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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.


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.


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).

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.

image

(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.


image

(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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7 SaaS Lead Generation Strategies to Use in 2024

7 SaaS Lead Generation Strategies to Use in 2024

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Alan Zhao

If you’re running a SaaS company, one of the first things you need to focus on is SaaS lead generation.

After all, no SaaS business can be successful without high-quality, high-potential leads, as they’re key to growing revenue year after year.

In this guide, we’ll dive into all the SaaS lead generation essentials, including all the important definitions, tips, and the 7 tested and tried SaaS lead generation strategies that are sure to help your business thrive.

TL;DR

  • SaaS lead generation is the process of attracting and identifying potential customers for SaaS products or services.
  • The main difference from traditional lead generation lies primarily in the fact that SaaS lead generation is conducted entirely via digital channels, from lead identification and scoring to engagement and conversion, which creates several other differences.
  • B2B and B2C lead generation strategies have similarities but are also widely different in terms of marketing focus, sales cycle length, and target audience size.
  • Best SaaS lead generation strategies include content marketing, SEO, PPC, social media marketing, free trials, automated outreach, and website optimization.
  • To run an efficient SaaS lead generation process, you should:
  • Define your ICP.
  • Choose the main SaaS lead generation channels.
  • Implement lead capture systems.
  • Engage with leads across channels.
  • Monitor and analyze campaigns.

How is SaaS lead generation different than traditional lead generation?

In simple terms, SaaS lead generation is the process of attracting, identifying, nurturing, and converting potential customers specifically for SaaS products or services.

Since SaaS products and services are digital, it’s no wonder SaaS lead generation is also tied to the digital sphere. As a result, you must rely on the web and other software solutions for every step of the process.

Additionally, the entire sales cycle is much longer regarding SaaS products. Building strong, long-term relationships with SaaS leads takes time, which is necessary as SaaS products generally rely on a subscription payment model.

So, when it comes to the key differences between SaaS and traditional lead generation, several stand out the most, including:

Digital and online focus

SaaS lead generation exclusively relies on digital marketing channels such as content marketing, SEO, PPC advertising, social media marketing, and email campaigns. 

On the other hand, traditional lead generation can use digital and physical tactics, such as cold calling, traditional advertising, face-to-face customer interactions, etc.

Subscription model

SaaS products typically operate on a subscription basis, where customers pay a recurring fee for access to the software. 

This affects the lead generation strategy, as the focus is on acquiring leads more likely to become long-term subscribers than one-time buyers. 

As a result, the entire lead generation and nurturing process is longer and requires different strategies than with traditional lead generation efforts.

Free trials and freemiums 

Another key difference between SaaS lead generation and traditional lead generation is their specific approaches to attracting potential customers.

SaaS companies often offer free trials or freemium versions of their products to spark leads’ interest and incentivize them to convert to paying customers. 

This means that leads can test a software product firsthand for a limited period or with limited access to its features instead of relying on demos or sales calls, which encourages continuous user engagement and product adoption.

Although this approach takes more time and won’t get you an ROI as quickly as simply selling a product from the get-go, it can certainly pay in the long run, as providing users with an immersive product experience can help convert them into recurring customers.

Lead nurturing

Given the longer sales cycle and subscription-based revenue model of SaaS, lead nurturing becomes crucial, as you’re looking to generate long-term paying customers.

Building that kind of trust and loyalty is no easy task, as you have to continuously educate leads about your solution and how it addresses their pain points, personalize their experiences every step of the way, be sure to listen to their feedback, etc.

Traditional lead generation, on the other hand, can be focused both on building long-term relationships or one-off sales, allowing for more flexibility in how you approach leads.

B2B SaaS lead generation vs B2C lead generation

‎The key difference between B2B and B2C SaaS lead generation is the target audience.

B2B SaaS lead generation efforts are focused on other businesses. 

However, since you can’t engage and convert an actual company, your leads will actually be the people representing these businesses, i.e., decision-makers or key stakeholders within organizations. 

In contrast, B2C SaaS lead generation targets individual consumers looking for software products for personal use or small-scale applications.

This difference in target audiences and decision-makers accounts for several other important differences, such as:

Size of your target audience

In B2C lead generation, you focus on individuals of various profiles, meaning your lead pool is much wider than in B2B lead generation.

For instance, if you build a mobile app for editing photos, your product can be used by amateurs and professional photographers, social media influencers, and average Joes who just want to play a bit with photo editing.

On the other hand, B2B lead generation is limited by the nature of the offering and the number of businesses that might be interested in it.

Namely, many B2B products are industry-specific, meaning they’re a match only for businesses within that vertical. Moreover, B2B products require bigger investments, further reducing the number of potential customers.

Finally, there are fewer businesses than individual customers, which also affects the size of your target audience.

Length of the sales cycle

B2B sales processes are typically longer because multiple decision-makers are involved. 

This means you’ll have to be ready to invest more time and effort into attracting and nurturing leads while taking a more professional approach to attracting and communicating with them.

Conversely, B2C sales processes are usually much quicker as you depend only on one decision-maker - the potential customer - and individual decisions are always faster and easier to make.

As a result, the entire process of attracting and converting these leads is more straightforward and allows for taking a more casual approach, as we’ll see below.

Marketing focus and strategies

Since B2B SaaS lead generation focuses on other businesses, it employs specific strategies designed to attract and convert companies.

These include:

  • ABM marketing that targets specific companies and stakeholders within them with personalized messaging.
  • LinkedIn outreach and advertising for networking with key stakeholders.
  • Creating industry-specific content that positions you as a thought leader.
  • Participating in or organizing industry conferences and similar events to increase brand visibility and connect with decision-makers.

Moreover, when dealing with businesses, your entire brand messaging and content have to be professional and appeal to the practical side of things (i.e., emphasize ROI potential, improvement in business efficiency, etc.).

B2C SaaS lead generation typically relies on other strategies to generate high-quality leads, such as:

  • Social media that entails using popular platforms to reach individual users with targeted ads, promotions, and relevant posts.
  • Content marketing, which includes creating engaging content like blogs, videos, tutorials, etc.
  • Influencer marketing that leverages the popularity of an influencer, blogger, gamer, etc., to promote a SaaS product to their audience

All these strategies have some common traits, as they all emphasize personal satisfaction and individual value. 

As a result, brand messaging and content appeal to emotions much more than in B2B lead generation and are more personal.

Note: B2B lead generation can include some B2C strategies and vice versa. However, some methods are more common in B2B or B2C, which is why we categorized them like this.

What are the different types of SaaS leads?

Before we dive into the 8 best SaaS lead generation strategies, let’s quickly clarify what types of SaaS leads exist.

They can be separated into 4 key categories:

  1. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) - Leads who have engaged with your marketing efforts to an extent that suggests they are likely to be interested in your product. They have shown interest through activities like downloading content, attending webinars, or signing up for a newsletter. They’re probably not ready to purchase, meaning that further nurturing is necessary.
  2. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) - Sales qualified leads are leads who have demonstrated a higher level of interest and have the potential to convert into paying customers. They have a specific problem or need that your product can cater to and may have had initial product demos or sales chats. They’re ready for direct engagement with sales and are close to converting.
  3. Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) - Leads that have used the product (often through a free trial or freemium) and shown behavior that indicates they are likely to convert to a paying customer, such as actively using the product, continuing to engage with it, etc.
  4. Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQLs) - Existing customers who express interest in additional products or upgrades. They are already familiar with your brand and have had a positive experience. Ideal for upselling or cross-selling.

SaaS lead generation strategies

When doing SaaS lead generation, there are several strategies you shouldn’t miss out on, regardless of your industry, size, and target audience

1. Content marketing 

Content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a clearly defined audience. 

For SaaS companies, content marketing aims to educate potential customers, address their pain points, and build trust in order to guide them through the sales funnel and convert them into subscribers.

There are various content types you can use to generate leads, depending on your product or service, niche, target audience, etc., including:

  • Blog posts.
  • Case studies.
  • How-to videos.
  • eBooks.

Source

Pro tip: Use gated content to capture leads. Choose the most valuable resources most likely to incentivize leads to provide their information in exchange for access, such as templates, industry reports, detailed guides, etc.

Source

Pros & Cons

✅ Cost-effective, as you don’t need a big budget to pull it off.

✅ Generates organic traffic, as optimized content can improve your SERP rankings and drive quality traffic to your website.

✅ Builds trust and authority, positioning your brand as a source of truth.

❌ Takes time to generate results. Think of it as a marathon more than a sprint.

❌ Highly competitive landscape, as everyone is generating some kind of content.

2. SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy focused on improving a website's visibility in search engine results pages. 

The goal is to attract organic traffic by optimizing website content and structure to rank higher for relevant search queries. 

For SaaS companies, SEO is a crucial strategy for increasing brand awareness and driving traffic consisting of high-quality leads.

It includes various tactics, such as:

  • Ensuring that your content and website include relevant keywords and have a structure that makes them readable and appealing (e.g., using appropriate headers, meta descriptions, title tags, etc.).
  • Internal linking.
  • Optimizing your website’s loading speed on computers and mobile devices.
  • Backlink building, etc.

Source

Pros & Cons

✅ Enhanced user experience across devices.

✅ Increased organic traffic, better domain rating, and visibility.

✅ Improves your credibility by helping you position your website and content at the top of SERPs.

❌ No immediate or guaranteed results. Sometimes you do everything right and don’t reap the expected benefits because SEO is not an exact science.

❌ Requires expertise, such as specialized knowledge and skills in areas such as keyword research, content optimization, and technical SEO.

3. Social media marketing

Another staple SaaS lead generation strategy is social media marketing, which can be used for B2B and B2C lead generation alike.

It involves using social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc., to promote your brand, engage with your audience, and drive traffic to your website. 

You can use all kinds of tactics here, including social media advertising, posting relevant and compelling content, engaging leads, and more.

Pro tip: The platform or platforms you choose should be appropriate for your target audience, so make sure to know where your leads live on the web before designing a social media marketing strategy.

Pros & Cons

✅ Direct audience engagement.

✅ Real-time feedback on your content and campaigns, allowing for quick adjustments and improvements.

✅ Improves brand awareness.

❌ Requires continuous engagement and maintaining an active presence year-round.

❌ Algorithm changes, as social media platforms frequently update their policies, which can impact the visibility and performance of your content.

4. PPC

PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising is a digital marketing strategy where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked. 

In the SaaS space, PPC campaigns are designed to drive targeted traffic to companies’ websites.

This is done by bidding on relevant keywords, crafting compelling ad copy, and placing ads on search engines and social media platforms where potential customers are most likely to see and interact with them.

For best results, however, you have to constantly monitor your campaigns and optimize them on the go, refining your ad copy, targeting, and bidding strategies.

Pros & Cons

✅ Immediate results.

✅ Allow for precise targeting of specific audience segments.

✅ Good control over budget, with options for setting daily budgets, bids, and maximum cost per click.

❌ Could get expensive, especially for highly competitive keywords.

❌ Requires ongoing monitoring and management.

5. Freemium and free trials

Freemium and free trials are popular strategies used by SaaS companies to attract potential customers by offering access to their product at no initial cost. 

Both approaches aim to showcase the product's value, build trust, and encourage users to convert to paid plans, but they differ in some ways. 

The freemium model enables you to offer a basic version of your product for free, with access to its essential features. Users can use this version for free with no time limits (so-called “Free-forever plans”).

As such, it’s best suited for products where users benefit from a basic version and can be motivated to upgrade for advanced features to get even more value.

The free trial model, on the other hand, lets you provide potential customers full access to your SaaS product’s features for a limited time (usually 7 to 30 days).

This makes it effective for products where experiencing the full feature set is crucial for demonstrating its real value.

Pros & Cons

✅ Lets you show users your product’s value before they commit.

✅ Generates sales opportunities.

❌ Conversion challenges, especially regarding freemium users.

❌ Churn and revenue loss risks.

6. Leverage your website 

Your website has an enormous lead generation and conversion potential, provided you know how to make the most of it.

To increase and harness your website’s lead generation capacity, make sure to take the following steps:

  • Optimize its speed and structure.
  • Ensure your landing page and other web page copy is relevant and actionable.
  • Include CTAs.
  • Leverage lead-capturing forms.
  • Invest in a website traffic tracking solution that can identify website visitors and help you detect those most likely to convert.
  • Use chatbots and live engagement options to engage visitors while they’re still hot.

Pros & Cons

✅ Provides a centralized point of control for identifying and engaging quality leads.

✅ Targeted lead capture, as you can set up filters to create audience segments.

✅ 24/7 availability, as this strategy doesn’t depend as much on sales reps, meaning that your leads will be provided with a personalized experience regardless of whether an actual human is available.

❌ Initial investment, as you’ll need software solutions for tracking and engaging website visitors.

❌ Potential compliance concerns, especially when dealing with European audiences due to GDPR rules.

7. Automated outreach sequences

Automated outreach involves using software tools and technologies to streamline and automate reaching out to potential leads. 

It can include anything from email marketing campaigns to social media messaging and automated follow-ups.

Pros & Cons

✅ Increased efficiency across levels.

✅ Allows for a “set it and forget it” approach.

✅ Good scalability.

❌ Initial setup and costs.

❌ Potential for getting flagged as spam.

How to do SaaS lead generation: Step-by-step guide

Define your ICP and target audience

Before you implement any SaaS strategy, you must conduct detailed market research to define your target audience and Ideal Customer Profile to know who to focus your lead generation efforts on.

This will help you decide on preferred lead generation channels, approach, specific lead generation strategy, etc.

Decide on and optimize your lead generation channels

Once you’ve pinpointed your market and defined your ICP, it’s time to choose the lead generation channels you’ll use the most.

It can include anything and everything we mentioned above, from content marketing to social media and PPC campaigns.

Regardless of which channel you choose, don’t forget to leverage your website as well. 

Think of it as your shop window - it’s one of the first things your leads will come in contact with, so make sure it’s optimized for conversion by implementing the steps and tips we mentioned above.

Implement lead capture systems

To be able to nurture and engage with your leads, you first have to get their contact details and gather as much information as you can on them to craft a personalized approach.

Investing in a lead enrichment tool, such as Warmly, is one of the most efficient ways of ensuring that you’ll get all the relevant info on each valuable lead.

Warmly is designed for capturing leads - both companies and individuals - that land on your website, enriching each identified visitor with:

  • Detailed B2B data (contact info, employee count, industry, technographic, job role, etc.).
  • First-party intent data (insights into how leads engage with your website, such as pages visited, time spent on each page, chatbot interactions, etc.).
  • Third-party intent data (buying signals left throughout the web, such as researched topics, visits to competitors’ websites, etc.).

This way, you’ll get the necessary contact and basic B2B info and gain valuable insights into a specific visitor’s intent to buy, enabling you to qualify and score them more easily.

Engage with leads

Once you’ve captured and qualified leads, you should engage them in a way that will resonate with them.

With Warmly, there are a number of options for engaging leads, including:

  • Chatbots - Warmly’s AI Chat will automatically engage all website visitors (or just those that match certain criteria) and offer them valuable resources, answer queries, book meetings, or ask questions that can help qualify them.

  • Orchestrator - Orchestrator adds leads who match predefined criteria to automated email or LinkedIn sequences, sending personalized emails, DMs, or connection requests.

  • Live video and text chat - This enables reps to engage leads in live conversations via chat or video straight from your website.

You can combine these options while leveraging insights Warmly uncovered on each lead for optimal results.

Monitor and analyze

Finally, it’s important to track relevant KPIs to understand how your SaaS lead generation strategy is performing.

You should monitor metrics such as conversion rates, cost per lead, and overall ROI of your lead generation campaigns to get a clear idea of what’s working and what requires improvement.

Start generating more quality SaaS leads today

Although effective SaaS lead generation takes time and effort, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a pain that will cost you an arm and a leg.

Use some of our techniques, leverage your existing resources, make a few tweaks here and there, and you’ll be ready for takeoff.

If you’re keen on filling your pipeline with high-value SaaS leads as soon as possible, Warmly can help you.

It’s optimized for identifying website visitors and allowing you to drill down on leads most likely to convert right now, enabling you to engage them while their interest is at its peak.

Subscribe to Warmly’s free plan and take your SaaS lead generation to the next level.

Or book a live demo with our team to see it in action first.


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Targeted Lead Generation: What Is It and How to Do It ? [2024]

Targeted Lead Generation: What Is It and How to Do It ? [2024]

Time to read

Alan Zhao

If you’re eager to find highly targeted prospects more likely to convert, targeted lead generation is a far better choice than standard lead generation.

However, many B2B sales and marketing teams aren’t quite sure what the concept of targeted lead generation entails, which inhibits them from applying it more widely in their strategies.

In this article, we’ll break down all the essentials, helping you master the art of generating targeted business leads in no time.

Let’s dive straight in!

TL;DR

➡️ ‎Targeted lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting high-quality, high-intent leads by focusing marketing efforts on a specific audience segment that’s most likely to be interested in your product.

➡️ ‎ It’s a more narrow and specific approach than general lead generation, as it focuses on particular, well-defined audience segments.

➡️ ‎Targeted lead generation is generally a good choice when launching a new product, entering a new market, or looking to shorten the sales cycle, as it allows for a more targeted and personalized approach to leads.

➡️ ‎While it can improve conversion rates, optimize marketing spend, and increase lead generation efficiency across levels, targeted lead generation also involves higher upfront costs, complex processes, and the risk of going too narrow in searching for quality leads.

➡️ ‎There are several steps to conducting efficient targeted lead generation, including:

  • Defining your ICP.
  • Using a lead enrichment tool for valuable data insights.
  • Creating audience segments.
  • Engaging leads.
  • Constantly monitoring and improving campaigns.

What is targeted lead generation?

Targeted lead generation is the process of sifting through your market to identify leads with a higher potential for conversion than “regular” leads.

In its essence, it involves segmenting your audience based on criteria relevant to your business and ICP - such as demographics, behavior, industry, intent level, etc.- to recognize leads most likely to be interested in your products or services.

So, what makes targeted lead generation that much different from standard B2B lead generation?

General lead generation involves attracting and identifying potential customers from a wide audience. Think of it as casting a very wide net to capture high volumes of leads, regardless of their actual quality.

Ideally, every lead generation campaign will result in qualified leads, but it’s rarely so in practice.

This means that your marketing team has to filter out all the “false positives” and low-quality leads from primary results.

As a result, many turn to targeted lead generation.

Targeted lead generation is a more strategic and precise approach that focuses marketing efforts on a much narrower and well-defined audience with a higher likelihood of converting. 

This strategy improves the quality of generated leads and increases the chances of getting a better ROI faster while enabling you to save valuable time and money otherwise wasted on chasing and nurturing poor-quality leads. 

