money on tech spend, repurpose reps' time on more strategic problem-solving for the customer, and have robust data to run models and AI against to automate processes further.

Setup Warmly in Minutes, Not Months

Larger platforms may require weeks to months to set up correctly, involving multiple teams, onboarding sessions, and alignment meetings. The hidden cost of setup starts to eat away at the ROI.

For Warmly, you can begin receiving hard ROI in 20 minutes by:

  • Adding a code snippet to the site
  • One-click authenticating into your systems (Hubspot, Outreach, Apollo, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.)

You can immediately start to improve conversion rates by de-anonymizing and enriching the traffic coming to your site, sync this data back into your CRM, and then routing hot accounts to the right rep.

Then we would set you up for an onboarding call with our CSM for 30 minutes to help you define your ICP accounts and buying committee personas in Warmly so that we can set website prospecting on auto-pilot by turning on AI chat and AI prospector. This would run all hours of the day to line up conversations for reps even as they sleep.

An example: within the first 8 minutes of turning on AI chat, Kandji was able to book two qualified meetings. You can read more about Kandji's case study here.

Read more about what our customers have to say about us:

The Rise of AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
The Rise of AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
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This article is Part III of a 4-part series on the shifting landscape of B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed.

You can read Part II, where we introduce account-based marketing and how it improves the buyer experience to get past the noise explained in Part I.

In the previous two parts, we talked about the problems facing revenue teams today and how we got there. Account-based marketing is a step in the right direction, as it adapts how companies engage with buyers depending on the stage of their buyer's journey. 

Right message, right person, right time, through the right channel.

However, having implemented ABM solutions ourselves and talked with many current or former users of ABM, we've seen that there are hard setup and maintenance costs, as well as difficulties in running such a complex operation effectively - particularly speed, coverage, and consistency.

People are influenced into deals rather than pushed into them like before. Demand creation and dark social are starting to become a key part of people’s strategies.

Understanding Demand: Creation vs. Selling

‎(Image Source: Freepik)

Demand creation focuses further up the funnel at the awareness and consideration stages of the buyer's journey. It's about finding ways to get our brand in front of the 97 to 99 percent of our total addressable market who may not be actively in the market but have the potential to become prospects in the future. This involves utilizing channels like LinkedIn, Reddit, ads, webinars, blog posts, and influencers to educate and engage with our target audience.

Demand capture is about capturing the buyer in the decision and purchase stage. Again, only 1 to 3 percent of people are currently in the market and showing purchase intent. This is where all of our sales team's efforts should go. There's typically a high cost for sales spending time on accounts that are not in-market.

The need to split between demand creation (mostly marketing, though there can be some assistance from sales) and demand capture (mostly sales but with some marketing influence) is to fulfill the buyer journey experience.

One common mistake companies make is the tendency to allocate most of their budget towards demand capture, even though 70% of the buying journey has already occurred by the time a seller is involved. By then, the buyer already has a top 5 list of vendors they are looking to evaluate.

By neglecting demand creation, we risk commoditizing ourselves among competitors and miss the opportunity to distinguish ourselves as a leader.

If we truly solve a problem, our buyer will be in the market for our solution one day. And if we did demand creation right, they'll be googling for our solution via branded search terms rather than typing our category name, where we may not even rank in the first four search results.

The Importance of ICP Creation

When we look at the difference between high-performing and low-performing SDR teams, there’s one thing that stands out across the board:

The best teams are getting fed with better pipeline.

That is, the leads coming through are of higher quality. They’re a better match for the company’s ICP, so they have an easier time closing deals and waste less time on leads that would never close.

For this, you need to have your ICP clearly nailed down and ensure your demand-generation activities are tailored to that specific audience.

It is not just about finding a fit on demographics, though.

You also want to know that the company is growing. Do they have NRR over 100%? Are they retaining customers? Is revenue increasing?

If these signals are all met, it means you’re less likely to have churn issues in the future because the buyers got laid off.


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Wasting Time on The Wrong Activities 

The other problem with many low-performing SDR teams is that they aren’t focusing on the right actions. Only 20% of their time goes to activities that create progress. The other 80% is just wasted time.

They aren’t working on the right deals at the right time, with the right people, through the right channels.

Revenue orchestration helps sales teams prioritize the best leads and deprioritize the worst ones so they can work on the activities that actually move the needle forward.

Advantages of AI-powered Revenue Orchestration

Fit 

AI-powered revenue orchestration helps ensure that the leads that do make it through to a conversation with sales reps are highly aligned with your ICP.

Instead of funneling all potential prospects through to a demo (like a standard chatbot or meeting booker would), a revenue orchestration solution:

  • De-anonymizes the site visitor.
  • Enriches your CRM data on that account with other firmographic info (such as identifying who else might be on the buying committee).
  • Extracts third-party buying intent signals from external providers to understand where the prospect is at in their buying journey.
  • Understands the current health of the company by pulling publicly available growth metrics.
  • Matches that collection of data against your ICP construct to determine what conversational path to put them down.
  • Orchestrates communications across email, social, and live chat.
  • Nurtures the prospect until they demonstrate a sufficient level of intent, triggering an alert for a salesperson to take over.

This means those website visitors you aren’t a fit for your ICP don’t clog up your sales teams’ meeting pipeline, which translates to faster sales cycles and stronger conversion rates.

Speed

When a target company exhibits buying intent, the window of opportunity that the buyer is thinking about you could be seconds.

If a buyer visits the site and has a question about the product but is unable to meet with a rep until a day later, that may be too late if the budget discussion is tomorrow. By the time a sales rep reaches out, the moment may have passed, and the buyer has gone to a competitor.

Here's an example of how orchestration could solve this.

The VP of Marketing tells a B2B marketing manager at SaaS Co. to research an intent solution to get more in-market leads. SaaS Co's marketing manager asks the Pavilion Go-to-market community for alternatives to 6sense because 6sense is so expensive. Someone mentions Warmly.

The marketing manager visits Warmly's homepage, the case studies page, and the pricing page. On the pricing page, the chatbot pings - it's an AE at Warmly asking if they have any questions.


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The marketing manager doesn't realize he's speaking to an AI. But by now, the actual AE has been notified and jumped in to take over the conversation, initiating a video call. They arrange to catch up again after SaaS Co's budget meeting (that's tomorrow). The marketing manager notes the solution in his deck and calls it a day.

But the orchestration doesn't end there.

  • Immediately after, the SaaS Co.'s CFO receives a LinkedIn connection request. It's the Warmly AE, enquiring about their precarious financial position. They detail exactly how Warmly integrates into SaaS Co's existing tech stack and maximizes the ROI of marketing spend. The CFO ignores the message but keeps Warmly in mind.
  • The rest of the buying committee (the VP of Marketing, CRO, VP of Sales, and Head of Sales Development) receive custom emails addressing all the risks Warmly would help eliminate.
  • The CRO finds a surprise in her message - an explanation of how Warmly eliminates revenue leaks, a topic they had recently read up on. The CRO clicks on a link in the email, arrives on the Warmly homepage, and reads case studies about how Warmly solved revenue leaks with SaaS Co's competitors.

The orchestration system automatically generated these experiences immediately after that initial call. AI carefully selected the message, buying committee members, and channels based on the surrounding context and historical data.

In the past, such an analysis and outreach would have taken hours. This took minutes. Plus, the call recording was synced to the CRM, transcribed, and processed alongside all other relevant data collected on the account.

So, onto that all-important buying committee meeting. What do you know? Warmly is top of mind.

The marketing manager reaches out to Warmly's AE to schedule another call with the VP of Marketing, CRO, and Sales. The AI, always doing more, includes the CFO on the call because they're deemed vital.

And in less than two days (there could be just 24 hours between the initial website visit and that buying committee meeting), you've got a prospect ready to buy.

Scale

A similar story plays out a hundred more times during the working day as companies visit the site, are qualified in or out, and the orchestration platform delivers the right experience. A single rep can only handle one account at a time, but an orchestration platform can simultaneously service every single account at every stage of the buyer journey.

The previous example discussed a possible experience delivered to the account if they were in-market.

What about those that aren't in-market?

They receive demand-creation experiences, like display ads or personalized emails that route to educational blog pages or videos.

When the target accounts finally enter the "buying window," Warmly's content has already shaped their opinions. The account is primed, and we move to demand capture involving the sales team.

The target accounts arrive on Warmly's landing page, the AI qualifies them as in, notifies the rep when a human needs to be in the loop, and the cycle repeats.

Flexibility

‎The best AI-powered revenue orchestration solutions give GTM teams the flexibility they need to plug into their existing tech stack and coordinate sales and marketing activities.

That’s not the case across the board, though.

Right now, we’re seeing a consolidation of the GTM tech market.

Salesloft bought Drift. HubSpot bought Clearbit. Leedfeeder merged with Echobot to become Dealfront.

You’re also seeing tools like Apollo.io and ZoomInfo build out unified GTM suites in-house.

Others, like Warmly, are more platform-agnostic. They focus on integrating with a wide variety of tools so you can plug into the tech stack you’re already set up with and orchestrate effective GTM campaigns powered by AI.

Zach Howland, a sales tech stack expert with a ton of experience implementing CRM and sales tools, has a great point on this:

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

Consistency

Take this example.

Based on data in the orchestration platform, the leadership team finds they're losing deals based on price to competitors, specifically to companies in B2B SaaS at the Series A stage.

So, the team tweaks the orchestration platform to show 20% discounts to in-market B2B SaaS accounts at the Series A stage. The AI also integrates this promotion into the company's messaging while keeping the price the same for all other prospects.

Normally, this type of change would take multiple training sessions with SDRs, as reps leave, are onboarded, or return from vacation. In the past, reps might have tested messaging and pricing on their own.

Now, everything is standardized. This change is implemented immediately and fed through the platform.

Personalization

The other problem with those stock standard sales conversations that lack context?

They’re exactly the opposite of what today’s buyers say they want.

86% say personalization plays a major role in their purchasing decision.

For many companies, especially SMBs, personalization is a great concept but can be difficult to achieve.

Most businesses add a dynamic name section to their email chains and call it a day. As if their name is what customers are talking about when they say they want personalized buying experiences.

A quality revenue orchestration platform provides companies access to the tools they need to deliver personalized experiences.

Again, it starts with quality data (you can’t personalize anything if you don’t know a thing about the person you’re speaking to), coordinated using a combination of AI and automation to identify opportunities to personalize aspects of the conversation.

It's not just about showing that you know their company's name or their role. Revenue orchestration can go as far as customizing the marketing messaging and even the sales assets that customers receive based entirely on the demographic and intent data you have on them.

Adaptive Systems and their Multiplier Effect

When the whole go-to-market functions of demand creation (marketing) and demand capture (sales) play together harmoniously and the experience is delivered correctly, buyers are happy because they feel like it's being done for them, not to them.

When data no longer lives in siloes and is combined to create derived insights that feed back into the platform, the system continuously delivers better experiences to each account.

Advancements in AI, like vector embeddings, can extend LLMs to have long-term memory for the surrounding historical context and experiences delivered to not just one account but every account being tracked in the CRM. This allows the system to create highly customized experiences that extend across the life cycle of the buyer's journey. Like Amazon and Netflix, millions of buyers don't receive templated emails; they receive carefully selected personalized experiences.

The Non-linear Nature of B2B Purchasing

B2B buying doesn’t play out in any kind of predictable, linear order. Instead, buyers engage in what one might call “looping” across a typical B2B purchase, revisiting (for example) six buying jobs at least once.

There's a multiplier effect when all the pieces work together and adapt in real time to the ever-evolving ecosystem of B2B buying.

‎(Image Source)

Redefining the Role of Human Interaction

Go-to-market teams have already been downsizing and learning to be just as effective with fewer headcounts.

It's gotten so difficult to get someone on the phone that when they finally pick up, after 100 dials, we end up word vomiting just to have them hang up again. It's a horrible experience for both the buyer and the seller.

In the very near future, sellers will move further away from these manual, repetitive tasks because of the increased sophistication, efficiency, and effectiveness of these new adaptive systems. SDRs and AEs can get back to focusing on solving complex customer problems and building long-term relationships. And marketers can spend more time building empathy for the people they are seeking to serve.

And because AI has become quite good at synthesizing data into something humans can understand, we can drill down into the system and reveal important answers to questions like: Who is our ICP? Where are the bottlenecks? Why did we deliver certain experiences? What's been working or not working? Why?

That's the magic of AI-supported revenue orchestration. It gives us the power to be more creative and strategic.

We do what we do best, and leave the rest to automation.

Read on for Part IV on Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform.

Interested to see Warmly in action? Book a demo.

The Future of Account Based Marketing
The Future of Account Based Marketing
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This article is Part II of a 4-part series on the shifting landscape in B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed next.

You can read Part I, in which talks about the evolution of sales and marketing pre and post-pandemic.

TL;DR:

  • The reduction in force in 2023 has accelerated the need for agile organizations in B2B buying and selling.
  • Account Based Marketing (ABM) has shifted the focus from individual leads to the account level, improving efficiency and relevance.
  • Understanding the buyer's journey and using automation and AI can increase sales velocity and conversions.
  • However, there are limitations to ABM, including the challenge of data silos and the need for speed, coverage, and consistency.
  • The next phase in demand capture and demand creation is Account Based Orchestration (ABO)

Headcount Reduction Accelerating the Agile Organization

As of August 2023, almost 300,000 workers in US-based tech companies have been laid off.

Just as COVID was a massive accelerant to the digital buying process, the 2023 reduction in force, because of uncertainty around the economy, was a massive accelerant to the new age of agile organizations.

Dynata conducted a 2023 study across 500 business leaders in the US, Germany, the UK, and France across all industries. Participants included heads of sales, revops, and marketing. A few findings:

  • 75% of organizations expected flat or reduced revenue growth this year
  • 58% expect to have less personnel to drive sales

So, there is less staff, potentially the same pipeline coverage needed to hit your quota.

As a result, sales and marketing organizations learned how to operate smaller, more agile, and more efficiently. Revenue teams began partnering with the most innovative technologies that used automation and AI to help them execute operational downstream activities, which allowed them to focus on key insights and personalization.

Shift Towards Customer Centricity and Account-Based Marketing

In the past, most go-to-market tooling was focused on helping the seller and marketer get more leads. The experience of tooling wasn't necessarily tailored toward the buyer (e.g. carpet bomb email and relentless cold calls).

There are two options to increase revenue:

  • Increase leads
  • Improve pipeline conversions, cycle times, ASPs

It seemed easier to get more leads, so many organizations chose that. But it wasn't. It was the more expensive option that had diminishing returns. More leads to sift through and follow up on meant sellers weren't  allocating their time as effectively.

The problem was that 3% of your TAM was in-market to buy (Sticky Branding).

Spending time on non-target accounts that were not in-market to buy was a huge waste of time and money for both the sales and marketing teams.

The Importance of Efficient Growth and Timing

Companies like 6sense keyed in on the importance of efficient growth, relevance, and timing. They introduced the idea of account-based marketing (ABM), which took the focus off the individual lead contact and brought it up to the account level.

Understanding the Buyer's Journey

The vision was to break your target ICP accounts into four key stages of the buyer journey:

  • Target: Not ready to buy
  • Awareness: Waking up to the problem
  • Consideration: Learning how to solve the problem
  • Decision: Engaging with vendors
  • Purchase: Ready to buy

Then, align the sales and marketing team to work together towards delivering the right experience at the right stage in the buyer's journey. Sellers needed the marketers to figure out which leads were in-market. The marketers needed sellers to engage those leads. ABM teams typically align on the same ICPs and metrics to build qualified pipeline together.

There are thousands of potential leads that a seller could follow up on, but they should just prioritize the ones with the highest ROI, and leave the rest to AI and automation.