When should targeted lead generation be run instead of general lead generation?

Another question that bothers B2B marketing teams is when is the right time for a targeted lead generation approach.

There are several scenarios and business stages in which the targeted lead generation strategy proves to be most effective.

The best way to determine when’s the right time to go for targeted lead generation is to ask yourself a few questions:

  1. Do I have a well-defined ICP? - Targeted lead generation can be run only if you have a clear understanding of your ideal customer profile. That lets you focus your lead generation efforts on that specific audience segment (e.g., you have a product geared toward compliance professionals at enterprise-level businesses in the banking industry).
  2. Am I launching a new product or service? - If you’re introducing a new product or service to the market, targeting specific segments that have already shown interest in similar offerings can help build traction and enable you to tailor your brand messaging based on feedback from a relevant audience.
  3. Is my sales cycle complex or long? - If your offering is highly specific and requires a longer decision-making process or involves multiple stakeholders, targeted lead generation can help pinpoint quality leads and nurture them through targeted strategies. As a result, you’ll move leads more quickly and efficiently through the sales funnel.
  4. Is the market I’m operating in very competitive? - If you’re in a highly competitive industry, you’ll need all the help you can get to distinguish your brand and reach the right audience. Targeted lead generation lets you focus on high-potential leads, enabling you to achieve that faster and without wasting resources.
  5. Do I have access to relevant data on potential leads? - Effective targeted lead generation relies on accurate and actionable data, so ensure your business can tap into relevant lead data and transform it into valuable insights to get the best results. 

As can be seen from this, businesses of all sizes and stages can benefit from targeted lead generation, each in their own way.

For instance, startups can break into the market more easily and achieve ROI faster, while larger businesses can use this strategy when expanding to new markets or looking to accelerate the sales cycle by narrowing down on targeted sales leads, etc.

In the following section, we’ll summarize some key advantages of running targeted lead generation campaigns.

What are the benefits of doing targeted lead generation?

The main benefits of doing targeted lead generation are:

#1. Improved conversion rates

By focusing on a specific audience segment, targeted lead generation helps attract higher-quality leads.

These target leads are usually much further along in their buyer’s journey, making them easier to convert than leads generated by a broader approach. 

Targeting a more relevant audience that consists of leads more likely to make a buying decision will increase conversion rates across levels.

#2. More effective campaigns

By segmenting your target market, focusing only on prospects that match your ICP and other relevant criteria, and designing a tailored approach for each prospect, you can run campaigns that resonate better with your target audience.

In turn, this increase in efficiency will lead to a better ROI by:

  • Increasing conversion rates.
  • We'll see below how you can spend your marketing budget better.

#3. Optimized marketing spend

Targeted lead generation allows you to allocate your marketing resources more efficiently. 

Directing resources towards segments with higher buying potential minimizes the waste of time, money, and effort on less relevant prospects.

#4. Personalized customer experience 

Because targeted lead generation focuses on specific audiences, all its tactics and activities must be tailored to that audience segment's needs and interests.

As a result, targeted sales leads will be provided with a much more personalized experience across channels, making them feel valued and appreciated.

Personalizing leads’ experiences with your brand helps with a number of things, including:

  • Building trust and rapport.
  • Increasing engagement rates, as leads are more likely to respond and interact with tailored messages and content.
  • Enhancing the chance of conversion.

#5. Reduced sales cycle time

All these benefits combined result in one significant advantage - shortening the sales cycle.

By identifying and attracting target leads who are already interested in your product or need a solution similar to yours and creating a tailored approach for each lead, you’ll be able to close deals more easily and in less time.

Disadvantages of targeted lead generation

Although targeted lead generation is a powerful tool for efficient lead targeting and generating better-quality leads, it comes with a few disadvantages.

#1. Higher initial costs 

Implementing a targeted lead generation process requires:

  • More investment in data analysis, as you’ll need a clearly defined ICP with all the relevant data attributes. 
  • Sophisticated marketing and lead enrichment tools that enable you to identify potential leads that match relevant criteria and contact them.
  • Personalized content creation because you’ll have to provide relevant and tailored resources and messaging across levels. 

These upfront costs are higher compared to general lead generation approaches, which might make targeted lead generation cost-prohibitive for smaller businesses or companies with tighter budgets.

2. Complexity and required resources

Targeted lead generation can be more complex to manage, as it involves a variety of processes, such as:

  • Segmenting your audience.
  • Crafting tailored messages.
  • Continuously analyze data to refine your approach as your business expands. 

This complexity requires additional resources, including skilled sales and marketing professionals and advanced technology, to efficiently execute targeted lead generation campaigns.

3. Risk of a narrow focus 

While targeting highly specific audience segments can be beneficial, it also comes with the risk of excluding potential leads who might not fit perfectly within your defined criteria but could still be valuable customers. 

Setting a too-narrow focus might lead to missing out on opportunities from leads who fall outside your primary segments but are interested in your products or services.

How to do targeted lead generation

There are several steps to follow to ensure you’ll generate more targeted leads with your lead generation strategy. 

#1. Define your ICP

First things first - you can’t run targeted lead generation without defining your ICP first.

To do that, you should:

  • Conduct thorough market research, including current and past trends, competitors’ performance, etc. 
  • Analyze your existing customer data (e.g., best-performing deals and champions from your CRM) to find common traits.

Once you’re done, compile those common characteristics and attributes - such as industry, company size, job roles, geographic location, pain points, needs, etc. - into detailed buyer personas that will help you pinpoint which audience segment to focus on first.

#2. Invest in a lead enrichment tool

A lead enrichment platform is one key tool for efficiently conducting highly targeted lead generation campaigns.

Namely, lead enrichment platforms help you collect relevant data on each potential lead, enabling you to score, segment, and qualify leads accordingly.

However, data enrichment software comes in all shapes and sizes, so make sure you choose the one that’s both capable of accurate lead targeting and the best fit for your needs.

For instance, if your website is one of your main lead generation channels, Warmly might be the ideal choice, as it’s designed to capture and enrich targeted leads on your website.

The platform:

🎯 ‎ Identifies website visitors, including both companies and individuals.

🎯 Enriches them with B2B data (contact details, technographic, job roles, etc.), allowing you to contact them and personalize your approach accordingly.

🎯 Detect buying intent, meaning it enables you to identify website visitors who are most interested in your product from the get-go.

As such, Warmly is perfect for running targeted lead generation campaigns, as it provides you with all the essential insights into your website traffic, including:

  • Who’s visiting your website right now.
  • What pages they’re looking at.
  • Details of their digital buyer’s journey, such as researched topics, interactions with competitors’ ads, etc.

All this helps you understand who your hottest leads are right now, enabling sales teams to prioritize and engage them while they’re still hot.

Pro tip: Warmly can help you build your ICP as well. By identifying website visitors and enriching them with relevant data, Warmly lets you get a better idea of who’s visiting your website the most, what they have in common, etc., enabling you to create a more detailed and precise ICP.

3. Create audience segments

The entire point of running targeted lead generation is to generate leads by focusing on specific audience segments that are most likely to convert.

Therefore, the next step is pinpointing high-possibility segments within your audience and focusing on them first.

You can do this by:

  • Analyzing CRM data.
  • Drilling down on intent data, which lets you identify high-intent leads on your website, social media, etc.

Segmentation is also important because different lead groups require different sales and marketing approaches tailored to their needs, behavior, and common traits (such as industry, seniority, job role, etc.).

Separating quality leads into specific segments helps you create unique campaigns that are sure to resonate with them and nurture them into conversion faster and with less effort.

4. Engage and nurture leads

Engagement is key for guiding leads to conversion, so you can’t afford to miss out on this.

It’s best to engage quality leads while their interest is at its peak, as time to lead is often a crucial factor in successful deal closing.

With Warmly, sales reps will get a real-time Slack notification when a lead fitting into your ICP or exhibiting high-intent behavior lands on your website or a relevant web page.

This allows reps to react in time by contacting these leads via video or text chat straight on your website. Moreover, they can use insights Warmly unearthed to craft unique messages, tailored to each lead’s interests, behavior, requirements, etc.

Moreover, Warmly lets you automate outreach and engagement by:

  • Automatically adding leads that match predefined criteria in personalized LinkedIn and email sequences.

  • Setting up AI-powered chatbots on your landing page or other web pages that send contextual messages, answer questions, book meetings, etc.

This way, no targeted lead will be wasted, as Warmly’s automated and semi-automated capabilities ensure that all quality leads are engaged with and nurtured in a way that’s most likely to resonate with them.

5. Rinse and repeat

Finally, repeat these steps with some adjustments over time for the best results.

Of course, you’ll have to tailor your targeted lead generation efforts accordingly as your business grows and expands or changes its initial offering to ensure you’re always targeting the most relevant audience.

Monitor your website and other channels to see who’s most interested in your offering, analyze existing customers, look into retention and churn rates, etc., to see what’s working and what should be enhanced.

You can use the insights you uncover to fine-tune further your targeting criteria, messaging, and channels for your high-value leads.

5 Tips for more effective targeted lead generation

Here are some tips and best practices for running efficient targeted lead generation that will turn you into a targeted leads generator in no time.

1. Leverage data and analytics for advanced segmentation

You should use data-driven insights to improve and adjust your targeting strategies. 

Analyze past interactions, relevant demographic data, and buyer intent

However, you’ll need to go beyond basic B2B demographics to better understand your audience and create more precise segments. Make sure to analyze data such as:

  • Past interactions with your reps.
  • Web search history.
  • Interactions with your website and other owned channels, etc.

This is exactly why you need lead enrichment tools like Warmly, as they enable you to get relevant and accurate lead data, allowing you to build more nuanced segments and create bulletproof targeted lead generation strategies.

2. Personalize your outreach

Personalization is key to capturing the attention of your target audience. Craft tailored messages and content that speak directly to each segment's specific pain points and needs. 

Personalized communication not only enhances engagement but also increases the likelihood of converting leads into paying customers by taking notice of their concerns.

3. Optimize your website and landing pages

Since your website is one of the first things potential customers come in contact with when getting to know your brand, you should make sure that it’s customized to match the needs and interests of each audience segment. 

Ensure that your website and landing pages feature targeted messaging, compelling calls-to-action, and relevant content, as this will both improve user experience and increase the possibility of lead conversion.

Pro tip: To check how your leads interact with your website and identify potential churn areas and hidden opportunities, go to the “Warm Calls” section of Warmly’s dashboard and monitor their web sessions in real-time.

4. Streamline lead nurturing and engagement with automated workflows

Automate lead nurturing and engagement processes to maintain their interest throughout the buyer’s journey and build trust. 

Implement automated workflows that send personalized outreach and follow-up emails and LinkedIn or chatbot messages based on leads’ behavior and interactions. 

This ensures that leads receive relevant information and proper engagement at the right time, helping to guide them toward conversion while saving your sales team time on manual tasks.

Pro tip: Warmly’s Orchestrator lets you include specific audience segments in tailored outreach cadences based on the criteria you define. Learn more about it here.

5. Engage through multi-channel strategies

Make sure to reach your target audience through a combination of channels to reinforce your messaging and increase engagement.

Consistent messaging across channels is important as it helps position your brand and increase its visibility and enhances the chances of engagement.

Use everything from email marketing and social media to content marketing and other relevant channels to ensure your message reaches your audience wherever they are most active.

Wrap up

Successfully running targeted lead generation campaigns that result in high-quality leads isn’t that difficult when you know what you’re doing.

When deciding whether to use targeted or general lead generation, remember to weigh its pros and cons against your specific business objectives, size, and stage, as it’s not the best fit for everyone.

If you decide the time is right, remember our best practices and pro tips, based on the methods we tested and tried ourselves, and you can’t go wrong.

Want more help with your targeted lead generation campaigns? 

Subscribe to Warmly’s free plan and start revealing high-intent leads on your website today.


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AI Lead Generation: How to Use AI to Get More Leads in 2024

AI Lead Generation: How to Use AI to Get More Leads in 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

AI has revolutionized virtually every vertical, and sales and marketing are no exception.

So, it’s no surprise that AI lead generation has become one of the industry’s hottest topics in 2024.

However, since this is still uncharted territory, many sales and marketing people are still figuring out how to make the most of AI lead generation.

In this guide, we’ll help you master the art of AI-powered lead generation by breaking down the essentials, from common use cases and best practices to the best AI lead generation software.

Let’s begin!

TL;DR

  • AI lead generation is the process of attracting, capturing, nurturing, and converting leads enhanced by AI.
  • AI can improve lead generation across levels, allowing marketers to run better-targeted and highly personalized lead generation campaigns on scale.
  • AI has a wide range of use cases thanks to its ability to analyze large volumes of data and identify complex patterns.
  • These include everything from building more precise ICPs to automating lead scoring and qualification, streamlining outreach and more.
  • Businesses looking to implement AI in their lead generation can use one of three top AI lead generation tools:
  • Warmly - For revealing and converting website visitors.
  • Keyplay - For qualifying and scoring leads.
  • Outreach - For automating email sequences.

What Is AI Lead Generation

We’ll start by answering the quintessential question:

What is AI lead generation?

Simply put, AI lead generation is the process of attracting and nurturing leads into conversion by harnessing the power of AI, i.e., using AI engines or AI-powered tools.

Lead generation as such consists of several segments:

  1. Attracting quality leads, i.e., leads that match your ICP.
  2. Capturing them in various lead generation channels (e.g., your website, social media platforms, targeted ads, etc.).
  3. Scoring and qualifying them to determine which leads are the hottest right now.
  4. Nurturing them, i.e., building trust and rapport to increase their interest in your offering.

Anyone who’s ever dealt with lead generation knows how complex and painstaking it is, especially in today’s competitive landscape that requires speed, efficiency, and hyper-personalization for success.

AI helps B2B businesses tackle these modern challenges in several ways:

  1. It saves valuable time - 33% of US marketing professionals surveyed in 2022 reported that one of the biggest benefits of AI is saving time. The same survey showed that most professionals use AI to quickly uncover trend insights and optimize content.
  2. It can generate personalized content on scale - Certain AI models provide options for creating all kinds of content, from images to blogs, social media captions, etc. In 2023, one in five marketers was already using AI to generate content, and this number will continue to increase as AI becomes more sophisticated.
  3. It streamlines various processes - Although sales and marketing automation is not new, AI can make it smarter, more precise, and overall better at what it does. In 2022, 77% of marketers reported using AI for automation.
  4. It lets you understand your audience better - AI engines are excellent at uncovering patterns, which makes them an amazing asset in understanding and predicting buyers’ journeys, behaviors, and needs. This, in turn, lets you personalize their experiences.
  5. It can leverage ad targeting - AI and ML models can be easily trained to analyze large volumes of data and match them against certain criteria. This makes them perfect for advertising and retargeting, as they can quickly detect leads that match your ICP or show high intent. This is why almost 50% of marketers use them for ad targeting, while 32% use them for perpetual optimization of paid ads.

So, it’s clear that implementing AI in lead generation gives you a significant competitive advantage by allowing you to run highly targeted, personalized, and efficient lead generation campaigns on a large scale.

However, approximately 45% of marketers are still hesitant to fully adopt AI because they feel they lack the necessary knowledge and capabilities.

To make sure you’ll join the other half, let’s look into common AI lead generation use cases, benefits, and best practices.

How to Use AI for Lead Generation

As we’ve seen above, AI can improve lead generation and overall sales and marketing efforts in various ways.

Here, we’ll explore the top 10 use cases of AI lead generation that every B2B marketer should include in their strategy.

1. Creating detailed ICPs

To create high-performing campaigns, you first must know who your ICP is. However, traditional market research can only get you so far, as there will always be insights and details you might miss.

Since AI excels at identifying patterns and uncovering bits of information that humans can’t detect as easily, you can have AI models analyze relevant data sources, such as:

  • Your best-performing accounts and deals.
  • High-intent leads detected in one of your lead generation channels (e.g., website, social media, etc.).

They will recognize the common traits and attributes that appear most frequently, providing a more detailed and accurate picture of your ICP and allowing you to create even better-targeted lead-generation campaigns.

2. Engaging leads

Even if you’ve been living under a rock these past few years, you must have heard about one AI engine - Generative AI.

It’s the AI model that powers popular engines such as ChatGPT, which are well-liked by broad audiences because of their conversational interface and ability to process natural language.

As such, this kind of AI is often used to create smart chatbots that you can set up on your landing page or any other relevant page (e.g., pricing, customer support, FAQ, etc.) to replace sales or customer support specialists.

Thanks to being powered by AI, these chatbots can be trained to perform a wide range of actions, including:

  • Engaging leads in conversation by sending personalized messages or offering help.
  • Providing simple product tours or case studies, whitepapers, etc.
  • Booking meetings.
  • Answering basic product questions that don’t require human attention, etc.

This way, you’ll reduce the time to lead and ensure that no high-intent lead goes under the radar just because no sales rep is available to engage them.

3. Scoring and qualifying leads

AI is perfect for scoring and qualifying leads because it can analyze large volumes of data and easily uncover valuable insights.

You can have it analyze your CRM records, website visitors’ behaviors, all correspondence leads have had with your reps or any other lead data source, and it will surface the hottest leads, followed by surging accounts and those still far from conversion.

As a result, you’ll be able to prioritize leads at the brink of conversion and use the insights pulled by AI to create high-converting strategies.

4. Automating prospecting and outreach

AI also helps you run lead generation campaigns on scale by putting various sales processes on autopilot.

AI models have made automation tools and capabilities smarter and more powerful than ever before, allowing them to efficiently handle a wide range of operations, such as:

  • Recognizing businesses and key stakeholders that match your ICP and automatically adding them to outreach sequences.
  • Finding leads’ contact information (e.g., email addresses, LinkedIn profiles, etc.) with higher accuracy and matching rates.
  • Segmenting leads according to the criteria you specify and ensuring they’re included in the right sequence based on their segment.
  • Drafting hyper-personalized emails and messages.

5. Predictive analytics

As mentioned above, many marketers use AI algorithms for predictive analytics and forecasting, and for a good reason.

AI’s pattern-recognition capabilities enable it to accurately predict a number of relevant factors by analyzing historical data and performance, including:

  1. How leads might behave in a certain situation or react to a certain product.
  2. How market trends will shift in the future.
  3. Total customer lifetime value based on their purchase history and behavior.
  4. Churn rate, allowing you to detect and improve high-churn areas.

6. Delivering personalized content at the right time

AI allows for real-time personalization of various content, ranging from web pages and chatbot conversations to providing customized offers and relevant blogs and case studies.

Real-time personalization was possible even before AI (think of providers like OptinMonster). However, AI further innovated the space, enabling smarter and optimized personalization.