Here's an example 6sense workflow:

  • Awareness: Marketing identifies the best accounts via the buyer's digital footprint on the web, finds the buying committee, and then adds them to social ad campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Consideration: Marketing adds the buying committee members into nurture/education campaigns to provide value
  • Decision: Landing pages and chatbots are personalized to the buyer. Target accounts are routed to the right sales rep
  • Purchase: CRM, marketing automation systems and the website capture buying signals. This is when the account is in-market to buy, and sales should chase

Understanding where the buyer was in their journey made marketers and sellers more relevant and customer-centric in their outreach timing, targeting, and messaging.

Taking a multi-threaded approach where everyone on the buying committee was engaged increased sales velocity, conversions, and ASPs.

Sales and marketing were going to market together, which boosted overall ROI.

ABM started to work and cut through the noise:

  • The first person in the conversation is 70% more ready to buy (6sense)
  • 85% of marketers say ABM significantly benefited them in retaining and expanding their existing client relationships (Triblio)
  • An ABM strategy can increase B2B revenue by 208% (Warc)

According to Lars Nilson, VP of Business Development at Snowflake, who ran a 200+ sales development team, when account-based marketing and account-based sales orchestrate, script, and strategize together, they saw a 3x lift rate on their meetings booked.

Limitations of Today's Account-Based Marketing

In spite of the lift from running an ABM motion, companies are still finding difficulty capturing demand. Deals are becoming increasingly complex, with more steps involved and more people to convince. The status of deals is constantly changing and faster than humans can react.

There are also fewer humans to react, period, because of the headcount reduction. Sales reps are working double-time to engage quickly and effectively with more accounts on increasingly complex deals. People are fried.

Sometimes it could take weeks, months, quarters to fully implement an ABM solution. It could take a while before sales and marketing and in full alignment on their ICP and agreed upon processes. Takes time to find a dedicated owner of the ABM tool. People are constantly shifting, so the CMO that brought on the ABM solution may leave midway through implementation. And the sales team that was onboarded today may not be the sales team that uses it tomorrow.

A strong signal on an account that's in-market to buy is only useful if it's acted upon, and better yet, acted upon immediately. Speed kills sales. Drafting a personalized email to a hot account a day after may be too late.

Human systems do not scale well, especially as organizations and the number of leads to keep track of gets larger.

The Challenge of Data Silos and Integration

The market is starting to consolidate tooling; however, you still have 5 to 6 solutions that need to work in tandem to execute effective ABM. For example there's conversational intelligence, sequencing, email, LinkedIn, Slack, CRM, buyer intent, etc. Humans still need to toggle between three screens to conduct analysis and pinpoint key moments in a buyer's journey. Revops needs to manage multiple vendors, which oftentimes have duplicate features.

But the biggest issue is having multiple data siloes to manage. With systems needing to integrate back and forth, it can be difficult to have a single set of robust, accurate data to automate workflows or run AI models off of.

The problem compounds as the size of the organization and prospect base grows.

Pretty soon there are processes to maintain processes, and, depending on your time horizon, the upfront setup and maintenance cost may introduce more harm to the team rather than the ROI promised.

The Need for Speed, Coverage, and Consistency in ABM

For ABM to work well, you need speed, coverage, and consistency.

Most sales teams are not set up to react in real-time, which breaks them out of their workflow. It takes significant orchestration to complete the ABM motion successfully at every step.

If there is a big marketing campaign that drives traffic, there may not be enough rep coverage to engage all the buyers.

In both cases, there is a revenue leak in the funnel because speed, coverage, and consistency fall short.

It means you're not engaging or fast enough with your in-market target accounts (3% of your TAM) who are in the decision/purchase stage, which costs you deals today.

You're also missing out on the opportunity to build relationships with target accounts that are not in-market (97% of your TAM) in the awareness/consideration stage, which will potentially cost you even more deals tomorrow and beyond because those accounts may be building an early relationship with your competitors.

Up Next: The Era of Account-Based Orchestration

Read Part III, where we'll delve into the evolution from account-based marketing to account-based orchestration. We'll explore how this transition enhances the speed and precision of delivering a tailored buying experience to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

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How The B2B SaaS Sales Funnel Has Changed
How The B2B SaaS Sales Funnel Has Changed
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This article is Part I of a 4-part series on the shifting landscape of B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed.

TL;DR:

  • B2B SaaS experienced a golden era with an influx of capital and a focus on go-to-market strategies.
  • The traditional sales funnel and data-driven processes became the foundation of go-to-market understanding.
  • The market saw an explosion of SaaS solutions and an increase in email deluge, leading to declining conversion rates.
  • The pandemic brought about significant changes in buyer behavior, with a rise in digital communities and increased reliance on content consumption for decision-making.
  • The digital transformation paradox emerged as conventional funnel metrics struggled to capture evolving buying behavior, leading to the need for companies to adapt and evolve.

The Golden Era of B2B SaaS: 2018-2022

The years from 2018-2022 could be called the Golden era of pre-AI startups. B2B SaaS was living its best life. Startups were bathing in cash. They were getting their rounds pre-empted because deals were becoming that hot.

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(Image Source)‎

I remember just two years back in 2021, there was a saying in the startup community that it was easier to raise money than it was to hire great talent.

The Capital Influx

Initially, we saw the influx of capital into SaaS businesses often channeled into go-to-market strategies. B2B SaaS companies hired like nobody’s business: sales reps, ad spend, sales reps, marketing tools, and more sales reps. Resource bloat accrued because of the mounting pressures to produce in order to meet valuation expectations.

This forced the hands of many B2B SaaS startups to hire too many employees to hit those targets. As the economy has continued to recede in 2023, shareholders, boards, and VC firms alike are asking nearly every startup to surrender to a RIF - aka layoffs - to reduce the bloated, unproductive staff.

GTM Strategies

The traditional construct of going to market was that of the sales funnel. Tools like ZoomInfo and Outreach would make one sales rep feel like the power of ten sales reps. But instead of cutting back, companies went all in, flooding the market with outbound — more dials and cold outbound calls, and more mass emails out the digital door.

With so many bodies, predictability and structure became the name of the game. I remember being curious about sales and asking Larson Stair, an expert sales founder in our Techstars batch.

"What makes a salesperson great?" — Alan

"Process." — Larson

Sales with a process is a science, which makes it more predictive. Without a process, it was emotion, which made it less predictive. VCs have historically pushed for predictability, which pushed for certainty in measurement. What is the best visualization of this predictability? The Marketing-to-Sales Funnels with conversion rates at every step.


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(Image Source)‎

At the same time, with the explosion of data, whatever could be measured was measured. Everything became seemingly quantifiable when the funnel was the foundation of go-to-market understanding, turning GTM into a science, and sales and marketing as “the scientist” executing the experiments.

The SaaS Startup Explosion: the 2020s

As venture capital continued to flow into the 2020s, the SaaS market saw an influx of tools, thanks also to the commoditization of API software development. Competitor apps could be spun up overnight with just a handful of developers. The availability and affordability of cloud service helped ensure that the entrepreneurial developers sitting inside a B2B SaaS company could develop revenue-producing applications to their heart's content.

Carina, Zack, and I built one such competitor tool during our time at Techstars without knowing anything about the space.

Everyone started building and buying everything. Then, the capital and the revenue started coming in - and it was good. However, when everyone starts making money, good decisions start going out the window. Lots of shelfware was created and sold to consumers who were sold something that didn’t deliver value.

The Email Deluge and Declining Conversions

Inboxes exploded from the deluge of emails. Eventually, Google started throwing certain domains into spam. Whole cottage industries emerged just to warm emails to improve deliverability so companies could send more.

Conversion rates started declining.

But the pressure mounted. What did people do? More hands on deck. 5% closed won conversion last year, 1% conversion this year? No problem. Pump up the top of the funnel to sustain revenue growth.

If your job was on the line, why fix something that wasn't broken? Plus, who had the bandwidth to innovate when the existing system was barely afloat? Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Lots of hungry reps to feed right now. Where are all the MQLs, form fills, white papers, and link clicks? Because of the short time horizon of CROs, the whole go-to-market team needed to operate on a similar timescale.