Thanks to its ability to identify behaviors and analyze large quantities of data in seconds, AI can quickly discern who your leads are and what they’re most interested in.

This opens the door to a range of personalization possibilities. For example, you can:

  • Ensure that each website visitor is shown a specific set of images, web copy, CTAs, and case studies that resonate the most with them based on relevant criteria (industry, job role, buyer intent, etc.).
  • Make personalized sales offers that increase the likelihood of conversion (e.g., give them a special discount, offer a product package tailored to their industry or position, etc.).
  • Have chatbots shoot highly personalized, contextual messages that look like they’ve been sent by actual humans, improving the chance of getting a reply.

7. Optimizing email campaigns

We mentioned email personalization and outreach automation before, but AI has improved cold email campaigns in so many ways that it deserves to be covered separately:

  1. AI has revolutionized name matching, reducing false positives to a minimum. This makes it a valuable asset in scraping for email addresses, increasing the possibility of finding the right match every time and helping you clean up email lists.
  2. It can personalize email copy to a greater extent than traditional automation tools. While it still cannot match human creativity, AI-generated content is much more original and personalized compared with what was possible before AI adoption.
  3. It’s enabled smarter automation. AI lets you apply more complex conditional logic in workflows, makes smart recommendations on creating better-performing campaigns, and more.

8. Ad targeting and audience segmentation

AI can help you make highly targeted ad campaigns optimized for conversions.

By analyzing user data, including browsing behavior, purchase history, and social media activity, AI algorithms can identify patterns and predict which audiences are most likely to respond positively to specific ads. 

This lets marketers deliver ads tailored to individual users' interests and needs. For instance, an e-commerce company can use AI to target users who have shown interest in similar products but have yet to make a purchase, presenting them with personalized ads at the optimal time to encourage a sale. 

Additionally, AI can continuously optimize ad performance by adjusting targeting parameters in real-time based on user interactions, ensuring that advertising budgets are spent efficiently. 

9. Lead enrichment

AI-driven lead enrichment enhances the quality and depth of lead information by automatically gathering and integrating additional data from various sources, such as public databases, social networks, and other online resources. 

This data goes beyond basic B2B contact data and goes into more detail, including actionable insights such as job changes, interactions with social media posts, and other details of their digital journey.

As a result, you’ll get a more nuanced understanding of your leads, allowing sales reps to:

  • Score, qualify, and segment them more efficiently.
  • Tailor their approach, addressing each individual lead's specific needs and interests.

10. Monitoring lead generation channels

Some AI-powered tools can continuously scan the web—especially social media and similar networking platforms, where most leads can be found—for mentions of specific keywords, brand names, and industry-related topics.

By analyzing this vast amount of data, AI can identify potential leads discussing relevant products, services, or pain points, even if they haven't directly interacted with the brand.

For instance, if someone tweets about needing a new project management tool, an AI-driven monitoring system can flag this company or individual as a potential lead for a software company.

Beyond identifying leads, AI can also categorize and prioritize them based on influence, engagement levels, and sentiment, enabling businesses to focus their efforts on the most promising prospects.

At the same time, you can leverage AI-powered tools to monitor your owned channels, such as your website, to detect high-intent behavior there as well, ensuring that no quality leads will fall through the cracks.

Examples of Companies That Use AI to Generate Leads

An increasing number of businesses from all industries have become aware of all the benefits of implementing AI in sales and marketing, leading to an expansion of AI adoption across verticals.

Unsurprisingly, major players are at the forefront of AI innovation, as they have the most resources to invest in AI implementation.

Here, we’ll look into well-known companies that have successfully incorporated AI in their lead-generation processes.

Sephora

Sephora was one of the first brands to recognize the power of AI, launching their first AI-powered chatbot back in 2016.

Fast forward to today, and the chatbot is much more sophisticated, helping Sephora’s buyers sift through its massive product base to find the exact items they need more easily.

The chatbot can answer questions, offer tailored suggestions or recommendations based on specific queries, etc., providing a smoother and more satisfying customer experience across levels.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola also dabbled with AI last year, taking it one step further and creating its own platform powered by ChatGPT 4 and DALL.E.

The platform enabled users to generate customized AI content featuring Coca-Cola’s assets, such as its bottle, logo, etc., with the best artwork appearing on digital billboards in New York’s Times Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus.

This innovative marketing approach helped increase brand presence and popularity and engaged leads in a highly creative process, creating stronger and lasting relationships.

Netflix

Did you know that Netflix also uses AI to improve customer experiences?

All those highly personalized watching recommendations you got based on your previous searches and the content you enjoyed the most are actually powered by AI that processes your preferences to provide a tailored experience. 

Although this isn’t a lead generation technique in the narrowest of senses, it’s still a useful tool for:

  • Nurturing existing customers by providing great experiences and increasing retention rates.
  • Pushing users to upgrade to higher-tier plans.
  • Getting free brand advocates, as satisfied users are sure to spread the word among their peers.

StraightIn

It’s important to note that you don’t necessarily have to be an industry giant to leverage AI in lead generation.

With so many powerful AI-driven tools on the market, you don’t have to make your own AI model from scratch.

For example, StraightIn, a LinkedIn marketing agency, opted to buy a ready-made customizable AI-powered solution instead of investing in its own platform—and the results were just as good.

StraightIn used Warmly, which enabled it to:

  • Identify high-intent website visitors.
  • Add specific visitor segments to a particular outreach sequence.
  • Personalize each part of their LinkedIn and email outreach strategy while running it on autopilot.

The result? 

$10K revenue in just 2 weeks, which speaks volumes about AI's value in sales and marketing.

What Are the Best AI Lead Generation Software Solutions?

If you want to harness the power of AI in your lead generation processes, then you’ll need AI lead generation software optimized for your specific use case.

Here, we’ll offer three AI-powered B2B lead generation platforms for various user types and needs:

1. Warmly

Best for: Identifying and converting website visitors.

Who is it for: B2B companies of all sizes looking to unlock their website’s full conversion potential.

Full disclosure: While Warmly is our own product, we aim to provide an unbiased perspective on why Warmly is truly one of the best AI lead generation platforms.

Warmly is a signal-based revenue orchestration platform that leverages AI and intent data to help users:

  • Identify website visitors.
  • Recognize the ones that are most likely to convert right now.
  • Streamline prospecting, outreach, and engagement.

Let’s get a closer look at its key features.

Feature #1: Website intent

Adding a snippet of Warmly’s code to your website lets you identify the companies and individuals visiting your website.

The platform will provide all the essential B2B information on every identified visitor, such as:

  • Contact details (company names, phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, LinkedIn profiles, etc.).
  • Firmographic data (industry, size, employee count, location, and other company details).
  • Technographic data (a company’s full tech stack).
  • SEP data (engagement with other sales and marketing campaigns, chatbot interactions, etc.).
  • CRM data (ongoing and closed deals, account owners, previous interactions with your sales professionals, etc.).

In addition to that, each lead will be enriched with detailed intent data, enabling you to easily recognize the hottest leads in real-time.

This data includes:

  1. First-party intent data, i.e., insights into leads’ web sessions, such as:
  • Pages they visited.
  • High-intent questions they asked the chatbot.
  • Time spent on each page.
  • The content they downloaded (such as playbooks, whitepapers, etc.) or forms they filled out.

2. Third-party intent data, i.e., details of their entire digital buyer journey, including:

  • Other websites they visited (with a focus on your main competitors).
  • Social media activity.
  • Ads they interacted with.
  • Recently researched topics.
  • Job change intent.

Feature #2: AI Chat

Warmly’s AI Chat is an AI-powered chatbot with all the functionality you’d expect from an innovative chat solution.

Since it’s AI-driven, it can be trained to perfectly match your needs, business goals, brand messaging, and tone of voice.

The chatbot will leverage the intent and B2B data Warmly identified to provide each lead with a personalized experience. It can handle a range of actions, including:

  • Answering leads’ questions.
  • Booking qualified meetings.
  • Engaging high-intent leads.
  • Offering valuable resources to visitors, such as product tours, case studies, playbooks, etc.

You can configure it to appear on all web pages or only on high-intent ones, such as pricing pages, case studies, BOFU blogs, etc.

Most importantly, Warmly’s AI Chat ensures that a human stays in the loop in case a hot lead requires to speak with an actual human or makes a high-intent query.

When that occurs, sales reps will be notified via Slack, allowing them to react promptly.

Feature #3: Orchestrator

Warmly’s Orchestrator, formerly AI Prospector, is another AI-powered feature enabling you to automate prospecting and outreach on LinkedIn and email.

Its workflow is simple to set up:

  1. Specify the workflow trigger (i.e., a lead heads to the pricing page, a visitor matching your ICP lands on your website, etc.).
  2. Decide on the lead segments you want the Orchestrator to target (filter companies by size, industry, employee count, technographic, etc.).
  3. Choose the actual stakeholders from these companies you want to be contacted (filter them by role, seniority, etc.).
  4. Specify the action you want the Orchestrator to take (send a personalized email/contextual LinkedIn message/LinkedIn connection request, or all three combined).

The Orchestrator also uses intent data to segment leads and to personalize each email and LinkedIn message accordingly.

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies companies and individuals visiting your website.

✅ Enriches visitors with intent and B2B data.

✅ AI-powered sales automation.

✅ AI-driven lead engagement.

✅ Live engagement options.

✅ Includes all features in all paid plans.

❌ Annual pricing options only.

2. Keyplay

Best for: Automated lead scoring and qualification.

Who is it for: Account-based marketing and sales teams that need a more efficient way of finding high-intent accounts.

Keyplay is an AI-powered lead generation platform that uses AI to find, score, and qualify leads.

It enables you to set up custom lead scoring and qualification rules, allowing you to tailor it to your specific target market and ICP.

Features

  • AI Lookalike helps find potential leads that match your best-performing customers and deals.
  • Leverages AI and ML to find accounts that match your ICP the best and qualify them accordingly.
  • Provides a wide range of advanced filters for highly specific searches, including recruiting velocity, industry categories, online presence, technographic, etc.
  • Lets you set up custom ICP scoring based on the signals and criteria relevant to your business and target market.

Pros & Cons

✅ Advanced filtering options.

✅ Tracks custom signals relevant to your ICP and business objectives.

✅ Puts lead qualification on autopilot.

❌ Offers only annual paid plans.

❌ Integrates with just two CRMs.

3. Outreach

Best for: AI-powered email outreach.

Who is it for: Larger B2B teams looking to run cold email campaigns on scale.

Outreach is an AI-powered sales execution platform that focuses on automating email outreach.

In addition to automation features, it also provides actionable insights into deals, customer-facing interactions, etc.

Features

  • Provides AI-generated actionable summaries of each deal and account, allowing you to identify hidden opportunities and potential risks, and decide on the next steps. 
  • Adds quality prospects to outreach lists and sends personalized emails based on the context, prior interactions, CRM data, etc.
  • AI-powered sales assistant that records, transcribes, and analyzes live meetings, uncovering opportunities for growth, identifying buyer sentiment, providing live suggestions during meetings, etc.

Pros & Cons

✅ Intuitive interface.

✅ Solid range of integrations with CRM and other popular sales tools.

❌ Non-transparent pricing.

❌ If you want more than sales automation, you’ll have to buy several product packages.

Wrapping Up

As we’ve seen, AI has a wide range of use cases in marketing and sales and the potential to transform lead generation for the better.

So, if you haven’t already started using AI in lead generation and other sales and marketing processes, now’s the right time to change that if you want to stay ahead of the curve.

If your website is one of your critical lead generation channels, Warmly might be the best way to begin your AI lead generation journey.

Its intuitive interface, wide range of features, and good value-for-money ratio make Warmly an ideal choice for both beginners and experienced AI users.

Sign up for its free plan and unlock your website’s full lead generation potential today.

Or, if you’d like to see it in action first, you can always book a live demo with our team.

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Alan Zhao

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Best 10 UserGems Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

Best 10 UserGems Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Searching the market high and low for the best UserGems alternative for your use case takes a lot of work, given the sheer number of powerful B2B prospecting tools.

That’s where this guide comes in.

We researched the market for you, tested numerous UserGems competitors, talked to real users, and sifted through G2 and Capterra to create this list of the top 10 UserGems alternatives.

Before we analyze the software that made it to our list, we’ll quickly look into why you might need a UserGems alternative in the first place.

Why Look for a UserGems Alternative?

On the one hand, UserGems can be a solid option for B2B sales prospecting due to a few nifty features, such as:

  1. Tracking buying signals and letting you build simple workflows on top of them. UserGems focuses on a specific kind of intent signals - job change. It tracks past champions’ job changes, new hires and promotions, champion referrals, etc.
  2. AI-powered features that help you build and update your ICP, automatically score and prioritize surging accounts, and assist with drafting personalized email copy.

However, UserGems has several downsides, pushing many potential and current users to turn to an alternative solution.

1. Data inaccuracies

Several users we talked to reported experiencing issues with UserGems’ data, and the same problem is often cited on G2.

Source

Since UserGems is primarily a B2B prospecting platform, failing to find accurate and up-to-date data on valuable prospects is quite an issue, forcing you to run manual searches.

Moreover, UserGems tracks and identifies job intent first and foremost.

Although this data is useful for determining how likely a company is to buy your product, more is needed to create a complete picture of their readiness to convert.

2. Opaque pricing

UserGems doesn’t publish its prices. This practice is often a strong signal that a tool is fairly expensive.

Judging by Vendr’s data, UserGems is not one of the more affordable platforms:

“For businesses with a headcount of 200, the cost starts at $16,400. For larger enterprises with a headcount reaching up to 1001, the price can go up to $81,900.”

One factor greatly contributing to the cost is that UserGems separates its offering into several packages, forcing users with more advanced needs to buy several at once.

3. Integration issues

One key factor to consider when buying any sales tool is how well it integrates with other sales and marketing platforms.

Unfortunately, UserGems doesn’t integrate as seamlessly with important tools, such as CRMs, meaning you’ll have to fill out records manually or rely on other software. 

Source

Source

What Are the Best UserGems Alternatives and Competitors in 2024?

1. Warmly - Reveals website visitors’ buying intent in real-time and helps you convert them.

2. Qualified - AI-powered intent data and sales platform.

3. Common Room - Customer intelligence platform that gathers intent signals from multiple sources.

4. Pocus - Signal-based selling platform.

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator - Native LinkedIn B2B sales prospecting solution. 

6. Clay - Waterfall data enrichment and outreach tool.

7. RB2B - Identifies US-based website traffic.

8. Boomerang - Tracks job changes in key accounts.

9. Keyplay - Provides custom lead scoring and filtering to help you identify key prospects.

10. LeadIQ - B2B prospecting platform that tracks changes in key accounts in real-time.

1. Warmly

Full disclosure: While Warmly is our own product, we aim to provide an unbiased perspective on why Warmly is truly the top UserGems alternative on the market.

Don’t want to read through the entire article to find out if Warmly’s really the best? Sign up for our free plan and put Warmly to the test.

Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that identifies website visitors, detects their buying intent across channels, and helps convert them via automated, semi-automated, and human-operated functionalities.

Let's get a closer look at the key features that make Warmly a strong UserGems alternative.

Feature #1: Reveals website visitors’ buyer intent

Warmly identifies both companies and individuals visiting your website, enriching each identified visitor with essential B2B data, including:

  • Contact details (company names, phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, LinkedIn profiles, etc.).
  • Firmographic data (industry, size, employee count, location, and other company details).
  • Technographic data (software tools and technology a company uses).
  • SEP data (engagement with other sales and marketing campaigns, chatbot interactions, etc.).
  • CRM data (ongoing and closed deals, account owners, previous interactions with your sales professionals, etc.).

However, Warmly does more than just identify anonymous website visitors.

It also detects visitors’ buyer intent by tracking how they interact with your website and picks up the buying signals they leave throughout their digital journey.

This means you’ll get insights into:

  1. Visitors’ web sessions, such as:
  • Pages they visited, with a focus on high-intent pages (e.g., pricing, specific features, comparison with competitors, etc.).
  • High-intent questions they asked the chatbot.
  • Time spent on each page.
  • The content they downloaded (such as whitepapers, playbooks, etc.) or forms they filled out.

2. Their entire buyer journey, including:

  • Recently researched topics.
  • Job change intent.
  • Visits to competitors’ websites.
  • Interactions with ads and social media posts.

Collecting this valuable data and translating it into actionable insights brings value across levels, as it:

  • Helps you understand who your hottest leads are right now.
  • Gives you all the information you need to create a tailored approach that will resonate with high-intent leads the most.

Feature #2: Automated sales workflows

Similarly to UserGems, Warmly uses the intent signals and other data it has on your website visitors to leverage various types of sales automation.

However, unlike UserGems, it offers a wider range of automation options, such as:

1. AI Chat

AI Chat is a conversational AI-powered chatbot that you can train to:

  1. Engage high-intent leads by sending contextual messages or offering collaterals like case studies and product tours.
  2. Answer website visitors’ questions.
  3. Book qualified meetings.

The chatbot is highly configurable, meaning you can have it engage all website visitors or only those that match certain criteria (i.e., fit into your ICP, visit high-intent pages, etc.).

2. Orchestrator

Warmly’s Orchestrator automatically adds certain website visitors into automated email or LinkedIn outreach sequences.

You remain in full control over Orchestrator’s actions as you decide on everything, including:

  • Workflow triggers (e.g., a high-value visitor lands on your website, or a visitor returns to a high-intent page).
  • The companies you want to be targeted (based on industry, size, and other ICP-relevant criteria).
  • The individual profiles you want to be targeted in each company (based on job role, seniority, etc.).
  • The action you want the Orchestrator to take (send a personalized email, a contextual LinkedIn DM, or a LinkedIn connection request).

3. Lead routing

Automated lead routing ensures that each valuable lead gets assigned to the most appropriate sales rep.

You can set up Slack alerts to notify a specific rep (alternately, you can set up a round-robin if it suits you better) when:

  1. A valuable lead matching your ICP lands on your website.
  2. A visitor exhibits high-intent behavior (frequently returns to the pricing page, for instance).
  3. A visitor requires to speak with an actual human or makes a high-intent query in the chatbot.

The sales reps can take it from there, monitoring leads’ sessions in real-time and waiting for the right time to engage them.

Feature #3: Live engagement

Finally, recognizing high-intent leads on the brink of conversion will do little good if you can’t engage them while they’re still hot.

Of course, automated workflows can help to an extent, but they can only partially replace human reps when it comes to closing deals.

This is why Warmly lets you reach out to visitors while they’re still on your website through:

  1. Live chat.
  2. Live video call.

The “Warm Call” section of the platform’s dashboard shows the companies and individuals visiting your website right now, in addition to intent and B2B data on each visitor.