The Pandemic's Impact on Business

Then 2020 ...

The pandemic changes everything.

It completely disrupts B2B SaaS marketing, in ways that are still being felt today.

And it all started with B2B SaaS buyers.

The Buyer's Evolution

Let's talk about what happened to the buyer.

Forget B2B SaaS products for a second. For the first time, during the pandemic, buyers were building entire teams without ever meeting face-to-face with their new hires.

As a result, B2B SaaS providers had to learn how to connect with buyers that were increasingly connecting with peers, potential clients, and sales teams entirely online.

The Rise of Digital Communities

Demand for community skyrocketed. Reddit, Discord, and Zoom engagement shot up. And in the wake of all this, professional communities like Pavilion started sprouting up everywhere. LinkedIn evolved into a real professional social network.

Suddenly, buyers, who in the past, would meet each other maybe once or twice a year at conferences to exchange ideas about B2B SaaS solutions, can poll thousands at a time, globally, for advice on whether to use Outreach or SalesLoft, Hubspot or Marketo in a single post, and get curated answers back within minutes.

Content Consumption

With social media engagement at an all-time high, consumption of marketing content like e-books, blog posts, podcasts, influencer endorsements, and peer reviews soared.

In 2020 alone, media uploads increased by 80% YoY, driven by an influx of social media marketing in the SaaS space. How-to videos, explainers, pre-recorded sales pitches: B2B buyers were absorbing it all.

The increase in content consumption meant that demand generation became a key factor in the B2B SaaS business model.

B2B Decision-Making

As well as consuming more and more content during the buying process, the way organizations decided on when and why to purchase a SaaS product also changed.

In particular, partnership programs - for example, Hubspot and Salesforce's app ecosystem - started gaining traction as a go-to-market channel, with buyers increasingly making purchase decisions from trusted B2B software vendors.

The Digital Transformation Paradox

Consequently, B2B SaaS underwent a digital transformation overnight.

The change was swift. But, ironically, as the world digitized, conventional SaaS metrics struggled to capture the evolving buying behavior.

Private Slack chats, influencer endorsements, or old-school phone calls - the funnel couldn't track these. The same large quantity of SaaS vendors still existed. It's just now the buyers could see them all a bit more clearly.

The Dark Funnel and Its Impact on B2B Marketing

In the past, companies could track customer interactions through traditional marketing automation platforms. However, with the rise of third-party marketing channels like podcasts, events, influencer marketing, and organic social media, companies are unable to track these interactions effectively. This lack of tracking has led to a major shift in the distribution of content and communication between companies and their customers.


image

(Image Source)‎

The software vendor landscape was vast, but now, buyers had a clearer view. The competition between vendors became fierce, with countless "Top X tools for Y" lists and regular Gartner and G2 matrices to guide buyers.

Still, the traditional sales and marketing model that drove buyers down the funnel persisted, even as it was seeing diminishing returns. A decade of conditioning led ingrained these large processes of generating Leads to MQLS to SQLs, as well as the people who maintained them.

The Informed Buyer

But here's the twist: Buyers were leveling up. They were more informed and more savvy. At least that's what they thought:

  • 70% of the buyer’s journey is done digitally before talking to a salesperson (Sirius Decisions)
  • 80% of B2B purchasers said that they would not even speak to a salesperson until they had done their own research (The Corporate Executive Board)
  • 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information from a series of articles versus an advertisement. (B2B PRSense)
  • 84% of B2B decision-makers begin their buying process with a referral. (Sales Benchmark Index)
  • 86 percent of buyers use peer review sites when buying software (G2)

The number of people in the SaaS solution buying committee was also becoming much larger. Each member has their own needs that must be met before the purchase can go through, so that means different messaging and timing for different personas.

It was like wringing water from a rock and suddenly finding yourself in a desert. That's okay because the VC well always had more rocks to pull from.

Navigating the New Demand Landscape

Post-pandemic, B2B SaaS companies faced a fresh challenge: the funding bubble began to deflate. Buyers tightened their belts. Sales quotas were missed.

Traditional methods seemed outdated in this new reality.

While many clung to old strategies, successful B2B SaaS organizations recognized the need for efficiency and adaptability. They shifted focus from lead generation to efficient demand capture and demand creation, emphasizing trust and authenticity in an informed buyer's world.

"How can I sell you something," no longer works. The approach must be proactive: "What does my customer need from me." Companies like Aligned have built the digital sales room to create better buying experiences.

In this evolving landscape, it's not about who spends the most - on sales teams, marketing campaigns, or SaaS tools - but who adapts the best.

Now that you're keyed up on the changes in the B2B market pre- and post-pandemic, read on for Part II, the future of account based marketing.

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Our Top 13 Demand Generation Tools For 2025

Our Top 13 Demand Generation Tools For 2025

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Alan Zhao

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. Warmly

Warmly (that’s us) offers the best demand generation tool on the market in 2025 with our signal-based revenue orchestration platform that provides a wide range of features designed to:

  • Capture warm leads that visited your website (first-party data).
  • Identify the hottest prospects from those visitors.
  • Automatically engage and nurture them, helping your sales reps to successfully convert them.

Let’s get a closer look at the functionality that makes Warmly an attractive option for sales teams looking for a complete demand generation solution: 👇

Feature #1: Identify Your Website Visitors

Warmly identifies companies and individuals visiting your website in real-time.

Since your website is one of the most important parts of your lead generation funnel, capturing and engaging all leads it generates is of pivotal importance if you’re looking to build a steady pipeline of warm leads.

All it takes is adding a snippet of Warmly’s code to your website to start revealing warm leads visiting it.

You can monitor your leads’ web sessions in real-time to see exactly how they interact with your website.

➡️ This can help you pinpoint whether your website is optimized for conversions or if it needs improvements.

But that’s not everything.

Every identified visitor will be enriched with granular B2B data, providing your sales team with all the information they need to:

  • Pinpoint leads that best fit your ICP.
  • Tailor their outreach to each lead for optimal results.

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The B2B prospect data Warmly reveals includes:

  • Company data (company name, location, size, etc.).
  • Technographics (software tools and technology the company predominantly uses).
  • Demographics (individual names, email addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, job roles, etc.).
  • CRM data (past interactions with your reps, former champions within that account, etc.). 

Feature #2: Reveal Buyer Intent 

While knowing who visits your website and gaining insight into relevant B2B information gives you a nice competitive advantage, I believe that it’s still not enough to ensure the best possible results from your sales efforts.

This is why Warmly tracks and captures buyer intent data, in addition to basic B2B data, enabling your sales reps to find which of your leads is most likely to convert now.

Warmly collects several types of intent signals:

  1. First-party intent: This includes intent signals leads left in your owned channels, such as website visits, the specific pages they visited, time spent on high-intent pages, recurring visits, etc.
  2. Second-party signals: These come from monitoring LinkedIn for things like job changes and openings, new funding rounds, etc.
  3. Third-party intent: This includes the intent signals your leads left across the web, such as web searches that include keywords relevant to your product, visits to competitors’ websites or interactions with their ads, etc.

Warmly provides a granular and comprehensive view of your leads’ buyer intent, enabling you to:

  • Score and qualify leads with greater precision.
  • Identify the highest-value leads among them.
  • Engage leads precisely when they’re most likely to convert, boosting your chances of success.

Feature #3: Automate Your Sales Process

In addition to helping your SDRs identify high-quality leads from the get-go, Warmly lets you leverage the intent signals it picks up to create comprehensive sales workflows.

It has several automation tools that let you set things like LinkedIn and email outreach or lead routing on autopilot.

Firstly, there’s the Orchestrator, which enables you to streamline LinkedIn and email outreach.

Here’s how it works:

  • Set up the action that triggers the automated sequence (e.g., a visitor matching your ICP lands on your website).
  • Define the criteria the prospects need to meet to be targeted (e.g., company size, industry, individual job role).
  • Specify the frequency at which you want the workflows to run and the maximum number of people targeted in a single account.
  • Decide what action you want the Orchestrator to take (e.g., sending a contextual email, personalized LinkedIn DM, or connection request).

The Orchestrator will then ensure that all the leads matching the criteria you defined are adequately engaged, taking notice that every email or message is personalized and contextual.

Learn more about how it works:

Secondly, there’s the AI Chat, Warmly’s AI-powered chatbot that engages with your prospects in real-time.

Warmly’s AI Chat can handle a wide range of actions, including:

  • Automatically engaging and qualifying leads.
  • Offering relevant collaterals.
  • Answering questions.
  • Booking meetings, etc.

The chatbot is powered by our tool’s generative AI, which can be trained to maintain a consistent brand tone across chats while ensuring that every interaction with each lead is contextual, relevant, and human-like. 

Finally, Warmly lets you automate lead routing, as your sales reps will be notified in Slack the second a high-intent lead or visitor matching your ICP lands on your website.

This significantly reduces the time to lead, improving your chances of converting them.

Feature #4: Live Engagement With Warm Video Chatting

Having the option to engage leads while their interest in your product is at its highest could be the make or break between converting them and losing them for good.

Warmly’s live video chat option was designed with this in mind, allowing sales reps to engage leads in live, one-to-one meetings while they’re still on your website.

When you go to the “Warm Call” section of Warmly’s dashboard, you’ll see a detailed overview of all your website visitors right now, with the option of monitoring each prospect’s website session and uncovering intent insights simply by clicking on their name.

Check it out here:


Once your sales reps assess that the time is right based on website session insights and other intent signals, they can easily initiate a call and do what they do best.

Feature #5: A Daily-Updated B2B Prospect Database: Coldly

Warmly lets you access Coldly, which is a database with 200M+ accounts and contacts that gives your sales team an excellent starting point for prospecting.

Coldly includes all the B2B data your sales reps need to make initial contact, including:

  • Validated emails.
  • Phone numbers.
  • LinkedIn profiles.

Our database also provides 25+ B2B filters and customizable data filters that you can set up, enabling your sales team to build highly targeted prospect lists in a few seconds.

Coldly also has a browser extension that lets you scrape essential B2B contact data from any source on the web, including LinkedIn profiles, company websites, etc.

This way, your team will have both accurate contact data at their fingertips and the right tools to pick up buyer intent signals and set up workflows on top of them.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly offers a freemium plan.

On it, you can:

  • Reveal up to 500 companies and individuals visiting your website (in addition to essential and accurate data on each lead).
  • Set up ICP filters to quickly identify high-quality leads. 
  • Automate basic lead routing.

If you need more, there are four paid plans to choose from:

  1. Micro: Starts at $333/month when billed annually and adds unlimited seats, 5,000 monthly visitors revealed, first-party intent signals, alerts, and access to Warmly’s extensive database of B2B contact data.
  2. Starter: Starts at $12,000/year, everything in Micro, plus 10,000 monthly visitors, third-party signals, AI Chat, and CRM syncs.
  3. Business: Starts at $19,000/year for up to 10,000 visitors or $28,000/year for up to 75,000 visitors, everything in Starter, plus second-party signals, sales orchestration, and lead routing.
  4. Enterprise: Starts at $30,000/year, lets you identify a custom number of visitors, includes everything in Business, plus custom signals and warm calling.

Pros & Cons

✅ Accurate website visitor identification at both company and individual levels.

✅ Reveals who your hottest leads are right now.

✅ Personalized lead generation and outreach workflows.

✅ Real-time monitoring of visitors’ web sessions with options to engage them via an AI chat or video call.

✅ Transparent pricing model – even at the Business plan level.

✅ Good range of integrations.

❌ You'd have to be on the Enterprise plan to access Warm Calling.

2. Positional 

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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.

3. Letterdrop

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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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

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. 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.

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How to Enhance Your B2B Sales With an Inbound Sales Representative

How to Enhance Your B2B Sales With an Inbound Sales Representative

Time to read

Maximus Greenwald

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.

27 Inbound Marketing Tools To Drive More Warm Leads

27 Inbound Marketing Tools To Drive More Warm Leads

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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 

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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 

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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.

A Complete Guide to Account-Based Selling in 2024

A Complete Guide to Account-Based Selling in 2024

Time to read

Keegan Otter

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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

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‎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.

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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.

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‎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.

How to Develop An Effective Account Based Marketing Funnel

How to Develop An Effective Account Based Marketing Funnel

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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.

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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.  

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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. 

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(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.

Unlocking Revenue: A Guide to Social Selling the Inbound Way for Sales Reps and Media Marketing Professionals

Unlocking Revenue: A Guide to Social Selling the Inbound Way for Sales Reps and Media Marketing Professionals

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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: 

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

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. 

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So, how do you begin social selling and do it well? And how can it bolster your traditional inbound marketing strategies? 

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:

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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.

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  • 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:

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Or

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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: 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

Unmasking the Invisible: How to Identify Anonymous Website Visitors to Boost B2B Conversion Rates

Unmasking the Invisible: How to Identify Anonymous Website Visitors to Boost B2B Conversion Rates

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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

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‎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.

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Image Source: Statista


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.

8 Clearbit Competitors & Alternatives in 2025 [Reviewed]

8 Clearbit Competitors & Alternatives in 2025 [Reviewed]

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Clearbit used to be one of the biggest and most respected names out there when it comes to quality B2B data - until they got acquired by HubSpot and became Breeze Intelligence.

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.

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.

Top 8 Clearbit Competitors and Alternatives In 2025


1. Warmly

Warmly offers the best alternative to Clearbit (now Breeze Intelligence) in 2025 with our signal-based revenue orchestration platform that provides a wide range of features designed to:

  • Capture warm leads that visited your website (first-party data).
  • Identify the hottest prospects from those visitors.
  • Automatically engage and nurture them, helping your sales reps to successfully convert them.

Let’s get a closer look at the functionality that makes Warmly an attractive option for sales teams: 👇

Feature #1: Identify Your Website Visitors

Similarly to Clearbit, Warmly identifies companies and individuals visiting your website in real-time.

Since your website is one of the most important parts of your lead generation funnel, capturing and engaging all leads it generates is of pivotal importance if you’re looking to build a steady pipeline of warm leads.

All it takes is adding a snippet of Warmly’s code to your website to start revealing warm leads visiting it.

You can monitor your leads’ web sessions in real-time to see exactly how they interact with your website.

➡️ This can help you pinpoint whether your website is optimized for conversions or if it needs improvements.

But that’s not everything.

Every identified visitor will be enriched with granular B2B data, providing your sales team with all the information they need to:

  • Pinpoint leads that best fit your ICP.
  • Tailor their outreach to each lead for optimal results.

The B2B prospect data Warmly reveals includes:

  • Company data (company name, location, size, etc.).
  • Technographics (software tools and technology the company predominantly uses).
  • Demographics (individual names, email addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, job roles, etc.).
  • CRM data (past interactions with your reps, former champions within that account, etc.). 

Feature #2: Reveal Buyer Intent 

While knowing who visits your website and gaining insight into relevant B2B information gives you a nice competitive advantage, I believe that it’s still not enough to ensure the best possible results from your sales efforts.

This is why Warmly tracks and captures buyer intent data, in addition to basic B2B data, enabling your sales reps to find which of your leads is most likely to convert now.

Warmly collects several types of intent signals:

  1. First-party intent: This includes intent signals leads left in your owned channels, such as website visits, the specific pages they visited, time spent on high-intent pages, recurring visits, etc.
  2. Second-party signals: These come from monitoring LinkedIn for things like job changes and openings, new funding rounds, etc.
  3. Third-party intent: This includes the intent signals your leads left across the web, such as web searches that include keywords relevant to your product, visits to competitors’ websites or interactions with their ads, etc.

Warmly provides a granular and comprehensive view of your leads’ buyer intent, enabling you to:

  • Score and qualify leads with greater precision.
  • Identify the highest-value leads among them.
  • Engage leads precisely when they’re most likely to convert, boosting your chances of success.