When sales reps assess the time is right - or when they get notified via Slack - they can shoot a contextual message emphasizing that they’re an actual human or initiate a video call.

Reps can then leverage the data Warmly revealed to further nurture, warm up, and convert leads.

Our Warm Calls best practices can help you ensure high response rates, so make sure to check them out.

Pricing

Warmly offers a free forever plan that lets you reveal up to 500 people and companies visiting your website. It’s the perfect plan for trying out one of the platform’s essential features.

If you expect higher traffic volumes and need additional features, you can upgrade to one of three paid tiers:

  1. Startup: $700/mo, includes 3 users, up to 10,000 monthly visitors.
  2. Business: From $1,440 to $1,740 per month, depending on the number of visitors you expect to have. It includes 10 seats.
  3. Enterprise: Custom price. Built for users with an estimated traffic of 100,000+ visitors per month who need more customization. Includes 20 seats, advanced AI personalization, custom integrations, etc.

Note: All paid plans provide access to all of Warmly’s features and include deep integrations with data tools such as Clearbit, Bombora, and 6Sense, allowing you to get a bundle of products at a single price.

Integrations

In addition to the data solutions mentioned above, Warmly has seamless integrations with OpenAI and most modern SEP and CRM software, which enables it to easily fit into any business’s tool stack.

How does Warmly compare to UserGems?

Both Warmly and UserGems leverage intent data to help users find valuable leads and convert them more easily.

However, while UserGems primarily focuses on job intent data and offers fairly limited access to other types of intent data, Warmly delivers both first- and third-party intent data in addition to job intent.

Furthermore, Warmly is better suited for sales automation, offering a wider range of options for streamlining various processes, from prospecting to outreach and routing.

You should also note that UserGems has no engagement features, meaning you’ll have to use other tools to contact and nurture leads. 

Warmly, on the other hand, lets you reach out to leads while they’re still hot straight on your website.

Finally, the price point is also worth mentioning.

Warmly’s pricing structure is transparent and straightforward, whereas UserGems doesn’t publish prices and has separate packages for various tools.

This means that Warmly is a better choice if you’re looking for a more advanced platform that can tackle prospecting and outreach and boost website conversions simultaneously.

UserGems, on the other hand, can be a viable option if you need a prospecting tool only (and have a pretty generous budget).

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies companies and individuals visiting your website.

✅ Reveals first- and third-party buying intent data.

✅ Enriches visitors with detailed B2B data.

✅ Sales automation and live lead engagement capabilities.

✅ Includes all features in all paid plans.

✅ Integrates with several data solutions, providing you with several products at the price of one.

❌ Annual pricing options only.

2. Qualified

Best for: Reducing time to lead by leveraging intent data.

Qualified is an AI-powered platform that detects intent data and uses it to engage website visitors in several ways.

The fact that it tracks various intent data types and provides personalized lead engagement options makes it a better choice than UserGems for users with more advanced needs.

Features

  • AI Pounce engages high-value visitors based on the intent data the platform collected.
  • AI-powered chatbot that answers leads’ queries, asks questions to qualify them, schedules meetings, etc.
  • AI Offers ensures that valuable leads will be presented with relevant marketing offers tailored to their needs and buyer intent.

Who is it for?

Qualified is built on Salesforce’s platform, making it the perfect choice for Salesforce users who want to maximize intent data and streamline some sales processes (including record enrichment). 

Pricing

Qualified has three payment plans:

  1. Growth: $3,500 per month, up to 10 users, includes basic chatbot features, purchase intent signals, routing, and marketing offers.
  2. Premier: Custom price, includes Qualified’s AI features
  3. Enterprise: Custom price, built for enterprise-level users. Includes various enterprise-level features, such as SSO, reporting API, etc.

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies website visitors.

✅ Native Salesforce integration for optimal enrichment experience. 

✅ Detects buyer intent.

❌ Expensive. 

❌ Built on Salesforce’s platform. As a result, users of other CRMs may find it lacking when it comes to enrichment.

❌ Steep learning curve.

3. Common Room

Best for: Tracking buying signals across sources.

Common Room tracks various intent signals to help you detect qualified leads.

In addition to its out-of-the-box signals, it lets you set up custom signals tailored to your target market, ICP, and business goals.

Its customization options and the fact that it detects a broader scope of intent signals make it a strong UserGems competitor.

Features

  • AI-powered lead scoring helps you prioritize the hottest accounts.
  • Lets you set up automated workflows triggered by specific signals (e.g., send an email to a high-intent lead or sync qualified leads to Hubspot).
  • AI-driven engine that captures buying signals anywhere on the web, summarizes them into comprehensive lead profiles, and auto-surfaces accounts that best match your ICP.

Who is it for?

Common Room is a solid option for account-based and product-led sales teams that need valuable insights from multiple touchpoints paired with options for putting some parts of the sales pipeline on autopilot.

Pricing

Common Room has a free plan limited to 500 contacts and 50 organizations, 2 users, and 2 integrations.

More advanced users can pick one of Common Room’s three paid plans:

  1. Starter: $625/mo, 2 users, up to 35k contacts
  2. Team: $1,250/mo, 3 users, up to 100k contacts
  3. Enterprise: Custom price, 10 users, up to 200k contacts with options for purchasing more

The platform offers a 14-day free trial for its Team plan.

All plans are annual.

Pros & Cons

✅ Options for setting up automated workflows.

✅ Tracks intent signals across the web.

❌ Annual billing only.

❌ Limited customization options.

4. Pocus

Best for: Creating automated sales prospecting and engagement workflows on top of intent signals.

Pocus is an AI-powered signal-based selling platform that uses first- and third-party intent signals to streamline prospecting and engagement.

Its features, especially the automation ones, are more sophisticated than UserGems’, making it a solid alternative for users who want to run automated sales prospecting on a scale.

Features

  • AI-powered automations called playbooks let you build signal-based prospecting and simpler outreach workflows.
  • AI recommendations that help you determine which playbooks perform well and which need to be further optimized.
  • Lets you track product usage data and uncover hidden opportunities, areas that could be improved, etc.

Who is it for?

Go-to-market and PLG teams that want to automate certain operations using quality intent signals as triggers.

Pricing

Pocus doesn’t disclose its pricing structure online.

To see what it can do for your specific use case, you’ll have to book a demo.

Pros & Cons

✅ Solid library of playbook templates to help you start streamlining prospecting.

✅ Seamless integrations with the most popular CRMs.

❌ Issues with data inaccuracy.

❌ Has no live engagement options.

❌ Non-transparent pricing.

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Best for: LinkedIn prospecting.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s native prospecting and lead generation solution.

It’s designed to let you access LinkedIn’s rich prospecting pool without worrying about limits the platform imposes on users of other plans.

If LinkedIn is your main prospecting channel, this might be the safest option since browser extensions and similar platforms that work on top of LinkedIn can get you banned. 

Features

  • Tracks key signals indicating the right time to reach out to quality prospects (e.g., job change, posting or interacting with a particular LinkedIn post, joining a group, etc.).
  • Advanced filtering options for running segmented and precise searches across verticals.
  • Warm introductions identify mutual connections with high-value prospects that can help you build strong relationships more easily.

Who is it for?

B2B sales teams that exclusively use LinkedIn for prospecting and lead generation.

Pricing

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of LinkedIn’s most expensive solutions.

It has three pricing tiers:

  1. Core at $74.31 per month when billed annually. 
  2. Advanced at $125.87 per month when billed annually.
  3. Advanced Plus at a custom price.

If you need access to features such as CRM integrations, data verification, etc., you'll have to upgrade to the Advanced Plus plan.

Pros & Cons

✅ Provides 50 InMails per month to contact even the prospects you’re not connected with.

✅ Nuanced filtering.

❌ Can be used for LinkedIn prospecting alone.

❌ No automation options.

6. Clay

Best for: Data-driven sales automation and waterfall data enrichment.

Clay is a waterfall data enrichment platform that also provides a solid range of sales automation features.

It’s a good UserGems alternative if you’re looking for optimal data accuracy combined with powerful outreach automation.

Features

  • AI-powered assistant that does automatic lead research, drafts personalized emails, and adds them to email sequences.
  • Enriches data by running and cross-referencing each point across 50+ sources to find a match.
  • Automated lead scoring based on the criteria you set up and the data Clay uncovers.

Who is it for?

GTM team leaders and members looking to automate and scale outreach by using quality data.

Pricing

Clay has a free forever plan that provides 100 search credits per month and limited access to its features.

If you need more credits and features, you can choose from 4 pricing tiers:

  1. Starter: $149/mo
  2. Explorer: $349/mo
  3. Pro: $800/mo
  4. Enterprise: Custom pricing

You can try Clay out with a 14-day free trial of its Pro plan.

If you’re interested in using Clay for sales automation, you’ll have to go for the Pro or Enterprise plan, as they’re the only ones that offer automation features.

Pros & Cons

✅ Helps create personalized outreach sequences based on the data points it collects.

✅ Dynamic data enrichment process, with data collected from dozens of sources.

❌ Learning curve.

❌ Automation features available only on its highest tiers.

❌ Doesn’t have native email sequencing capabilities, meaning you need to connect it with an email outreach tool.

7. RB2B

Best for: Identifying US website visitors.

RB2B is a website traffic deanonymization platform that can reveal individuals who land on your website—provided they’re from the US.

If you run a US-based B2B business and want a tool that identifies both companies and individuals, then RB2B is a viable UserGems alternative.

Features

  • Pushes visitors’ LinkedIn profiles in your Slack as soon as it identifies them.
  • Lets you set up filters to drill down on high-value visitors.
  • It integrates with sales engagement platforms, allowing you to add identified visitors to automated outreach sequences.

Who is it for?

RB2B is best suited for smaller B2B teams whose target market is US-based and that need a simple solution for identifying website traffic.

Pricing

RB2B has a free forever plan with 200 monthly reveal credits that sends visitors’ profiles to Slack. However, that’s about everything it offers.

If you want more credits, you can upgrade to its paid plan, which starts at $119 per month and can go up to $1,149 per month if your website traffic has 8,001-10,000 visitors.

Plans for higher traffic volumes have custom prices.

Pros & Cons

✅ Unlimited users on the paid plan.

✅ Easy to use.

❌ Very limited functionality.

❌ Expensive for what it offers.

8. Boomerang

Best for: Tracking job change data in key accounts.

Similarly to UserGems, Boomerang tracks job change data and notifies you when a relevant change occurs in a profile that matches your ICP.

However, since its data undergoes two layers of verification, it’s more accurate than UserGems. It also has a few extra features that UserGems doesn’t, making it an overall better option for a similar use case.

Features

  • Monitors job changes in key profiles, from new hires to promotions and more, and helps you rank these signals by relevance.
  • Warm introductions discover connections with relevant stakeholders within your company network, allowing you to leverage them to build and nurture relationships more easily.
  • 1-click org chart creator for a visual overview of key champions, detractors, surging profiles, etc.

Who is it for?

Boomerang is best suited for users who want a more sophisticated version of UserGems.

Pricing

Boomerang doesn’t have a typical free trial. Instead, you can run a data test to see what it can do.

If you decide it suits you, you can subscribe to one of three plans:

  1. Revv Up: Starting at $10,000 per year for 10,000 contacts (if you need more, the price goes up)
  2. Cruise: Starting at $15,000 per year for 10,000 buying group members and 1,000 new hire accounts
  3. Enterprise+: 20% of annual subscription price

Account Tracking and Database Cleanup are add-ons, each starting at $10,000.

Pros & Cons

✅ User-friendly interface.

✅ Good data accuracy, data is verified by both ML engines and humans.

❌ Very expensive.

❌ Prone to bugs and glitches.

9. Keyplay

Best for: Uncovering high-value accounts.

Keyplay helps you find accounts that best fit into your ICP by letting you set up custom scoring and tracking systems.

This makes it a better option than UserGems for users dealing with specific markets or unique ICPs.

Features

  • Lets you set up custom ICP scoring based on the signals and criteria relevant to your business and target market.
  • Provides a wide range of advanced filters for highly specific searches, including recruiting velocity, industry categories, online presence, technographic, etc.
  • AI Lookalike helps you find potential leads that match your best-performing clients and deals.

Who is it for?

Account-based sales and marketing teams that need help finding ideal accounts and prioritizing the ones most likely to convert.

Pricing

Keyplay has a free forever plan that includes its basic features. Moreover, subscribing to the PeerSignal community lets you access a more limited number of records. 

If you need more records and additional features, you can upgrade to one of two paid plans:

  1. Growth: $12,000/year
  2. Scale: Custom pricing

Pros & Cons

✅ Advanced filtering options.

✅ Lets you track custom signals relevant to your ICP and business objectives.

❌ Offers only annual paid plans.

❌ Integrates with just two CRMs.

10. LeadIQ

Best for: Tracking sales signals in real-time and generating personalized emails based on relevant data.

LeadIQ is a B2B sales prospecting platform that goes beyond a generic contact database. It tracks relevant buying signals in key accounts, helping reps determine the best time to contact them.

It has a wider range of features than UserGems, paired with better data accuracy.

Features

  • Its database includes millions of verified profiles, emails, and mobile numbers collected from various sources.
  • Tracks real-time changes in important accounts, such as job changes, promotions, funding announcements, etc.
  • AI-powered email generator drafts personalized email copy based on LeadIQ's data on prospects.

Who is it for?

LeadIQ is best suited for smaller B2B teams that want to track important changes in high-value leads without spending a fortune.

Pricing

Lead IQ has a free forever plan that provides:

  • 20 verified work emails per week
  • 10 mobile phone numbers
  • 40 email generations per month
  • 10 accounts tracked

There are three paid plans for users who need more:

  1. Essential: $45 per user per month
  2. Pro: $89 per user per month
  3. Enterprise: Custom pricing, annual subscription only

Pros & Cons

✅ User-friendly.

✅ Chrome extension for 1-click LinkedIn prospecting.

❌ Emphasis on North America, limited European coverage.

❌ Some of its features, including contact tracking and Salesforce enrichment, are add-ons priced at $5,000 per year.

Next Steps: Find the Right Prospects With Warmly

So, which of these tools is the best for you?

Ultimately, only you can answer that question, as it depends on your unique needs, goals, and budget size.

The above information will help you make the right decision.

One thing is certain 👇

If you’re looking for a platform that can uncover the buying intent of businesses and individuals that have already shown interest in your product by surfing your website, then Warmly is your best choice.

The platform will detect high-intent leads, provide all the information you need to convert them, and enable you to engage with them while they’re still hot—all from a single point of control.

But why just take our word for it? 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.

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Best 9 RocketReach Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

Best 9 RocketReach Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Although RocketReach is a solid lead intelligence platform, it doesn’t do the trick for everyone, urging users to search for RocketReach alternatives.

In this article, we’ll explore the 9 best RocketReach competitors to help you find the perfect solution for your specific use case.

We ensured that only the best options made it to our list by:

  • Testing dozens of RocketReach alternatives.
  • Interviewing their real-life users.
  • Going through software rating sites to get the hang of the general user experience for each platform.

As a result, we hand-picked the best-in-class RocketReach alternatives for different user types, needs, and budgets.

Before we delve into the top 9 list, let’s get a closer look into why users switch from RocketReach or avoid it altogether.

Why Look for a RocketReach Alternative?

RocketReach has a B2B contact database with 700M+ people and 60M+ companies, which makes it a viable solution for prospecting and obtaining essential lead intelligence.

The platform also offers a few handy features, such as:

  • Chrome extension for finding email addresses and other basic lead details in LinkedIn search results and company pages.
  • AI-powered recommendations that find lookalikes of the prospects you already searched for based on various criteria, helping you expand and scale your prospecting efforts.

However, there are quite a few downsides to RocketReach worth considering:

1. It’s expensive

One of the first things ex and current RocketReach users mention is the price, which makes the platform cost-prohibitive for smaller companies.

Source

Most users believe that its pricing is far too high given its offering, especially because:

  1. Its lowest tier reveals only email addresses, so you must upgrade to a more expensive plan for phone numbers.

Source

2. The platform offers limited functionality, with no sales automation or engagement features.

2. No outreach and lead engagement options

RocketReach can be used only for finding essential B2B lead info, as it offers no options for engaging leads or orchestrating sales processes.

Source

This can be a dealbreaker for many users, as most modern platforms include a wider set of functionality in their standard offering.

3. Data inaccuracies

Another common complaint is RocketReach’s data quality and accuracy.

Source

Numerous users reported issues with high email bounce, inaccurate phone numbers, and similar problems.

Source

And now, time for our curated list of the best RocketReach alternatives.

What Are the Best RocketReach Alternatives & Competitors in 2024?

1. Warmly - Reveals, enriches, and converts website visitors.

2. Apollo - Sales intelligence and engagement platform.

3. Lead411 - B2B database that runs data through several layers of verification.

4. UpLead - B2B contact database with real-time email verification.

5. Cognism - Sales intelligence platform with international data coverage.

6. Keyplay - Lets you build targeted lead lists through custom filtering and lead scoring.

7. Hunter - All-in-one email outreach platform.

8. Adapt - Advanced industry-based filtering for vertical-specific prospecting.

9. Kaspr - Chrome extension for LinkedIn prospecting.

1. Warmly 

Disclaimer: Although Warmly is our platform, we reviewed it objectively, just like all other RocketReach alternatives. Warmly made it to our list because some of our customers have switched to our solution from RocketReach, which is why we’re confident at least some of you will find it to be a match as well.

Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that reveals website visitors, detects those most likely to buy right now, and provides options for engaging them while they’re still hot.

Three features in particular make Warmly a strong RocketReach competitor:

Feature #1: Reveals website intent

Warmly identifies anonymous website visitors at both company and individual level, uncovering businesses as well as individual stakeholders that landed on your website.

Pasting a piece of Warmly’s code into your website is all it takes. The platform will start revealing potential leads in minutes.

Once Warmly identifies a website visitor, it pulls all the relevant information on them, providing you with a complete data profile, including:

  • Contact details (company names, phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, LinkedIn profiles, etc.).
  • Firmographic data (industry, size, employee count, location, and other company details).
  • Technographic data (software tools and technology a company uses).
  • CRM data (ongoing and closed deals, account owners, previous interactions with your sales professionals, etc.).
  • SEP data (engagement with other sales and marketing campaigns, chatbot interactions, etc.).

However, Warmly is more than a website traffic deanonymization platform - it also uncovers visitors’ buyer intent.

The tool tracks buying signals your visitors left on your website and other places on the web, delivering a complete picture of their readiness to buy.

The insights Warmly provides include:

1 - Web session details, such as:

  • Pages they visited, with a focus on high-intent pages (e.g., pricing, specific features, comparison with competitors, etc.).
  • Time spent on each page.
  • The content they downloaded (such as whitepapers, playbooks, etc.) or forms they filled out.
  • High-intent questions they asked the chatbot.

2 - Details of their customer journey across the web, including:

  • Recently researched topics.
  • Job change intent.
  • Visits to competitors’ websites.
  • Interactions with ads and social media posts.

All this data combined lets you understand who your hottest leads are right now and provides you with all the information you need to craft a personalized approach.

Feature #2: Automated outreach

Unlike RocketReach, Warmly provides several options for streamlining essential sales processes, including:

1. Orchestrator

Warmly’s Orchestrator is used to put prospecting and outreach on autopilot.

It automatically adds website visitors that match the criteria you set up in automated LinkedIn and/or email sequences.

Building workflows with the Orchestrator is easy, as all you have to do is follow through several steps:

  1. Set up the workflow trigger (e.g., a lead lands on a high-intent page).
  2. Choose which companies you want to target (you can filter them by size, industry, deal stage, etc.).
  3. Specify which stakeholders you want to target from each company (filter by role, seniority, etc.)
  4. Decide which action the Orchestrator should take (send a personalized email, connect with them on LinkedIn, send a LinkedIn DM).

2. AI Chat

AI Chat will automatically engage your website visitors by firing a contextual message.

This way, you’ll ensure that no potential leads fall through the cracks just because no sales rep was available to take care of them at the right time.

You can instruct it to:

  1. Engage all website visitors.
  2. Only visitors that land on high-intent pages or match other relevant criteria.

In addition to chatting leads up, the AI Chat can also:

  • Answer their questions.
  • Book meetings.
  • Offer collaterals like case studies, playbooks, interactive product tours, etc.

Having AI Chat to engage website visitors lets your sales reps focus only on matters that demand their attention, such as nurturing hot leads and closing more deals.

3. Lead routing

Finally, Warmly lets you automate lead routing to ensure that every valuable lead is assigned to the most appropriate sales rep.

You can set up Slack notifications that will alert a specific rep based on the criteria you specify whenever:

  • A high-intent lead or lead that matches your ICP lands on your website.
  • A lead asks a high-intent question in the chatbot or requires to speak with an actual human.
  • A website visitor takes any other relevant action that qualifies them as a potentially warm lead.

The rep can take it from there, engaging leads via one of Warmly’s live engagement features.

Feature #3: Live engagement

Although automation can efficiently handle quite a few sales processes, it can’t replace the good old human touch when it comes to especially delicate operations such as lead nurturing and conversion.

This is why Warmly lets you engage leads straight from your website via:

  1. Text chat.
  2. Live video call.

In the “Warm Calls” section of Warmly’s dashboard, you’ll find all the visitors surfing your website in real-time.

Clicking on a visitor will reveal their enriched profile (B2B information and intent data) and let you tune into their web session and monitor how they interact with your website.

Once reps assess that a visitor is qualified enough, they can:

  1. Send a personalized chat message, making it clear that they’re a real human.
  2. Initiate a video call.

Check out our Warm Calls best practices to ensure high response rates.

Pricing

Warmly offers a free forever plan that lets you reveal up to 500 people and companies visiting your website. It’s the perfect plan for getting a taste of one of the platform’s essential features.

If you expect higher traffic volumes and need additional features, you can upgrade to one of three premium tiers:

  1. Startup: $700/mo, includes 3 users, up to 10,000 monthly visitors.
  2. Business: From $1,440 to $1,740 per month, depending on the number of visitors you expect to have. It includes 10 seats.
  3. Enterprise: Custom plan. Created for users with an estimated traffic of 100,000+ visitors per month who need more customization. Includes 20 seats, advanced AI personalization, custom integrations, etc.

Note: All paid plans provide access to all of Warmly’s features and include deep integrations with data tools such as Clearbit, Bombora, and 6Sense, allowing you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

Integrations 

Warmly integrates with OpenAI and most modern SEP and CRM software, in addition to the data solutions mentioned above, allowing it to easily fit into any business’s tech stack.

How does Warmly compare to RocketReach?

RocketReach focuses on one use case.

Warmly is a more versatile solution that helps you manage the entire sales pipeline - from lead generation and initial outreach to lead engagement and conversion.

Also, it’s worth noting that RocketReach charges a hefty price considering its offering and keeps its best features behind a paywall.

Warmly, on the other hand, includes all features in every pricing tier, allowing businesses of all sizes to make the most of its capabilities.

Furthermore, while Warmly reveals website-generated leads and provides accurate B2B contact information paired with first and third-party intent data, RocketReach delivers only third-party intent and essential B2B data with varying accuracy rates.

Finally, RocketReach’s Chrome extension and static B2B database make it a better option than Warmly if you’re looking for a solution that can help you handle prospecting on multiple web channels (LinkedIn and company websites).

However, if you want a more complete sales solution optimized for enhancing website lead generation and conversions, then Warmly is your best pick.

Sounds like you? Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and try it out for size.

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies companies and individuals visiting your website.

✅ Enriches each identified lead with detailed B2B intelligence.

✅ Reveals buying intent data.

✅ Sales engagement and orchestration options.

✅ Includes all features in all paid plans.

✅ Integrates with several lead and sales intelligence solutions, enabling you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

❌ Only annual pricing options.

❌ No static B2B database.

2. Apollo 

Best for: Managing the entire sales funnel.

Apollo is a B2B sales intelligence and engagement platform with a vast B2B contact database.

It boasts a wide range of features for streamlining various sales processes, from prospect engagement to booking meetings, making it a good RocketReach alternative for more advanced users.

Features

Apollo.io, a full-stack sales tech platform, bags $100M at a $1.6B  valuation | Medial
  • B2B database with 275M contacts and 73M companies with solid international coverage.
  • Robust analytics dashboards and reports for tracking sales performance.
  • Lets you create automated and semiautomated outreach sequences across email, LinkedIn, and phone.

Who is it for?

Sales teams that want to handle the entire sales cycle from a single platform.

Pricing

Apollo has a free forever plan that includes unlimited email finder credits, 5 phone number credits, and 10 contact export credits.

If you need more, you can upgrade to one of three paid plans:

  1. Basic: $59 per user per month
  2. Professional: $99 per user per month
  3. Organization: $149 per user per month

Professional and Basic plans offer a 14-day free trial.

Pros & Cons

✅ Strong filtering and overall prospecting capabilities.

✅ Versatile functionality.

❌ Dual credit system (one credit is spent for revealing an email address and another for the phone number of the same contact), meaning the costs can easily add up.

❌ Issues with finding accurate phone numbers.

3. Lead411 

Best for: Getting verified and up-to-date B2B contact data.

Lead411 is a B2B sales leads database that stands out from similar platforms due to its multi-step data verification that ensures high accuracy rates.

It provides good value for money compared to RocketReach and is one of the more affordable solutions on our list.

Features

  • Triple-verifies each data point, running it through its algorithm, AI engine, and human verification process and reverifies the entire database every 90 days.
  • Lead scoring that leverages growth intent data enables you to quickly find and prioritize high-intent accounts that match your ICP.
  • Lets you create multichannel outreach sequences.

Who is it for?

Smaller businesses and startups that need a good B2B database and solid outreach features but don’t want to break the bank.

Pricing

Lead411 has a 7-day free trial with 50 data exports.

Once it expires, you can upgrade to one of two plans:

  1. Basic Plus Unlimited: $99 per user per month
  2. Enterprise Limited: Custom pricing

You’ll get a few extra options if you opt for annual billing. In addition to getting a discount on the Basic Plus Unlimited Plan, you can also subscribe to:

  1. Pro with Bombora Intent: Custom pricing 
  2. Unlimited: Custom pricing

While all of Lead411’s plans include a decent range of features, if you want the most advanced functionality, such as Bombora intent data or automatic CRM enrichment, you’ll have to subscribe to one of its highest tiers.

Pros & Cons

✅ Good data accuracy.

✅ User-friendly interface.

❌ Limited filtering capabilities.

❌ Regions apart from the US, Canada, and EU are poorly covered.

4. UpLead 

Best for: Verifying email addresses in real-time.

UpLead is a B2B database that finds and verifies email addresses in real-time, providing higher accuracy rates than RocketReach.

It also has a Chrome extension that allows users to find contact data on LinkedIn and B2B websites.

Features

  • Tracks 155M+ individual contacts and 16M+ company profiles.
  • Real-time email address verification to ensure you’ll get only accurate addresses.
  • Data enrichment with 50+ relevant B2B attributes.

Who is it for?

Sales teams that need a large database of verified email addresses.

Pricing

UpLead has a 7-day free trial with 5 credits for revealing a contact or exporting it.

After the trial expires, there are 3 plans to choose from:

  1. Essentials: $99 per user per month with 170 monthly credits
  2. Plus: $199 per user per month with 400 monthly credits
  3. Professional: Custom pricing

Since the paid plans offer limited reveal/export credits, you’ll probably have to buy more. One extra credit costs $0.60 per credit on the Essentials plan and $0.50 on the Plus plan.

Pros & Cons

✅ One credit unlocks both the email address and the phone number of an account, so you won’t have to spend two to reveal the entire contact profile.

✅ Tracks 16,000 technology data points, providing deep insights into a company’s tech stack.

❌ The best features, such as buyer intent data and advanced filtering, are available only on the Professional plan.

❌ Limited international coverage.

5. Cognism 

Best for: Finding B2B data for international contacts.

Cognism is a sales intelligence platform with a solid database of GDPR-compliant data.

Cognism might be the best RocketReach alternative in the contact data provider category if you aim to cover international markets.

Features

  • B2B database with 70M verified mobile phone numbers (47 million cell phone numbers in the US alone) and global data coverage.
  • Provides phone-verified mobile numbers for best accuracy in some of its data packages.
  • Several CRM enrichment options for keeping your data accurate and up-to-date.

Who is it for?

Larger businesses that run sales operations across borders.

Pricing

Cognism doesn’t have one-size-fits-all pricing packages. Instead, the price is tailored to each customer’s needs.

However, there are several things we can tell you about the price:

  • There are two types of data to choose from: Platinum and Diamond, with the latter being more accurate as it goes through several verification layers.
  • Each plan has a flat platform fee that includes support, maintenance, onboarding, and initial setup. 

For more details, it’s best to contact its sales team.

Pros & Cons

✅ Global data coverage with high matching rates.

✅ More verified phone numbers than most B2B contact data providers.

❌ Opaque pricing.

❌ You need a more advanced data package to access phone-verified phone numbers.

6. Keyplay 

Best for: Finding companies that fit your ICP by setting up custom scoring and qualification systems.

Keyplay is best known for enabling users to create custom lead scoring and qualification models without using code.

This makes it an ideal RocketReach alternative for building highly targeted lead lists and prioritizing surging accounts.

Features

  • AI Lookalike helps you find potential leads that match your best-performing clients and deals.
  • Provides a wide range of advanced filters for highly specific searches, including online presence, tech stack, recruiting velocity, industry categories, etc.
  • Enables you to define your unique ICP scoring based on the signals and criteria relevant to your business and target market.

Who is it for?

Account-based sales and marketing teams that need to discover ideal accounts and prioritize the ones most likely to convert.

Pricing

Keyplay has a free forever plan that provides access to its basic features. Moreover, subscribing to the PeerSignal community lets you access a more limited number of records. 

If you need more records and additional features, you can upgrade to one of two paid plans:

  1. Growth: $12,000/year
  2. Scale: Custom pricing

Pros & Cons

✅ Advanced filtering options.

✅ Lets you track custom signals relevant to your ICP and business objectives.

✅ Enables you to create custom ICP scoring systems to easily identify matching companies.

❌ Offers only annual paid plans.

❌ Integrates with just two CRMs.

7. Hunter 

Best for: Finding email addresses and automating email outreach.

Hunter helps you find verified B2B email addresses and lets you set up email cadences that run on autopilot.

Its solid accuracy rates and automated outreach options make it a good alternative to RocketReach.

Features

  • Lets you find qualified leads in its database by applying your ICP attributes.
  • Domain Search allows you to find who to contact within a company by unearthing publicly available email addresses of key stakeholders.
  • Enables you to create, personalize, schedule, and send targeted email campaigns on scale.

Who is it for?

B2B sales and marketing teams that mostly rely on cold email outreach to find leads.

Pricing

Hunter has a free plan with 25 email search credits and 50 verification credits.

If you need more than that, you can subscribe to one of three paid plans:

  1. Starter: €49 per month, includes 3 email accounts, additional account is €10/mo
  2. Growth: €149 per month, includes 10 email accounts, additional account is €10/mo
  3. Business: €499 per month, includes 20 email accounts, additional account is €10/mo

The plans differ in the number of email search and verification credits and the number of prospects you can include per campaign.

Pros & Cons

✅ Easy to use.

✅ Provides an all-in-one email solution in a single platform.

❌ Limited functionality and use cases.

❌ The costs can quickly skyrocket, especially for bigger teams.

8. Adapt 

Best for: Precision targeting of companies within a specific industry.

Adapt lets you run company searches based on their industry and helps you identify high-growth companies by revealing key growth signals.

It’s a good RocketReach alternative if your ideal prospects are in a niche vertical.

Features

  • Tracks more than 3,000 industries and has a B2B database with 250M+ verified contacts.
  • Enriches data with 50+ B2B attributes.
  • Advanced filtering for targeted prospecting, including funding insights, job change alerts, etc.

Who is it for?

Teams that need to drill down on leads in specific verticals.

Pricing

Adapt has a free plan with 25 email credits, 25 enrichment credits, and 25 contacts per day.

For more credits and features, you can sign up for one of three plans:

  1. Starter: $49 per month
  2. Basic: $99 per month 
  3. Custom: Custom pricing

Pros & Cons

✅ Robust technographic filters.

✅ User-friendly interface.

❌ Phone credits available only on the two most expensive plans.

❌ No outreach and engagement options.

9. Kaspr

Best for: Simple and affordable LinkedIn prospecting.

Kaspr is a Chrome extension built to retrieve contact info from LinkedIn.

It also offers options for connecting and engaging prospects from its dashboard, giving it an edge over RocketReach.

Features

  • Has a solid database of verified emails and phone numbers (500M+).
  • Scrapes prospect data from anywhere on LinkedIn (search results, groups, posts, etc.).
  • Enables automating LinkedIn outreach, including sending connection requests and personalized DMs.

Who is it for?

Small B2B sales teams whose main prospecting channel is LinkedIn.

Pricing

Kaspr has a free forever plan with:

  • Unlimited email credits
  • 5 phone credits
  • 5 direct email credits, and
  • 10 export credits

It has three plans for users who want more:

  1. Starter: Starting at $49/user/mo
  2. Business: Starting at $79/user/mo
  3. Organization: Starting at $99/user/mo

Every plan includes unlimited B2B email discovery, but there are differences in the number of direct email, phone number, and export credits. 

The plans also differ in features and customization options.

All plans are annual.

Pros & Cons

✅ User-friendly interface.

✅ Easily integrated with CRM tools.

❌ Can get your LinkedIn account flagged and suspended for suspicious activity.

❌ Limited to LinkedIn-based prospecting and lead generation.

Next Steps: Choose the Ideal RocketReach Alternative for Your Use Case

Every platform on our list is there for a reason, as they’re all good at what they do.

However, as shown above, each has a specific use case at which it excels, so it’s best to focus on platforms that:

  1. Are geared toward your outreach channel or specific target market.
  2. Offer the tools you need the most for your use case.

If your website is your primary lead generation channel, look no further than Warmly - the solution built to discover qualified leads on your website and help you convert them.

The best way to find out if Warmly is right for you?

Sign up for its free plan and take it for a test ride - no strings attached.

Or, if you’d like to see it in live action first, book a personalized demo with our team.

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Best 12 Lead Intelligence Software in 2024

Best 12 Lead Intelligence Software in 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

If you want to crush your lead generation goals, there are several questions you need to answer:

  1. Who are your leads?
  2. What problems are they looking to solve?
  3. Where can you find them?
  4. How can you contact them?
  5. When is the best time to reach out?

However, this is no easy task, given that everyone competes to get your leads’ attention on every channel.

This is exactly why you need lead intelligence software. It can help answer all these questions quickly and accurately, allowing you to run high-performing lead-generation campaigns at scale.

We researched and tested dozens of lead intelligence platforms firsthand, interviewed real users, and reviewed user reviews on reputable software rating sites, resulting in this detailed list of the 12 best lead intelligence software.

But first, let’s look at some factors you should consider when deciding.

What Makes a Good Lead Intelligence Tool?

🏆 Is the data high-quality and accurate?

This one’s a no-brainer - the whole point of getting a lead intelligence tool is to access relevant, accurate, and up-to-date data on your leads.

Look for tools with high accuracy, matching rates, and regular data updates for the best results.

🏆 Are features complementing your stack?

Some are designed for highly specific use cases and target markets, while others provide more versatile possibilities.

Evaluate each tool you consider against your unique needs to find the best match.

🏆 Will Sales love it or hate it?

Sales and marketing people use lead intelligence software.

By default, they’re not the most technical user type, so try to find a tool that won’t require months of training and frequent sessions with its customer support team later.

🏆 Can cost scale without surprises?

Does the lead intelligence tool you’re interested in have transparent pricing? 

Does it include all its features in its regular pricing packages, or do you have to pay extra for add-ons?

How do costs scale when higher volumes?

These questions can help you determine whether a lead intelligence platform is worth it.

🏆 Does it play well with others? 

Make sure that the tool you choose fits in well with your existing tech stack and has the out-of-the-box integrations you need to get going.

What Is the Best Lead Intelligence Software in 2024?

1. Warmly - Reveals leads on your website and enriches them with B2B and intent data.

2. Clay - Waterfall lead enrichment

3. Zoominfo & Apollo.io - All-in-one sales platforms with large B2B databases.

4. Bombora - Intent data provider.

5. 6Sense - Identifies accounts most likely to convert right now.

6. Clearbit - HubSpot native lead intelligence data provider.

7. Cognism - Lead and sales intelligence solution with international data coverage.

8. Dealfront - B2B database and website traffic tracking platform built for the European market.

9. LeadIQ - B2B prospecting and lead intelligence solution that tracks key leads and data in real time.

10. BuiltWith - Provides technographic lead intelligence.

11. CrystalKnows - Analyzes leads’ personality profiles, allowing you to create tailored sales strategies.

1. Warmly

Disclaimer: Although Warmly is our solution, we reviewed it as objectively as any other lead intelligence platform on our list. We included it here because we’re confident it will be the perfect match for some of you.

Warmly is a website traffic deanonymization platform that goes beyond just revealing the companies that land on your website.

It enriches all identified visitors - companies and individuals alike - with granular data that lets you recognize who your hottest leads are right now.