Feature #3: Automate Your Sales Process

In addition to helping your SDRs identify high-quality leads from the get-go, Warmly lets you leverage the intent signals it picks up to create comprehensive sales workflows.

It has several automation tools that let you set things like LinkedIn and email outreach or lead routing on autopilot.

Firstly, there’s the Orchestrator, which enables you to streamline LinkedIn and email outreach.

Here’s how it works:

  • Set up the action that triggers the automated sequence (e.g., a visitor matching your ICP lands on your website).
  • Define the criteria the prospects need to meet to be targeted (e.g., company size, industry, individual job role).
  • Specify the frequency at which you want the workflows to run and the maximum number of people targeted in a single account.
  • Decide what action you want the Orchestrator to take (e.g., sending a contextual email, personalized LinkedIn DM, or connection request).

The Orchestrator will then ensure that all the leads matching the criteria you defined are adequately engaged, taking notice that every email or message is personalized and contextual.

Learn more about how it works:

Secondly, there’s the AI Chat, Warmly’s AI-powered chatbot that engages with your prospects in real-time.

Warmly’s AI Chat can handle a wide range of actions, including:

  • Automatically engaging and qualifying leads.
  • Offering relevant collaterals.
  • Answering questions.
  • Booking meetings, etc.

The chatbot is powered by our tool’s generative AI, which can be trained to maintain a consistent brand tone across chats while ensuring that every interaction with each lead is contextual, relevant, and human-like. 

Finally, Warmly lets you automate lead routing, as your sales reps will be notified in Slack the second a high-intent lead or visitor matching your ICP lands on your website.

This significantly reduces the time to lead, improving your chances of converting them.

Feature #4: Live Engagement With Warm Video Chatting

Having the option to engage leads while their interest in your product is at its highest could be the make or break between converting them and losing them for good.

Warmly’s live video chat option was designed with this in mind, allowing sales reps to engage leads in live, one-to-one meetings while they’re still on your website.

When you go to the “Warm Call” section of Warmly’s dashboard, you’ll see a detailed overview of all your website visitors right now, with the option of monitoring each prospect’s website session and uncovering intent insights simply by clicking on their name.

Once your sales reps assess that the time is right based on website session insights and other intent signals, they can easily initiate a call and do what they do best.

Feature #5: A Daily-Updated B2B Prospect Database: Coldly

Warmly lets you access Coldly, which is a database with 200M+ accounts and contacts that gives your sales team an excellent starting point for prospecting.

Coldly includes all the B2B data your sales reps need to make initial contact, including:

  • Validated emails.
  • Phone numbers.
  • LinkedIn profiles.

Our database also provides 25+ B2B filters and customizable data filters that you can set up, enabling your sales team to build highly targeted prospect lists in a few seconds.

Coldly also has a browser extension that lets you scrape essential B2B contact data from any source on the web, including LinkedIn profiles, company websites, etc.

This way, your team will have both accurate contact data at their fingertips and the right tools to pick up buyer intent signals and set up workflows on top of them.

Warmly Pricing

Similar to Clearbit, Warmly offers a freemium plan.

On it, you can:

  • Reveal up to 500 companies and individuals visiting your website (in addition to essential and accurate data on each lead).
  • Set up ICP filters to quickly identify high-quality leads. 
  • Automate basic lead routing.

If you need more, there are four paid plans to choose from:

  1. Micro: Starts at $333/month when billed annually and adds unlimited seats, 5,000 monthly visitors revealed, first-party intent signals, alerts, and access to Warmly’s extensive database of B2B contact data.
  2. Starter: Starts at $12,000/year, everything in Micro, plus 10,000 monthly visitors, third-party signals, AI Chat, and CRM syncs.
  3. Business: Starts at $19,000/year for up to 10,000 visitors or $28,000/year for up to 75,000 visitors, everything in Starter, plus second-party signals, sales orchestration, and lead routing.
  4. Enterprise: Starts at $30,000/year, lets you identify a custom number of visitors, includes everything in Business, plus custom signals and warm calling.

Pros & Cons

✅ Accurate website visitor identification at both company and individual levels.

✅ Reveals who your hottest leads are right now.

✅ Personalized lead generation and outreach workflows.

✅ Real-time monitoring of visitors’ web sessions with options to engage them via an AI chat or video call.

✅ Transparent pricing model – even at the Business plan level.

✅ Good range of integrations.

❌ You'd have to be on Warmly's Enterprise plan to access Warm Calling.


2. 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.


3. 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 (Warmly uses 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.


4. 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).


5. 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.


6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

Find Out Who Your Warmest Leads Are With Warmly & Engage Them

While Clearbit (now Breeze Intelligence) provides a solid range of features for sales teams using HubSpot, especially those looking for a good B2B prospecting platform, the platform’s data reliability is still under question and lacks integrations with non-HubSpot products.

The platform’s capabilities of detecting buyer intent on your website at the contact level are also significantly limited compared to Warmly's.

With Warmly, all that changes.

Our revenue orchestration solution enables you to identify website visitors, detect the hottest leads among them, and engage them via automated outreach sequences perfectly tailored to each lead.

Want to know for sure if Warmly is a good match for your sales team?

Try Warmly for free and start building a steady, warm pipeline in minutes.

Or, book a demo with our team for a personalized tour of all of Warmly’s capabilities.

Read More

Best 11 Website Visitor Identification Software in 2025

Best 11 Website Visitor Identification Software in 2025

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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 website 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? 

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.

What Are The Best Website Visitor Identification Software?

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1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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 Cost

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.

11. 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.

Related reading:

Zoominfo Pricing Guide for 2024: Is It Worth It?

9 Best Lead Forensics Alternatives 

Clearbit Alternatives & Competitors in 2025

6sense Alternatives & Competitors in 2025

Zoominfo Alternatives & Competitors in 2025

Must-Have GTM Tools for Every Sales Team

Content Marketing and SEO: A Dynamic Duo for Sales Growth

Content Marketing and SEO: A Dynamic Duo for Sales Growth

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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:

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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.

Best Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives for Maximum Lead Generation in 2025

Best Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives for Maximum Lead Generation in 2025

Time to read

Alan Zhao

2023 and 2024 were years 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 CRM20 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 2025.

Here is our round-up of the best Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives for Visitor Intelligence in 2025.

7 Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives for Maximum Lead Generation in 2025

  • Warmly – Best for AI Sales Orchestration.
  • 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 – Best for Beginners.

Warmly

Warmly (that’s us) offers the best alternative to Leadfeeder in 2025 with our signal-based revenue orchestration platform that provides a wide range of features designed to:

  • Capture warm leads that visited your website (first-party data).
  • Identify the hottest prospects from those visitors.
  • Automatically engage and nurture them, helping your sales reps to successfully convert them.

Let’s get a closer look at the functionality that makes Warmly an attractive for sales teams looking for a Leadfeeder alternative: 👇

Feature #1: Identify Your Website Visitors

Warmly identifies companies and individuals visiting your website in real-time.

Since your site is one of the most important parts of your lead generation funnel, capturing and engaging all leads it generates is of pivotal importance if you’re looking to build a steady pipeline of warm leads.

All it takes is adding a snippet of Warmly’s code to your website to start revealing warm leads visiting it.

You can monitor your leads’ web sessions in real-time to see exactly how they interact with your website.

➡️ This can help you pinpoint whether your website is optimized for conversions or if it needs improvements.

But that’s not everything.

Every identified prospect will be enriched with our platform's granular B2B data, providing your sales team with all the information they need to:

  • Pinpoint leads that best fit your ICP.
  • Tailor their outreach to each lead for optimal results.

The B2B prospect data Warmly reveals includes:

  • Company data (company name, location, size, etc.).
  • Technographics (software tools and technology the company predominantly uses).
  • Demographics (individual names, email addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, job roles, etc.).
  • CRM data (past interactions with your reps, former champions within that account, etc.). 