The signal-based revenue orchestration platform also enables you to automate outreach, prospecting, and lead engagement by leveraging the buying signals and data it picked up.

However, three features stand out the most in the context of lead intelligence.

Feature #1: Identifies website visitors

Your company website is a potentially rich source of qualified leads, as it’s likely that the individuals and businesses visiting it are interested in your offering.

Warmly lets you tap into that lead pool by identifying website visitors.

Unlike similar software, Warmly uncovers both companies and individuals, revealing the name and LinkedIn contact of actual stakeholders.

Just paste a snippet of Warmly’s code into your website to start revealing website visitors, and watch as the platform identifies anonymous visitors in minutes.

Pro tip: Add Warmly’s code snippet to email campaigns to track leads that come to your website through them. This improves marketing attribution and lets you identify warm leads more easily.

Feature #2: Enriches visitors with B2B intelligence

Warmly provides essential B2B intelligence on each identified visitor, including:

  1. Contact details (company names, phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, LinkedIn profiles, etc.).
  2. Firmographic data (industry, size, employee count, location, and other company details).
  3. Technographic data (software tools and technology a company uses).
  4. CRM data (ongoing and closed deals, account owners, previous interactions with your sales professionals, etc.).
  5. SEP data (engagement with other sales and marketing campaigns, chatbot interactions, etc.).

With this data at hand, you’ll be able to:

  • Contact leads.
  • Identify buying committees and key stakeholders.
  • Assess how well your solution fits in with the technology the lead is already using.
  • Tailor your approach based on previous interactions.

Feature #3: Reveals buying intent data

In addition to B2B intelligence, Warmly uncovers buyer intent insights that tell you who your hottest leads are right now.

It reveals two types of buyer intent data:

➡️ ‎ First-party intent data (buying signals coming from leads’ interactions with your website) that includes:

  • Pages they visited, with a focus on high-intent pages (e.g., pricing, specific features, comparison with competitors, etc.).
  • Time spent on each page.
  • The content they downloaded (such as whitepapers, playbooks, etc.) or forms they filled out.
  • High-intent questions they asked the chatbot.

➡️ ‎ Third-party intent data (buying signals they left on other places on the web), such as:

  • Recently researched topics.
  • Job change intent.
  • Visits to competitors’ websites.
  • Interactions with ads and social media posts.

Such actionable lead intelligence can significantly improve your conversion rates by enabling sales reps to:

  • Identify leads most likely to buy at this moment.
  • Personalize their approach using the data Warmly revealed.
  • Find the perfect time to reach out to specific leads.

Pricing

Warmly offers a free forever plan that lets you reveal up to 500 people and companies visiting your website. 

If you expect higher traffic volumes and need more functionality, you can upgrade to one of three paid options:

  1. Startup: $700/mo, includes 3 users, up to 10,000 monthly visitors.
  2. Business: From $1,440 to $1,740 per month, depending on the number of visitors you expect to have. It includes 10 seats.
  3. Enterprise: Custom plan. Created for users with an estimated traffic of 100,000+ visitors per month who need more customization. Includes 20 seats, advanced AI personalization, custom integrations, etc.

Note: All paid plans provide access to all of Warmly’s features and include deep integrations with lead intelligence tools such as Clearbit, Bombora, and 6Sense, allowing you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

Integrations 

Warmly integrates with OpenAI and most modern SEP and CRM software, in addition to the data solutions we mentioned above.

As a result, Warmly will easily fit into various tech stacks.

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies companies and individuals visiting your website.

✅ Enriches each identified lead with detailed B2B intelligence.

✅ Reveals buying intent data.

✅ Sales engagement and orchestration options.

✅ Includes all features in all paid plans.

✅ Integrates with several lead and sales intelligence solutions, enabling you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

❌ Only annual pricing options.

2. Clay

Best for: Dynamic lead enrichment.

Clay is a waterfall data enrichment solution that collects and cross-references data from 50+ sources, providing high accuracy rates.

It can be used to find B2B contact data as well as other relevant data attributes, such as tech stacks, job openings, etc.

Features

  • Provides multiple data waterfalls for looking up various data across sources, such as contact information, company news, industry, leads’ social media profiles, etc.
  • Artificial Intelligence-powered web scraper Claygent that you can train to do detailed lead research anywhere on the web.
  • Automatic CRM enrichment.

Who is it for?

Clay is best suited for GTM leaders and revenue teams that need accurate B2B contact data and other types of lead intelligence.

Pricing

Clay has a free forever plan that provides 90 monthly search credits and limited access to its essential features.

If you need more, you can choose from 4 paid plans:

  1. Starter: $149-$229/mo
  2. Explorer: $349-$699/mo
  3. Pro: $800-$2,000/mo
  4. Enterprise: Custom pricing

A 14-day free trial lets you try Clay’s Pro plan.

Pros & Cons

✅ Compares data from dozens of sources to find the right match, ensuring high accuracy rates.

✅ Solid number of CRM integrations.

❌ Complex user interface, not suitable for sales and marketing reps.

❌ The costs can add up quickly.

3. Zoominfo & Apollo

Best for: Getting lead intelligence and options for managing the entire sales cycle.

Both Zoominfo and Apollo are popular sales tools best known for their massive B2B contact database and a wide range of sales pipeline management options.

This is why we chose to showcase them together. They’re fairly similar, and it's just a matter of nuances deciding which is better for you.

Apollo and Zoominfo are good choices if you’re looking for a solution that offers lead intelligence, sales engagement, and automation.

Features

Zoominfo

  • Large B2B databases with over 260M professional and 100M company profiles and 135M verified phone numbers.
  • Identifies companies visiting your website.
  • Tracks buying intent signals, such as researched topics and keywords relevant to your business.

Apollo

Apollo.io, a full-stack sales tech platform, bags $100M at a $1.6B  valuation | Medial
  • B2B database with 275M contacts and 73M companies and solid international coverage.
  • Versatile filtering options to drill down on leads who match your Ideal Customer Profile the best.
  • Apollo Chrome extension for unearthing lead intelligence anywhere on the web.

Who are they for?

Both solutions are best suited for medium-sized and large businesses looking for vast B2B databases and versatile functionality that lets them handle the entire sales process from a single platform. 

Pricing

Zoominfo has separate plans for Sales, Marketing, and Talent teams.

No prices are disclosed, so you’ll have to contact its sales team for a custom quote.

The final price depends on:

  • Features and functionality you need.
  • Number of licenses.
  • Credit usage.
  • Other factors.

On the other hand, Apollo has a free forever plan that includes unlimited email finder credits, 5 phone number credits, and 10 contact export credits.

If you need more, you can upgrade to one of three paid plans:

  1. Basic: $59 per user per month
  2. Professional: $99 per user per month
  3. Organization: $149 per user per month

Professional and Basic plans come with a 14-day free trial.

Pros & Cons

✅ Both platforms have large B2B databases with good matching rates.

✅ Both offer a wide range of features for sales management across levels.

❌ Both are expensive. (Apollo has a dual credit system, meaning you spend one credit for revealing an email address and another for getting a phone number).

❌ Zoominfo doesn’t cover regions other than North America well and can’t identify individual-level website visitors.

❌ Apollo has issues with finding accurate phone numbers.

4. Bombora

Best for: Revealing buying intent signals across the web.

Bombora is an intent data provider that tracks leads’ digital journeys across 5,000+ B2B websites to help you understand what they’re looking for and how ready they are to convert.

Many platforms, like Warmly, embed Bombora to provide their clients with quality intent data combined with their native capabilities for the best results.

Features

  • Tracks more than 5,000 premium B2B websites, 86% of which are exclusively covered by Bombora.
  • Market Insights that visualizes the intent data the platform revealed, delivering actionable and easy-to-navigate intelligence reports.
  • Identifies and tracks 15,000+ B2B intent topics.

Who is it for?

Businesses of various sizes that want to make data-driven sales decisions by being enabled to recognize and prioritize the hottest leads easily.

Pricing

Bombora chose not to publish prices or details about its packages.

You can request a demo or contact its sales for more details.

Note: Integration with Bombora is included in all of Warmly’s paid plans.

Pros & Cons

✅ Tracks a wide range of intent topics and has high accuracy rates.

✅ Robust integrations with numerous sales and marketing tools.

❌ Its reports are somewhat unintuitive.

❌ Judging by user reviews, it’s expensive, especially for smaller teams.

5. 6Sense

Best for: Building highly-targeted data-driven lead lists.

6Sense provides a vast database of B2B contact data in addition to collecting intent data.

This combination makes it ideal for creating lead lists, uncovering accounts that exhibit the most interest in your offering, and tailoring your sales efforts accordingly.

Features

  • Tracks 65M+ companies, 600M+ buyer profiles, and 35K+ technologies.
  • Detects website intent and connects it with the rest of the visitor’s customer journey online, enabling you to recognize leads most likely to convert based on their level of intent.
  • Predictive analytics identifies the leads most likely to convert right now.

Who is it for?

Sales, GTM, and account-based marketing teams that need to accurately identify the hottest leads and figure out the best way to convert them.

Pricing

6Sense has a free plan with 50 credits for accessing its database and limited functionality.

You can upgrade to one of three plans for additional features:

  1. Team
  2. Growth
  3. Enterprise

6Sense doesn’t disclose prices for any of the plans.

Note: 6Sense is one of the data solutions included in Warmly’s premium plans.

Pros & Cons

✅ Has advertising capabilities, letting you build targeting and retargeting campaigns based on its intent data.

✅ Insightful and actionable data.

❌ Unintuitive interface.

❌ Expensive.

6. Clearbit

Best for: HubSpot data enrichment.

Clearbit is a real-time data enrichment tool that pulls data from over 250 proprietary and external sources and translates it into 90+ B2B attributes for individual and company profiles.

Since HubSpot acquired it last year, some of its features have been discontinued, and the data solution has become primarily geared toward HubSpot lead and data enrichment.

Features

  • Real-time data enrichment with over 100 B2B attributes aggregated from 250+ data sources, providing an in-depth view of leads’ vital data.
  • Automatically refreshes HubSpot records as soon as a relevant data change occurs.
  • Instant lead scoring and routing thanks to granular industry categorization, corporate hierarchies, job roles, seniority tags, etc.

Who is it for?

Clearbit is a good option for HubSpot users who need detailed lead intelligence and want to keep their CRM data fresh and accurate.

Also, if you want to improve a SaaS product by embedding a rich B2B database, Clearbit might be a good choice because it can be white-labeled. 

Pricing

Clearbit doesn’t disclose prices, meaning you’ll have to contact its team for accurate pricing details.

The volume-based plan can include add-on packages like Forms, Advertising, and Capture. (The add-ons are probably charged extra).

Remember that Warmly's pricing tiers include access to Clearbit’s vast B2B contact and intent data database.

Pros & Cons

✅ Accurate data.

✅ Integrates with various platforms and CRMs.

✅ User-friendly.

❌ Opaque pricing.

❌ Some of its features are available only as add-ons that are charged extra.

❌ Uncertain future as part of the HubSpot family.

7. Cognism

Best for: Uncovering intelligence on international leads.

Cognism is best known for its large B2B database with good international coverage.

If your business operates internationally, Cognism might be a good choice for gathering relevant lead data.

Features

  • B2B database with 70M verified mobile phone numbers (47 million cell phone numbers in the US alone) and global data coverage.
  • Offers phone-verified mobile numbers in some of its packages, ensuring 100% accuracy.
  • Chrome extension for pulling lead intelligence from LinkedIn and LinkedIn Sales Navigator search results.

Who is it for?

Large teams that run sales and marketing operations on an international market.

Pricing

Cognism doesn’t have one-size-fits-all pricing packages. Instead, the price is tailored to each customer’s needs.

However, there are several things we do know regarding the price packages:

  • There are two types of data to choose from: Platinum and Diamond, with the latter being more accurate as it goes through several verification layers.
  • The price comes with a flat platform fee that includes support, maintenance, onboarding, and initial setup. 

For more details, it’s best to contact its sales team.

Pros & Cons

✅ Global data coverage with high matching rates.

✅ Chrome extension for LinkedIn sales prospecting.

✅ More verified phone numbers than most lead intelligence tools.

❌ Complex pricing.

❌ Phone-verified mobile numbers are available only on its most expensive data package.

8. Dealfront

Best for: Finding relevant lead intelligence for European-based leads.

Dealfront is a B2B lead intelligence tool built for sales and marketing teams focused on the European market.

The platform was born through the merger of Echobot (sales intelligence software) and Leadfeeder (website visitor identification software), combining their key features into a single solution.

Features

  • Provides data on 40M+ companies and 180M+ contacts, with 30M+ companies and 83M+ contacts in Europe alone.
  • In-depth data from specific European regions, such as DACH, Benelux, Nordics, etc.
  • Lets you set up alerts to follow relevant changes in key leads’ profiles, such as changes in management, increases in employee count, mergers and acquisitions, etc.

Who is it for?

Sales and marketing teams whose leads are mostly located in Europe. 

Pricing

Dealfront has separate pricing for its sales intelligence and website traffic deanonymization.

Its sales intelligence plan does not have flat fees, so you’ll need to contact its team for precise pricing details.

When it comes to website visitor identification, there’s a limited free plan that only lets you identify up to 100 anonymous website visitors per month, omitting all other Dealfront features.

The paid plan starts at €99 per month, with the final price depending on the number of identified companies.

You also get 25 free credits for revealing contact details like email addresses and phone numbers. If you exceed the limit, you’ll pay extra.

The website visitor identification plan has a 14-day free trial.

Pros & Cons

✅ Solid international coverage.

✅ GDPR-compliant data.

❌ Separate and non-transparent pricing plans for sales intelligence and website visitor identification.

❌ Users report frequent inaccuracies with its website traffic deanonymization.

9. LeadIQ

Best for: Tracking high-value leads and potential sales triggers in real-time.

LeadIQ is a B2B lead intelligence platform that tracks buying signals and sales-relevant changes in your key leads’ accounts.

It has a solid range of CRM integrations, enabling seamless record enrichment.

Features

  • Covers millions of verified profiles, emails, and mobile numbers aggregated from various sources.
  • Lets you track real-time insights and changes in important prospects’ profiles, such as job changes, promotions, etc.
  • Chrome extension for 1-click LinkedIn prospecting.

Who is it for?

LeadIQ is geared toward smaller B2B teams looking to track buying signals and relevant account changes in real-time,and enrich their CRMs on autopilot.

Pricing

Lead IQ has a free forever plan that provides:

  • 20 verified work emails per week
  • 10 mobile phone numbers
  • 40 email generations per month
  • 10 accounts tracked

There are three paid plans for users who need more:

  1. Essential: $45 per user per month
  2. Pro: $89 per user per month
  3. Enterprise: Custom pricing, annual subscription only

Pros & Cons

✅ User-friendly interface.

✅ Lets you monitor relevant changes and other important factors, allowing you to pounce on leads while they’re still hot.

❌ Emphasis on North America, limited European coverage.

❌ Contact tracking is an add-on whose price starts at $5,000 per year.

10. BuiltWith

Best for: Finding out what tools and technology a lead uses.

BuiltWith reveals “what websites are built with,” i.e., provides deep insights into a company’s tech stack.

As a result, you’ll be able to find ICPs more easily and adjust your sales and marketing efforts based on what you know of each lead.

Features

  • Tracks 100,000+ web technologies and 670M+ websites, providing valuable insights into which sites use shopping carts, hosting, etc.
  • Lets you search for potential customers by applying various filters relevant to your business, such as specific keywords used on their website, industry, technology, revenue, and more.
  • Helps you find higher-quality leads by identifying B2B companies that use technologies similar to your best-performing records or companies that might benefit from your product.

Who is it for?

Given its wide range of features geared toward e-commerce, BuiltWith is best suited for e-commerce businesses looking to improve their lead generation process.

However, since the platform offers nuanced technology-based filtering, it can also be used by companies operating in a specific niche or offering a highly unique product.

Pricing

BuiltWith doesn’t have a free trial or a plan, meaning you have to subscribe to one of its three plans from the start:

  1. Basic: $295/mo
  2. Pro: $495/mo
  3. Team: $995/mo

Pros & Cons

✅ Solid data accuracy.

✅ Delivers a nearly 360-degree view of a company’s technology stack.

❌ Its most affordable plan is very limited, pushing you to upgrade.

❌ Limited to technographic data only.

11. CrystalKnows

Best for: Leveraging personality data to find quality leads, landing more qualified meetings, and getting more conversions.

CrystalKnows analyzes publicly available data points across the web to assess potential customers’ personality traits.

It provides insights into a person’s tolerance to risk, preferred way of communication, and more, allowing you to tailor your approach accordingly.

Features

  • Identifies your leads' personality and communication style, letting you understand what strategy and approach work best, the tone of voice, and even specific words you should use, etc.
  • Lets you build marketing segments based on personality traits, ensuring that your campaigns will resonate with your target audience without exception.
  • Chrome extension for uncovering personality insights while you surf LinkedIn.

Who is it for?

Can be used by sales and marketing teams of various sizes to create better-targeted and personalized experiences for potential customers.

It’s also suitable for internal use, as HR departments and team leaders use it to create best-performing teams.

Pricing

CrystalKnows offers a free trial with 5 profile credits and 5 assessments.

Once you spend those credits, you can upgrade to one of three plans:

  1. Premium: $49/mo, billed annually
  2. Business: Custom pricing
  3. Enrichment: Custom pricing

Pros & Cons

✅ Delivers actionable insights that enable personalization and customization.

✅ Nifty Chrome extension for pulling personality data from LinkedIn.

❌ Expensive.

❌ Personality assessments are not an exact science, so caution is advised.

Next Steps: Start Generating More Quality Leads Today

Now that you’ve read through this entire piece, a question remains:

Which lead intelligence software solution can boost your lead generation?

All the detailed information we provided is bound to help you decide, but the best way to know for sure whether a tool is suitable for your specific use case is to test it yourself.

While you’re here, you might as well start with Warmly, as it:

  • Identifies leads most likely to convert right on your website.
  • Provides options for engaging them while they’re still hot.
  • Includes several top-performing lead intelligence tools in its paid plans without extra costs.

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and unlock your website’s full lead generation potential.

Need more convincing? Book a live demo with our team and see Warmly in action first.


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Best 10 GTM Tools in 2024

Best 10 GTM Tools in 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

If you’re looking to introduce a new product or service into the market, there’s one thing you shouldn’t go without - a good set of GTM tools.

We tested hundreds of go-to-market tools, sifted through user reviews, and interviewed real users to find the best GTM products.

Consequently, we ranked the winners in each of the ten most important categories for go-to-market solutions.

We’ll break down each platform’s features, pros and cons, pricing, and more, giving you everything you need to make an informed decision 👇

Must-Have GTM Tooling

1. Signal-based GTM platforms - They help you uncover ICPs and the hottest leads in your marketing and lead generation channels.

2. Sales engagement solutions - They provide personalized engagement tools for tailoring your outreach strategy to every individual lead.

3. Data tools - They deliver the data you need to optimize your GTM approach based on your target market, ICP, etc.

4. Marketing operations solutions - They streamline customer journeys across channels.

5. Customer messaging tools - They let you build interactive messaging experiences for customers.

6. System of record platforms - They enable efficient data management.

7. CRM software - Allows you to manage all ongoing and prospective deals, alongside relevant customer data, from a single point of truth.

8. Attribution and analytics tools - These let you track the progress and performance of GTM campaigns.

9. Product adoption platforms - They enable you to track and improve product and feature adoption, provide personalized onboarding, and enhance overall customer experience.

10. Content creation software - Lets you create content optimized for raising product awareness and promoting it.

Factors to Consider when Buying a GTM Tool

Before we dive into the list, let’s quickly look into the features you should look for in go-to-market software to ensure that it’ll allow you to create and execute winning GTM strategies.

💡 ‎ Good scalability

If you choose the right tool, your business should grow and expand steadily, generating new leads and more conversions.

However, if scaling your business significantly increases the cost of your GTM tool - or it turns out that it can’t handle large data volumes - you’ll find yourself in quite a pickle.

Make sure that the tool you buy offers a wide range of features in its packages and doesn’t base its pricing on usage alone.

💡 ‎ Strong integration capabilities

GTM teams are composed of various professionals, including sales and marketing people, customer success representatives, and product managers.

To ensure seamless team collaboration, find a tool that plays well with other platforms these professionals use on a day-to-day basis, such as CRMs, SEPs, productivity software, etc. 

💡 ‎ Orchestration features

The fast-growing and ever-more competitive market demands speed and efficiency across levels.

To help your GTM team keep up with this fast-paced landscape and keep delivering excellent results, look for go-to-market strategy tools that can automate essential sales and marketing processes, such as outreach, follow-up campaigns, prospecting, etc.

What Are the Best GTM Tools in 2024?

1. Signal-based GTMWarmly - Reveals the hottest leads on your website and helps you convert them.

2. Sales engagement: Apollo.io - Sales engagement platform with a large B2B database for finding the contacts you need.

3. Data: Clay - Waterfall data enrichment solution.

4. Marketing operations: HubSpot - All-in-one marketing platform.

5. Customer messaging: Customer.io - Streamlines customer journeys across channels.

6. System of record: HubSpot - Lets you store all essential data on your product, customers, and prospects in one place.

7. Modern CRM: Attio - Highly customizable CRM platform.

8. Attribution and analytics: HockeyStack - AI-powered attribution platform that provides a holistic approach to customer journeys.

9. Product adoption: Appcues - Measures product adoption across web and mobile apps.

10. Content creation: Veed - User-friendly video content creator.

🥇 ‎ Signal-based GTM: Warmly

Click the image below for a tour of the Warmly platform 👇

First on our list is Warmly, which is the leading solution in the signal-based GTM category.

Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that identifies website visitors, enriches them with relevant data, and provides options for engaging them when they’re ripe for conversion.

Disclaimer: Warmly is our solution, but that doesn't change the fact that Warmly is the best platform for signal-based GTM on the market.

Want to try it firsthand instead? Try Warmly’s free plan and start generating new leads in minutes.

Let’s explore which features resonate most with GTM teams.

Feature #1: Reveal website traffic

Given that your website is the first thing most of your leads encounter when finding out or exploring your brand, having a website traffic tracking tool is something GTM teams shouldn’t forego.

Unlike most other website traffic identification tools that reveal only companies, Warmly can detect both businesses and individual prospects that land on your website.

The platform reveals about 65% of companies and 15% of individuals, which can be very helpful in finding the exact stakeholder you should reach out to when dealing with enterprise-level companies with hundreds of employees.

To start identifying website visitors, just paste Warmly’s code snippet on your site. 

The tool will reveal website visitors in minutes and let you monitor their web sessions in real time, enabling you to understand how they interact with your website.

This lets GTM teams track campaign performance, handle attribution, and tweak their strategies to drive more pipeline. 

Feature #2: Waterfall enrichment and buying signals

Warmly enriches each identified visitor with B2B data that lets you understand who they are, how to best engage to drive qualified conversations, etc.

This data includes:

  • Contact details (phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, etc.).
  • Firmographic data (industry, size, employee count, location, annual revenue, etc.).
  • Technographics (software tools and technology a business uses).
  • CRM data (account owners, ongoing and closed deals, previous interactions with your sales and marketing reps, etc.).
  • SEP data (e.g., interactions with certain marketing and sales campaigns).

In addition, Warmly detects buying signals that help you determine which website visitors are ready to buy right now and which need more coaxing.

It captures two types of buying signals:

💠 ‎‎ Signals coming from visitors’ interactions with your website, such as:

  • Pages they visited, with a focus on high-intent pages (e.g., pricing, specific features, comparison with competitors, etc.).
  • Time spent on each page.
  • High-intent questions they asked the chatbot.
  • The content they downloaded (such as whitepapers, playbooks, etc.) or forms they filled out.

💠 ‎‎2️⃣ ‎ Signals from third-party sources that indicate their readiness to buy, like:

  • Recently researched topics.
  • Interactions with ads and social media posts.
  • Job change intent.
  • Visits to competitors’ websites.

All of this combined provides you with a deeper understanding of:

➡️ ‎ Does your GTM strategies attract the right audiences?

➡️ ‎ How successful are they in pushing leads down the sales funnel?

➡️ ‎ Who are your hottest leads right now?

➡️ ‎ What’s the best way to engage?

Feature #3: Streamlines outreach

You can use Warmly picked up buyer intent signals to automate outreach and ensure that quality prospects won’t go under your sales reps’ radar.

Warmly’s Orchestrator takes care of that by adding specific website visitors to outreach sequences, such as:

  • Sending a personalized email.
  • Connecting with them on LinkedIn.
  • Sending a contextual DM on LinkedIn.
  • Combining all of the above.

You decide which companies and individuals will be added to these automated campaigns by setting up the criteria and signals you want the Orchestrator to monitor.

For example, you can:

  • Decide which action or signal will trigger the automation (e.g., a visitor lands on a high-intent page, such as pricing).
  • Set up company and individual-level filters (e.g., add only companies of a certain size or from a particular industry, focus on profiles with specific roles or seniority levels, etc.).
  • Choose the maximum number of people you want included in the sequence from each company.

Pricing

Warmly has a free forever plan that lets you reveal up to 500 people and companies visiting your website. It’s the perfect plan for getting a taste of one of the platform’s key features.

If you expect higher traffic volumes and need more advanced capabilities, you can upgrade to one of three paid options:

  1. Startup: $700/mo, includes 3 users, up to 10,000 monthly visitors.
  2. Business: From $1,440 to $1,740 per month, depending on the number of visitors you expect to have. It includes 10 seats.
  3. Enterprise: Custom plan. Created for users with an estimated traffic of 100,000+ visitors per month who need more customization. Includes 20 seats, advanced AI personalization, custom integrations, etc.

Note: All paid plans provide access to all of Warmly’s features and include deep integrations with powerful tools such as Clearbit, Bombora, and 6Sense, allowing you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

Integrations 

Warmly integrates with OpenAI and most modern SEP and CRM software, in addition to the data solutions we mentioned above, allowing it to easily fit into any business’s tech stack.

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies both companies and individual website visitors.

✅ Enriches each visitor with detailed B2B data.

✅ Detects intent signals across levels.

✅ Automates outreach.

✅ Includes all features in all paid plans.

✅ Deep integrations with data solutions enable you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

❌ Annual pricing only.

🥇 Sales Engagement: Apollo

Best for: Sales engagement.

Apollo is a go-to-market software platform optimized for sales engagement that lets you streamline a range of processes to help you land qualified meetings.

Its massive B2B database comes in handy as well, allowing you to find the contact info you need.

Features

Apollo.io, a full-stack sales tech platform, bags $100M at a $1.6B  valuation | Medial
  • International B2B database with 275M contacts and 73M companies.
  • Lets you build automated email sequences coupled with an AI-powered email writing assistant that generates personalized email copy.
  • Built-in dialer for making cold calls that automatically records, transcribes, and logs each call in your CRM.

Who is it for?

GTM teams looking for a powerful tool for handling sales engagement and other sales and marketing operations.

Pricing

Apollo has a free forever plan that includes unlimited email finder credits, 5 phone number credits, and 10 contact export credits.

If you need more, you can upgrade to one of three paid plans:

  1. Basic: $59 per user per month
  2. Professional: $99 per user per month
  3. Organization: $149 per user per month

Note: Professional and Basic plans come with a 14-day free trial.

Pros & Cons

✅ Lets you contact potential customers via email or phone straight from the platform.

✅ Automation capabilities.

❌ Dual credit system (you spend one credit for revealing an email address and another for getting a phone number), which scales badly.

❌ Issues with retrieving accurate phone numbers.

🥇 ‎ Data Tooling: Clay

Best for: Dynamic data enrichment.

Clay is a waterfall data enrichment solution that cross-references data from 50+ sources to find the right match.

This helps GTM teams save time on uncovering relevant data without compromising its quality and accuracy.

Features

  • Analyzes and cross-references 50+ data sources to find accurate matches, optimizing data coverage while saving time.
  • It can search for any data point besides basic B2B data, including job openings, tech stacks, funding rounds, etc.
  • Integrates with a solid number of CRM, enabling automated enrichment.

Who is it for?

GTM leaders who decide the criteria for lead enrichment, segmentation, and outreach, and GTM team members who implement them into their operations.

Pricing

Clay has a free forever plan that provides 90 monthly search credits and limited access to its essential features.

If you need more, you can choose from 4 paid plans:

  1. Starter: $149-$229/mo
  2. Explorer: $349-$699/mo
  3. Pro: $800-$2,000/mo
  4. Enterprise: Custom pricing

A 14-day free trial lets you try Clay’s Pro plan.

Pros & Cons

✅ Dynamic data enrichment, with data collected from dozens of sources.

✅ AI-powered assistant, Claygent, that scrapes the web for relevant data.

❌ Complex interface.

❌ The costs don’t scale that well.

🥇 ‎ Marketing Operations: HubSpot

Best for: Controlling all your marketing operations from a single platform.

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer service software platform designed to help businesses attract, engage, and nurture customers.

Its suite of marketing tools lets GTM teams streamline and optimize marketing processes.

Features

  • Lets you build personalized automated marketing workflows, including email campaigns and chatbot flows, and provides a wide range of triggers and filters.
  • AI-powered assistant that can generate marketing content and social media post captions, provide SEO recommendations, summarize customer-facing activities into actionable reports, etc.
  • Options for creating and tracking personalized ad campaigns, which let you target the right people across channels.

Who is it for?

Enterprises looking to run marketing campaigns on scale.

Pricing

HubSpot has a free plan with up to 5 users and limited access to its marketing tools.

If you want additional features and more users, you can upgrade to one of the following plans:

  1. Starter: Starts at $15/mo/seat
  2. Professional: Starts at $800/mo, includes 3 users, additional seats start from $45/mo
  3. Enterprise: $3,600/mo, includes 5 users, additional seats start from $75/mo

‎The total price depends on the number of users and monthly marketing contacts you need.

Pros & Cons

✅ Wide range of features for complete marketing management.

✅ Robust integrations with other CRMs, SEPs, and other relevant tools.

❌ Has a learning curve.

❌ Expensive for larger teams.

🥇 ‎ Customer Messaging: Customer.io

Best for: Providing personalized customer journeys across channels via compelling messaging.

Customer.io enables you to manage and tailor customer messages across web and mobile channels.

It's an excellent tool for customer retention, cross-selling and upselling, onboarding, and other customer interactions.

Features

  • Lets you personalize in-app customer journeys via push notifications and in-app messages, in addition to providing options for sending SMS and emails.
  • Leverages behavioral data to help you tailor each message for every individual customer.
  • Has an email coding interface that lets you further personalize email campaigns, control deliverability, collaborate with your entire team, etc.

Who is it for?

Customer.io is best suited for SMBs with a dedicated development team as more technical users will benefit the most from the platform’s versatile capabilities.

Pricing

Customer.io has three pricing plans for users who need its customer interaction capabilities:

  1. Essentials: Starts at $100/mo
  2. Premium: Starts at $1,000/mo, billed annually
  3. Enterprise: Custom pricing

The final price depends on the volume of profiles you want to contact and the number of emails you send per month.

Pros & Cons

✅ Visual workflow builder.

✅ Options for mobile customer engagement.

❌ The costs can quickly skyrocket.

❌ Geared toward more tech-savvy users, other user profiles will find it overwhelming.

🥇 ‎ System of Record: HubSpot

Best for: Providing a centralized source of truth for marketing and sales data.

In addition to streamlining marketing operations, HubSpot provides handy tools for syncing, cleaning, managing, and curating relevant customer and marketing data.

You can combine it with the marketing tool suite for a more thorough overview of campaign performance and customer-relevant data.

Features

  • Automatically cleans stale and inaccurate data and syncs quality data across apps.
  • Lets you set up custom roles and permissions, allowing the entire team to collaborate on vital processes.
  • Custom report builder pulls relevant data from HubSpot and integrated apps and delivers actionable insights.

Who is it for?

Businesses of all sizes that want a centralized view and control of relevant data and look to enable collaboration across operations, marketing, and sales teams.

Pricing

HubSpot Operations has a free plan that offers limited access to the platform’s functionalities.

When it comes to premium plans, there are three to choose from:

  1. Starter: Starts at $20/mo per user
  2. Professional: Starts at $800/mo, 1 user included
  3. Enterprise: Starts at $2,000/mo, 1 user included

Pros & Cons

✅ Good connectivity with various apps, allowing you to make a custom GTM tool ecosystem.

✅ Seamless data sync between apps, enabling efficient team collaboration and ensuring data freshness.

❌ Most advanced features are hidden behind a paywall.

❌ Requires technical expertise to master it.

🥇 ‎ Modern CRM Software: Attio

Best for: Data-driven customer relationship management.

Attio is a flexible and customizable CRM platform that can be tailored to any business’s unique data structure and needs.

It also lets the whole team collaborate on tasks, making it an excellent tool for customer relationship management for GTM teams.

Features

  • Lets you create custom fields, objects, and attributes, enabling you to fine-tune the platform to your use case and data structure.
  • Automatic record enrichment and 1-click relationship intelligence for every ongoing deal and customer.
  • Robust analytics reports that can be further customized, allowing you to drill down to the metrics that matter the most to your business.

Who is it for?

Companies of all sizes that need a customizable platform for handling customer-relevant data.

Pricing

Attio has a free plan that includes up to 3 seats and limited features.

For more, you can upgrade to one of three premium plans:

  1. Plus: $34 per user per month
  2. Pro: $69 per user per month
  3. Enterprise: $119 per user per month

All plans have no seat limits, meaning you can include as many team members as you want.

Pros & Cons

✅ Has a mobile app, allowing GTM teams to access it whenever and wherever.

✅ Intuitive and customizable interface that can fit into various teams’ needs and SOPs.

❌ Limited integrations with other sales and marketing platforms.

❌ It can get expensive for larger teams.

🥇 Attribution and analytics: HockeyStack

Best for: Marketing attribution and tracking KPIs.

HockeyStack is a marketing attribution platform that provides full visibility of your marketing funnel.

Its no-code interface is easy to implement into any system - although it has a slight learning curve - making it a favorite among GTM teams.

Features

  • Measures the influence of specific marketing activity on return on investment, conversions, demo bookings, etc., enabling you to understand what performs well and what needs improving.
  • Tracks the entire buyer journey across multiple touchpoints, matches each activity to revenue impact, and uncovers the influence marketing efforts had on outbound sales.
  • Uses AI models to measure, forecast, and predict contributions of individual marketing activities across channels.

Who is it for?

GTM teams of various sizes that want to closely monitor and understand the impact and performance of their marketing efforts across multiple channels.

Pricing

HockeyStack has 2 plans:

  1. Growth: $1,399 per month
  2. Enterprise: Custom price

The Enterprise tier offers options for adding custom features and add-ons, including forecasting, AI insights, ML-powered attribution, and more

Pros & Cons

✅ Robust analytics and forecasting features.

✅ Provides powerful insights that enable GTM teams to make data-driven decisions.

❌ Most of its best features are available as add-ons that are charged extra.

❌ Slow loading time for reports.

🥇 ‎ Product Adoption: Appcues

Best for: Measuring and improving product adoption.

Appcues lets you track and enhance product adoption on web and mobile apps without a developer.

This makes it a great addition to your GTM tool stack, allowing you to track and analyze product usage and create personalized user onboarding experiences without technical knowledge.

Features

  • Lets you create personalized onboarding flows and targeted checklists to shorten users’ time to value and reduce churn rates.
  • Enables you to enhance feature adoption through in-app walkthroughs and prompts, ensuring new and key features are used to their full potential.
  • Tracks key product events to help you measure overall product and feature adoption or how a specific persona or customer segment interacts with it.

Who is it for?

Non-technical product teams who want to understand and improve product adoption across levels.

Pricing

Appcues offers a 14-day free trial that lets you experience its interface and track up to five events. If you install its SDK, you can extend the trial by another 14 days.

Once the trial expires, you can subscribe to one of three paid options:

  1. Essentials: Starts at $249 per month, includes one app and 3 users
  2. Growth: Starts at $879 per month, also includes one app and 10 users
  3. Enterprise: Custom pricing, custom number of apps and users

The total cost will depend on the number of your product’s monthly users and the number of apps whose usage you want to monitor.

Pros & Cons

✅ Lets you target specific user segments with announcements, feature tours, surveys, etc.

✅ Can be used for mobile and web apps with equal ease.

❌ Limited customization options when it comes to creating surveys, announcements, etc.

❌ Can be difficult to navigate when handling larger projects.

🥇 ‎ Content Creation: Veed

Best for: Creating videos that convert.

Veed is an intuitive video editor that lets you create professional-looking videos regardless of your experience and expertise with video production.

It also offers a variety of AI-powered features, enabling many nifty tricks and effects.

Features

  • Magic Cut significantly reduces editing time by automatically cleaning up filler words, cutting out awkward silences, picking the best takes of different sequences, and merging them into one seamless video.
  • 50 pre-made AI avatars and options for creating custom ones with various genders, attires, personalities, and voices that you can easily add text to.
  • AI-powered video generator creates custom videos based on your prompts.

Who is it for?

GTM teams that rely on video content for marketing and don’t want to spend a fortune on creating and editing videos.