Feature #2: Reveal Buyer Intent 

While knowing who visits your website and gaining insight into relevant B2B information gives you a nice competitive advantage, I believe that it’s still not enough to ensure the best possible results from your sales efforts.

This is why Warmly tracks and captures buyer intent data, in addition to basic B2B data, enabling your sales reps to find which of your leads is most likely to convert now.

Warmly collects several types of intent signals:

  1. First-party intent: This includes intent signals leads left in your owned channels, such as website visits, the specific pages they visited, time spent on high-intent pages, recurring visits, etc.
  2. Second-party signals: These come from monitoring LinkedIn for things like job changes and openings, new funding rounds, etc.
  3. Third-party intent: This includes the intent signals your leads left across the web, such as web searches that include keywords relevant to your product, visits to competitors’ websites or interactions with their ads, etc.

Warmly provides a granular and comprehensive view of your leads’ buyer intent, enabling you to:

  • Score and qualify leads with greater precision.
  • Identify the highest-value leads among them.
  • Engage leads precisely when they’re most likely to convert, boosting your chances of success.

Feature #3: Automate Your Sales Process

In addition to helping your SDRs identify high-quality leads from the get-go, Warmly lets you leverage the intent signals it picks up to create comprehensive sales workflows.

It has several automation tools that let you set things like LinkedIn and email outreach or lead routing on autopilot.

Firstly, there’s the Orchestrator, which enables you to streamline LinkedIn and email outreach.

Here’s how it works:

  • Set up the action that triggers the automated sequence (e.g., a visitor matching your ICP lands on your website).
  • Define the criteria the prospects need to meet to be targeted (e.g., company size, industry, individual job role).
  • Specify the frequency at which you want the workflows to run and the maximum number of people targeted in a single account.
  • Decide what action you want the Orchestrator to take (e.g., sending a contextual email, personalized LinkedIn DM, or connection request).

Warmly's Orchestrator will then ensure that all the leads matching the criteria you defined are adequately engaged, taking notice that every email or message is personalized and contextual.

Learn more about how it works:

Secondly, there’s the AI Chat, Warmly’s AI-powered chatbot that engages with your prospects in real-time.

Warmly’s AI Chat can handle a wide range of actions, including:

  • Automatically engaging and qualifying leads.
  • Offering relevant collaterals.
  • Answering questions.
  • Booking meetings, etc.

The AI-powered chatbot is powered by our tool’s generative AI, which can be trained to maintain a consistent brand tone across chats while ensuring that every interaction with each lead is contextual, relevant, and human-like. 

Finally, Warmly lets you automate lead routing, as your sales reps will be notified in Slack the second a high-intent lead or visitor matching your ICP lands on your website.

This significantly reduces the time to lead, improving your chances of converting them.

Feature #4: Live Engagement With Warm Video Chatting

Having the option to engage leads while their interest in your product is at its highest could be the make or break between converting them and losing them for good.

Warmly’s live video chat option was designed with this in mind, allowing sales reps to engage leads in live, one-to-one meetings while they’re still on your website.

When you go to the “Warm Call” section of Warmly’s dashboard, you’ll see a detailed overview of all your website visitors right now, with the option of monitoring each prospect’s website session and uncovering intent insights simply by clicking on their name.

Once your sales reps assess that the time is right based on website session insights and other intent signals, they can easily initiate a call and do what they do best - coax leads into conversion.

Feature #5: A Daily-Updated B2B Prospect Database: Coldly

Warmly lets you access Coldly, which is a database with 200M+ accounts and contacts that gives your sales team an excellent starting point for prospecting.

Coldly includes all the B2B data your sales reps need to make initial contact, including:

  • Validated emails.
  • Phone numbers.
  • LinkedIn profiles.

Our database also provides 25+ B2B filters and customizable data filters that you can set up, enabling your sales team to build highly targeted prospect lists in a few seconds.

Coldly also has a browser extension that lets you scrape essential B2B contact data from any source on the web, including LinkedIn profiles, company websites, etc.

This way, your team will have both accurate contact data at their fingertips and the right tools to pick up buyer intent signals and set up workflows on top of them.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly offers a free plan.

On it, you can:

  • Reveal up to 500 companies and individuals visiting your website (in addition to essential and accurate data on each lead).
  • Set up ICP filters to quickly identify high-quality leads. 
  • Automate basic lead routing.

If you need more, there are four paid plans to choose from:

  1. Micro: Starts at $333/month when billed annually and adds unlimited seats, 5,000 monthly visitors revealed, first-party intent signals, alerts, and access to Warmly’s extensive database of B2B contact data.
  2. Starter: Starts at $12,000/year, everything in Micro, plus 10,000 monthly visitors, third-party signals, AI Chat, and CRM syncs.
  3. Business: Starts at $19,000/year for up to 10,000 visitors or $28,000/year for up to 75,000 visitors, everything in Starter, plus second-party signals, sales orchestration, and lead routing.
  4. Enterprise: Starts at $30,000/year, lets you identify a custom number of visitors, includes everything in Business, plus custom signals and warm calling.

Pros & Cons

✅ Accurate website visitor identification at both company and individual levels.

✅ Reveals who your hottest leads are right now.

✅ Personalized lead generation and outreach workflows.

✅ Real-time monitoring of visitors’ web sessions with options to engage them via an AI chat or video call.

✅ Transparent pricing model – even at the Business plan level.

✅ Good range of integrations.

❌ You'd have to be on the Enterprise plan to access Warm Calling.

Clearbit – Best for Developers & Budget Users

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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.

The platform 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

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‎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

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‎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

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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

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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

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‎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

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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

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‎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

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‎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

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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

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‎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

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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.

Find out who is on your website and engage them in real-time with Warmly

With Leadfeeder and its alternatives, companies will often have problems like limited identification functionalities, an expensive pricing model, and limited free usage.

But what if we tell you there’s a platform that can minimize these drawbacks to a minimum while providing you with fast ROI?

Warmly gives you information about all the prospects that come to your website and helps you nurture and convert them into paying customers.

When the data comes from your own website, the possibility of it being wrong is comparatively less.

But Warmly is not a platform that just reveals anonymous website visitors or provides access to leads to go after. 

Our revenue orchestration platform does much more:

  • Website Intent Signals: You can identify potential buyers by tracking their interactions with your website and get insights into their interest level, allowing for timely and targeted outreach.
  • Coldly Contact Database: Access a wide range of accurate prospect contact details directly from the Coldly database, helping you reach out to the right people.
  • Meeting Scheduling: Simplify your meeting process with automatic scheduling that removes the back-and-forth, ensuring a frictionless booking experience.
  • Inbound Chat: Engage website visitors in real-time with intelligent chat features designed to convert inbound traffic into meaningful leads.
  • The ability to send leads to the right salesperson automatically and notify them via Slack with a high-intent lead is active on your website.
  • A Bombora integration that helps you proactively reach out to your warm leads and track who’s researching terms relevant to your product and brand and get in front of them before your competitors do.
  • AI Prospector: Automate the search for high-potential prospects using AI-driven technology, ensuring your sales team focuses on the right opportunities.

You can sign up for Warmly’s free plan and discover firsthand how it can fill your pipeline with qualified leads, or book a live demo to see it in action first.

6 Tangible Benefits of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

6 Tangible Benefits of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Time to read

Alan Zhao

It wasn’t all that long ago that account-based marketing was a fairly obscure approach practiced only by enterprise sales teams targeting whales at other equally large companies.

Today, account-based marketing (ABM) is a widely accepted practice and one that’s used not only by enterprise-level companies but also by mid-sized and small businesses alike.

The thing with ABM is that it's not exactly something you can just tip a toe in like you can with something like digital advertising or outbound email.

To be successful with account-based marketing, you need to go all in, which means you’ll need buy-in from every stakeholder on your leadership time.

And, naturally, they’ll all ask the same thing before signing off:

What are the benefits of account-based marketing?

That’s the exact question we are going to answer in this guide, diving deep into the six important and tangible benefits of running an ABM playbook:

1. Aligns sales and marketing toward a common goal 

The tension between sales and marketing teams is a thing of legend.

It's kind of weird when you think about it. Both teams are, in the end, working toward the goal of closing more customers.

There really shouldn’t be any turbulence here. 

But there often is, and that generally comes from a disconnection between the two teams that work in siloes and only on part of the problem.

The sales and marketing problem

Marketing works to attract new prospects to the company and capture leads. Sales then takes those leads and tries to convert them into customers.

And that’s where the issue emerges.

Sales blames marketing for poor quality leads. Marketing blames sales for not doing enough with the leads they’ve generated.

But with an account-based marketing approach, this divide disappears.

The ABM solution

In ABM, you choose the accounts you go after. There is no “lead generation” in the traditional sense, as you define from the get-go who your target audience is going to be.

Then, sales and marketing must collaborate to attract and close deals. There is no “marketing to sales handoff.”

In the early stages of an ABM playbook, marketing might run personalized digital ads, while sales executes outreach via email and LinkedIn. 

Further down the sales funnel, the sales team might be engaging in demos and presentations while marketing supplements with additional educational email content.

Members from each team work in parallel rather than in series, and they work together toward the same goal: closing target accounts.

In fact, the alignment between sales and marketing that ABM brings is so strong that some organizations forgo the distinction altogether and merge the two departments into one GTM (go-to market) team:


         

(Image Source)

2. Allows for a more focused use of resources 

One of the biggest problems with the traditional marketing model is that your use of resources is relatively unfocused.

Sure, you have a defined target audience and ICPs (ideal customer profiles) that you’re going after. But the truth is that beyond that, your “targeting” is incredibly broad.

Most of the people your ad campaigns, emails, and content marketing efforts get in front of aren’t in the market to buy right now, even if they fit your customer persona.

Worse, you don’t even know if you’re getting in front of the decision-maker.

Consider, for example, a prospect coming across a blog post you’ve written and then promoted on social media.

That prospect signs up for a sales demo—great news, a warm lead.

But after going through the whole presentation, your salesperson learns that they don’t actually have the authority to buy, and so the whole process needs to happen again with the decision-maker.

Account-based marketing flips this on its head.

Finding KDMs from day one

You know who the key decision makers (KDMs) are in a given organization because you’ve used a tool like Warmly or Demandbase to pull account-level data and build a list of multiple stakeholders that might be involved in the deal. 

Then, your ABM efforts (be they personalized marketing outreach via LinkedIn InMail or a series of ads via your marketing automation platform) go out to those prospects specifically.

All of this means that every dollar you spend on account-based marketing strategies is incredibly focused and spent only on the specific accounts that you want to start a conversation with.

3. Opens up a world of personalization 

One of the biggest benefits of ABM campaigns as a B2B marketing strategy is that you can run incredibly personalized campaigns.

We’re not talking about using the prospect’s name in your email campaigns here.

We’re talking:

  • Using advanced marketing tools to deliver personalized ads across multiple platforms
  • Target multiple stakeholders at the same time with a personalized and role-based email copy
  • Using unconventional tactics like direct mail and personalized gifting to attract attention

Here’s an extreme example to illustrate my point.

When software design firm Intridea targeted Ogilvy as a key account in their account-based marketing campaign, they went as far as uncovering the daily commute of the decision-maker at their soon-to-be new customer and ran a custom billboard on the side of the street.


         

(Image Source)

4. Creates a more customer-centric experience 

A well-executed ABM approach almost always leads to an enhanced customer experience when compared with a traditional marketing playbook.

In the traditional marketing approach, every customer sees the same marketing programs and tactics.

Sure, the content they see might be tailored to their current stage in the customer journey, but it's very rarely personalized to them specifically.

But an ABM experience is all about that specific customer and is customized to individual accounts.

As a prospect, all of the content you engage with is personalized to your company and even to you and your role. 

And when you speak to a member of the sales team, they aren’t giving you a blank slate templated pitch. They know who you are, and what success means for you in your role and at your company, and will deliver a tailored pitch that speaks exactly to those needs.

It also blends seamlessly with an omnichannel approach, where you’re targeting multiple stakeholders in the buying committee with the right messaging at the right time via the right channel.

That's critical because these days, there are more stakeholders than ever before, so the complexity of the deal has increased exponentially.

You need solutions that give you signals as to who’s hot and warm in the committee and when they are thinking about you to know when and how to engage.

This customer-centric approach ultimately leads to more effective campaigns that close faster. Speaking of which… 

5. Can lead to shorter sales cycles 

Many advocates of an ABM process claim that it has helped them achieve a shorter sales cycle.


         

(Image Source)

This is going to be true in many cases, though we should be careful to say that there are a number of different variables here.

The target audience you’re going after has a huge impact. 

Enterprise companies (who are more commonly the target of ABM campaigns) close slower than mid-sized organizations, as they often have large and elaborate buying committees.

Your sales process itself also has some cards to play here, as do the specific account-based marketing activities you choose to engage in.

On the whole, however, if you:

  1. Define your ideal customer profile correctly
  2. Build realistic account lists with accurate account data
  3. Supplement that with third-party buying intent data
  4. Execute well-timed and personalized ABM tactics that speak to ICP needs

You should see shorter sales cycles from ABM compared to what you would otherwise see from a non-account-based approach. 

6. Sets you up for long-term customer relationships 

Perhaps the most important of the six account-based marketing benefits discussed here is the fact that you’re building stronger relationships than you would be with a traditional motion.

In a traditional marketing model, a given prospect isn’t considered a customer until you actually close the deal. Up until then, they’re just a lead.

This inevitably frames all discussions up until contracting as sales conversations. 

An ABM motion, on the other hand, doesn’t really use the lead/customer division; they’re considered an account from the beginning.

And because all of your marketing and sales activities are personalized to that specific account, you’re essentially using that as the starting point of your relationship-building efforts.

This relationship is then transferred over to the customer success manager (or key accounts manager, depending on your chosen nomenclature). Their job is to nurture and grow the customer relationship rather than create it, which ultimately has a positive impact on customer retention rates.

This distinction is why many account-based marketing teams choose to take a land-and-expand approach.

The land and expand model

The idea with land-and-expand is that your initial sales efforts aren’t about closing the biggest deal possible. They’re just about getting a foot in the door.

You might sell your lowest-value product or most commonly used feature and narrow in on that to get a relationship established and a deal closed.

Then, your CSM looks for opportunities to upsell to a more robust plan or cross-sell additional features as the relationship flourishes, the trust your client has for you grows, and they begin to see value from using your product.

This is a fantastic tactic to add to your startup sales playbook, as it means you can get a door opened with just a single product or even an MVP and expand revenue from there.

Account-based orchestration: Moving beyond ABM 

Account-based marketing clearly offers a number of important benefits.

Most importantly, being a personalized approach, a successful ABM strategy ultimately leads to higher ROI and stronger customer relationships than a traditional marketing motion.

While we’re fans of ABM programs in general—as compared to a more traditional alternative—we also believe there’s a better way, one which we call account-based orchestration.

Account-based orchestration takes an ABM campaign to the next level and encompasses a more holistic approach that aligns both marketing and sales efforts. 


         

(Image Source)

It incorporates various technologies (many of which are ABM tools), data-driven insights, and a heavy dose of AI and automation to execute at scale without needing a huge team.

Read more: The Rise of Account-Based Orchestration in the Age of AI and Automation.

We built Warmly to help small and medium-sized organizations access account-based orchestration on an SME budget, combining the best of advanced AI and best-in-class data with well-timed human intervention.

With Warmly, you can:

What’s best about Warmly?

You can get started for free, right now, without speaking to a sales rep or getting thrown into a sales funnel. 

Get set up with Warmly today, and start seeing ROI in minutes.

Learn how Behavioral Signals tripled their enterprise sales pipeline in just one month using Warmly:

How Behavioral Signals sourced $7M in enterprise pipeline since using Warmly.

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Alan Zhao
Head of Marketing
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