Pricing

Veed has 4 plans:

  1. Basic: $18 per user per month
  2. Pro: $30 per user per month
  3. Business: $70 per user per month (for up to 5 users)
  4. Enterprise: Custom pricing

There’s a free trial for prospective users of the Enterprise plan with a minimum of three users.

Pros & Cons

✅ Excellent transcription, caption, and subtitle capabilities.

✅ Easy to use.

❌ The costs can quickly add up if you want access to more advanced features.

❌ Issues with some of its tools like audio cleaning, background removal, auto voice translation, etc.

Next Steps: Enhance Your GTM Strategy Across Levels

All GTM tools that made it to our list will help you address a certain aspect of your GTM strategy, allowing you to get your product to market faster while making it more likely to appeal to your target customers.

Regardless of your unique GTM approach, however, you shouldn’t forget about your website.

It’s at the forefront of every sales and marketing effort and one of the first things prospects encounter, making it a powerful source of high-quality leads and a good starting point for GTM operations.

To ensure you’ll harness your website’s full potential, make Warmly one of the cornerstones of your GTM tool stack.

To get the hang of Warmly’s capabilities, sign up for its free plan and start revealing qualified visitors today.

Or, book a live demo to see it in action first.

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Best 11 Company Research Tools in 2024

Best 11 Company Research Tools in 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Show me your data, and I’ll show you how efficient your sales and marketing campaigns will be. 

Modern sales teams need the best company research solutions so that reps can know who to focus on and how to engage in a way that drives qualified meetings.

The landscape has evolved, so we explored dozens of popular B2B account platforms, testing them firsthand and interviewing real users. 

Solutions that can help you: 

  1. Discover companies that match your ICP.
  2. Enrich them with firmographics and intent data.
  3. Find the right contacts at those companies.
  4. Capture buying signals to help you understand how likely they are to want to buy your product (and why).
  5. Uncover other actionable insights that help reps craft tailored outbound strategies.

Below is the result of our search. The 11 best Company research tools for 2024.

We broke down each solution’s key features, strengths, weaknesses, price, etc.

Before we begin, a few pointers to help you make the best decision.

What Makes a Good Company Research Tool?

This question has no simple answer, as it all depends on your goals and requirements.

However, regardless of your specific use case, there are a few things to keep in mind when buying a company research tool.

1. Is it accurate and has the data coverage you need?

Some company research tools cover international data, while others focus on specific regions.

Make sure that the platform you choose is optimized for your market and the regions where most of your customers are based.

Also, high accuracy and matching rates are a must. There is nothing worse than a good campaign wasted on leads that have outdated information.

2. Can you filter records precisely enough?

Good filtering capabilities are vital for targeted company research, especially when dealing with more specific markets or ICPs.

This is especially important if you want to automate some of your processes without using generic criteria. 

Focus on tools that can be tailored to fit your needs and fine-tuned to your ICP.

3. Do you have the insights you need? 

Tools that go beyond basic B2B contact data can provide a huge competitive advantage.

For example, Keyplay (listed below) can tell you if an account has a free trial or a product tour available on their site, which can be used by reps to hyper-personalized campaigns and stand out from the noise

4. Can it power the rest of your tech stack?

Once prospecting accounts is done, you’ll likely want to do something with the accounts you’ve identified.

Make sure that your company research software connects easily with your existing stack.

5. Can it scale with you?

Look for a tool that:

  • Provides good value for money (e.g., includes a wide range of features regardless of your plan, has native integrations with various CRMs and SEPs, etc.).
  • Doesn’t break the bank at large data volumes.

For example, solutions like Dirft and Cognism start at appealing price points, but costs will rise exponentially as you scale.

Now that you’re equipped with all the basics, time to start reviewing our 11 best company research tools.

What Are the Best Company Research Tools in 2024?

1. Warmly - Reveals and enriches leads on your website.

2. Zoominfo - Sales operating system with a large B2B database.

3. Crunchbase - Vast database of private company data.

4. Cognism - Sales intelligence platform with international coverage.

5. UpLead - B2B database with email verification capabilities.

6. SalesIntel - B2B contact and intelligence provider with human-verified data.

7. LinkedIn Sales Navigator - Native LinkedIn prospecting solution with advanced filters.

8. Keyplay - Enriches contacts with relevant data and lets you set up custom lead scoring.

9. LeadIQ - B2B prospecting solution with real-time tracking of key accounts and data.

10. Apollo - Sales intelligence and engagement platform.

11. Dealfront - B2B database with GDPR-compliant data.

1. Warmly

Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that identifies website visitors, enriches them with granular data, and helps you convert them.

It has a wide range of features, including automated prospecting and outreach, live engagement capabilities, etc., but three features are vital in the context of efficient company research:

  1. Website traffic deanonymization.
  2. B2B data enrichment.
  3. Intent data enrichment.

Let’s break them down one by one.

Reveal accounts and leads visiting your site

When designed to attract your target audience, your website can be a rich source of potential customers.

You can use it to capture B2B accounts who come to you - as the fact they’re on your website alone can signal that they’re interested in your offering - instead of relying solely on outbound sales. It’s a must-have for any B2B sales strategy.

Warmly can reveal about 65% of companies and 15% of individuals that visit your website. Try it below ⬇️

As a result, your SDRs can design highly personalized outreach.

All it takes is pasting a snippet of Warmly’s code into your website, and new website-generated leads will start trickling down your pipeline in no time.

If you want to identify the companies that interacted with your cold email campaigns as well, you can add Warmly’s code to emails just as easily. 

Enrich visitors with B2B data

Warmly goes beyond basic website visitor identification, enriching each visitor with detailed B2B data, like:

  • Contact details (phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, etc.).
  • Firmographic data (industry, size, employee count, location, and other company data).
  • Technographic data (software tools and technology a company uses).
  • CRM data (ongoing and closed deals, account owners, previous interactions with your reps, etc.).
  • SEP data (engagement with other sales and marketing campaigns, chatbot interactions, etc.).
  • And more.

Leverage intent data and buying signals

Warmly comes included with 2 types of intent data.

Firstly, the platform delivers first-party intent data by monitoring how website visitors interact with your site, and capturing key buying signals such as:

  • Pages they visited, with a focus on high-intent pages (e.g., pricing).
  • Time spent on each page (the longer they stayed on high-intent pages, the better).
  • Asking high-intent questions in the chatbot.
  • Downloading relevant content (such as whitepapers, playbooks, etc.) or filling out forms.

In addition to monitoring website sessions, Warmly pulls third-party intent data from tools such as Bombora, 6Sense, HumanDataLabs, and more.

Insights like:

  • Recently researched topics on the web.
  • Interactions with ads and social media posts.
  • Job change intent.
  • Visits to competitors’ websites.

By uncovering both first- and third-party intent, you better understand which accounts are most likely to convert right now.

Moreover, this approach lets you qualify and score leads more accurately and efficiently allocate sales and marketing resources. Here’s one example ⤵️

Pricing

Warmly offers a free forever plan that lets you reveal up to 500 people and companies visiting your website. It’s the perfect plan for getting a taste of one of the platform’s key features.

If you expect higher traffic volumes and need more advanced capabilities, you can upgrade to one of three paid plans:

  1. Startup: $700/mo, includes 3 users, up to 10,000 monthly visitors.
  2. Business: From $1,440 to $1,740 per month, depending on the number of visitors you expect to have. It includes 10 seats.
  3. Enterprise: Custom plan. Created for users with an estimated traffic of 100,000+ visitors per month who need more customization. Includes 20 seats, advanced AI personalization, custom integrations, etc.

Note: All paid plans provide access to all of Warmly’s features and include deep integrations with sales intelligence tools such as Clearbit, Bombora, and 6Sense, allowing you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

Integrations 

In addition to these data platforms, Warmly integrates with OpenAI and most modern SEP and CRM software, which will easily fit into any business’s tech stack.

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies both companies and individual website visitors.

✅ Enriches each visitor with detailed B2B data.

✅ Reveals first- and third-party intent.

✅ Provides options for engaging and routing leads.

✅ Includes all features in all paid plans.

❌ Annual pricing only.

❌ No static B2B database.

2. Zoominfo

Best for: Finding North American B2B data.

Zoominfo is a sales operating system with a wide range of features for handling various sales processes, from prospecting to engagement.

It’s most widely known for its massive B2B database with solid accuracy rates.

Features

  • Large B2B database with over 260M professional and 100M company profiles and 135M verified phone numbers.
  • Provides detailed org charts for companies in its database to help you pinpoint vital stakeholders more easily.
  • Tracks buying intent signals, such as researched topics and keywords relevant to your business, letting you uncover potential customers.

Who is it for?

Enterprise-level businesses whose target market is primarily NAM-based.

Pricing

Zoominfo has separate plans for Sales, Marketing, and Talent teams.

No prices are disclosed, so you’ll have to contact its sales team for a custom quote.

The final price depends on:

  • Features and functionality you need.
  • Number of licenses.
  • Credit usage.
  • Other factors.

Pros & Cons

✅ Massive B2B database with good matching rates.

✅ CRM enrichment.

❌ Expensive.

❌ Regions outside of North America aren’t covered as well.

3. Crunchbase

Best for: Researching private company data, especially financial information.

Crunchbase has one of the largest B2B intelligence databases for private companies, with a special focus on financial data (funding rounds, investors, etc.).

This makes it a valuable tool not only for B2B sales and marketing teams but also for investors looking for good investment options or startups looking for eligible investors.

Features

  • Holds data on more than 2M companies.
  • Provides a wide range of valuable insights, from a company’s financial health to industry trends and good investment opportunities.
  • Browser extension for collecting data from company websites and LinkedIn search results.

Who is it for?

B2B teams that focus their sales and marketing efforts on the North American private sector.

Pricing

Crunchbase has 2 pricing packages:

  1. Pro: $99 per user per month when billed monthly or $49 on the annual plan
  2. Enterprise: Custom pricing

The Pro plan has a 7-day free trial.

Pros & Cons

✅ Accurate data.

✅ More detailed financial information than any other B2B database.

❌ Most of its data is on North American companies, EMEA is not covered that well.

❌ Real-time updates and automated CRM enrichment are available only on the Enterprise plan.

4. Cognism

Best for: International B2B sales prospecting.

Cognism boasts a solid database of B2B data with good international coverage.

This makes it a great option for conducting company research and finding relevant contact data for businesses worldwide.

Features

  • B2B database with 70M verified mobile phone numbers (47 million cell phone numbers in the US alone) and global data coverage.
  • Diamond Data Verification is used to verify phone numbers via calls, ensuring accuracy.
  • Several CRM enrichment options for keeping your data fresh and accurate.

Who is it for?

Large teams with an internationally based target audience.

Pricing

Cognism doesn’t have one-size-fits-all pricing packages. Instead, the price is tailored to each customer’s needs.

However, there are several things we can tell you about the price:

  • There are two types of data to choose from: Platinum and Diamond, with the latter being more accurate as it goes through several verification layers.
  • The price comes with a flat platform fee that includes support, maintenance, onboarding, and initial setup. 

For more details, it’s best to contact Cognism’s sales.

Pros & Cons

✅ Global data coverage with high matching rates.

✅ Chrome extension for LinkedIn prospecting.

✅ More verified phone numbers than most B2B intelligence tools.

❌ Non-transparent pricing.

❌ You need a more advanced data package to access phone-verified phone numbers.

5. UpLead

Best for: Real-time B2B email verification.

UpLead is a B2B database and business contact provider with a real-time email verifier and an email finder tool.

It also has a handy Chrome extension for 1-click prospecting and company research anywhere on the web.

Features

  • 155M+ B2B contacts with email addresses and 16M+ company profiles.
  • Real-time email address verification to ensure you’ll get only valid addresses.
  • Tracks 16,000 technology data points, providing insights into a company’s tech stack.

Who is it for?

Smaller teams who rely primarily on cold email outreach and need verified email addresses.

Pricing

UpLead has a 7-day free trial with 5 credits for revealing a contact or exporting it.

After the trial expires, there are 3 plans to choose from:

  1. Essentials: $99 per user per month with 170 monthly credits
  2. Plus: $199 per user per month with 400 monthly credits
  3. Professional: Custom pricing

Since the paid plans offer limited reveal/export credits, you’ll probably have to buy more. One extra credit costs $0.60 per credit on the Essentials plan and $0.50 on the Plus plan.

Pros & Cons

✅ One credit unlocks both the email address and the phone number of an account, so you won’t have to spend two to reveal the entire contact profile.

✅ Advanced filtering for more detailed company searches.

❌ The most advanced features, such as buyer intent data and advanced filtering, are available only on the Professional plan.

❌ Limited international coverage.

6. SalesIntel

Best for: Human-verified B2B contact info.

SalesIntel is a B2B data provider that boasts high accuracy rates thanks to having each contact run through a layer of human verification every 90 days.

If you need highly accurate and double-checked data, SalesIntel might be a good option.

Features

  • Large database of 90M+ contacts with 17M+ contacts that are human-verified.
  • Research On Demand provides human-verified contact information on any company you need on request.
  • In-depth technographic and firmographic filters.

Who is it for?

GTM teams working with specific or difficult-to-access markets that need verified contact data they can’t find anywhere else.

Pricing

SalesIntel has three pricing plans:

  1. Individual: $69 per month, 1 user only
  2. Teams: $199 per user per month, up to 5 users
  3. Professional: Custom pricing, custom number of users

Pros & Cons

✅ User-friendly.

✅ High data accuracy.

❌ Intent data is available on its highest tier only.

❌ Issues with integrations.

7. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Best for: LinkedIn-based company research.

Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s designated sales prospecting tool.

As such, it provides nuanced filters and insights, allowing you to deep-dive into company and individual profiles.

Features

  • 14+ account filters that let you run segmented and precise searches across industries.
  • Account IQ provides Artificial Intelligence-generated profile summaries packed with actionable insights.
  • Data validation ensures that you get only up-to-date contact information.

Who is it for?

Businesses that mainly use LinkedIn for prospecting and company research.

Pricing

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of LinkedIn’s most expensive solutions.

It has three pricing tiers:

  1. Core at $74.31 per month when billed annually. 
  2. Advanced at $125.87 per month when billed annually.
  3. Advanced Plus at a custom price.

If you need access to features such as CRM integrations, data verification, etc., you'll have to upgrade to the Advanced Plus plan.

Pros & Cons

✅ Optimized for LinkedIn prospecting.

✅ Nuanced filtering for more advanced searches.

✅ CRM integrations that let you enrich CRMs and view LinkedIn info about leads, contacts, and accounts directly in your CRM app.

❌ Can be used on LinkedIn only.

❌ Key features are hidden behind a paywall.

❌ Too expensive given its limited use case.

8. Keyplay

Best for: Finding companies that match your ICP through custom scoring systems.

Keyplay is an account-based sales and marketing platform that lets you build targeted lead lists, find ICPs across the market, and track relevant buying signals.

It’s an excellent tool if you need a customizable solution that can be tailored to your specific ICP, letting you run highly targeted searches.

Features

  • AI Lookalike helps you find accounts that match your best-performing clients and deals.
  • Lets you build custom account-scoring systems for better account prioritization.
  • Provides a wide range of advanced filters for highly specific searches, including online presence, tech stack, recruiting velocity, industry categories, etc.

Who is it for?

Account-based sales and marketing teams looking to optimize lead generation and prospecting for target companies.

Pricing

Keyplay doesn’t have a free trial for its paid plans.

However, it has a free forever plan that provides access to its basic features, and subscribing to the PeerSignal community lets you access a more limited number of records. 

If you need more records and advanced features, you can subscribe to one of two paid plans:

  1. Growth: $12,000/year
  2. Scale: Custom pricing

Pros & Cons

✅ Advanced filtering options.

✅ Lets you track custom signals relevant to your ICP and business objectives.

✅ Enables you to create custom ICP scoring systems to identify matching companies more easily.

❌ Offers only annual paid plans.

❌ Doesn’t deliver contact data.

9. LeadIQ

Best for: Tracking relevant contacts and sales triggers in real-time.

LeadIQ is a B2B prospecting platform that lets you find contact data on LinkedIn searches and sync it with your CRM.

Its key strength, however, is its ability to track buying signals and sales-relevant changes in key accounts.

Features

  • Lets you track relevant insights and changes in important prospects’ profiles, such as job changes, promotions, etc.
  • Monitors buying signals, including funding rounds, company news, web searches, etc.
  • Covers millions of verified profiles, emails, and mobile numbers aggregated from various sources.

Who is it for?

Smaller teams more interested in tracking buying signals than gaining access to a static B2B database.

Pricing

Lead IQ has a free forever plan that provides:

  • 20 verified work emails per week
  • 10 mobile phone numbers
  • 40 email generations per month
  • 10 accounts tracked

There are three paid plans for users who need more:

  1. Essential: $45 per user per month
  2. Pro: $89 per user per month
  3. Enterprise: Custom pricing, annual subscription only

Pros & Cons

✅ User-friendly interface.

✅ Lets you monitor relevant changes and other important factors, allowing you to pounce on leads while they’re still hot.

❌ Emphasis on North America, limited European coverage.

❌ Contact tracking is an add-on whose price starts at $5,000 per year.

10. Apollo

Best for: B2B sales intelligence combined with sales engagement options.

Apollo is a B2B database and sales engagement platform with solid international coverage of B2B data.

Its wide range of features makes it attractive for users looking for an all-in-one sales solution.

Features

Apollo.io, a full-stack sales tech platform, bags $100M at a $1.6B  valuation | Medial
  • B2B database with 275M contacts and 73M companies with solid international coverage.
  • Robust filtering options for running precise searches.
  • Apollo Chrome extension for researching companies anywhere on the web.

Who is it for?

Sales teams of various sizes that need a well-rounded prospecting solution with additional features for managing other parts of the sales cycle.

Pricing

Apollo has a free forever plan that includes unlimited email finder credits, 5 phone number credits, and 10 contact export credits.

If you need more, you can upgrade to one of three paid plans:

  1. Basic: $59 per user per month
  2. Professional: $99 per user per month
  3. Organization: $149 per user per month

Note: Professional and Basic plans come with a 14-day free trial.

Pros & Cons

✅ Advanced filtering options for more targeted prospecting.

✅ Good data accuracy.

❌ Dual credit system (you spend one credit for revealing an email address and another for getting a phone number), which scales badly.

❌ Best features available only on its higher tiers.

11. Dealfront

Best for: Researching European companies.

Dealfront is a B2B sales intelligence tool built for sales and marketing teams focused on the European market.

The platform was created by merging Echobot (sales intelligence software) and Leadfeeder (website visitor identification software), combining their key features into a single solution.

Features

  • Provides data on 40M+ companies and 180M+ contacts, with 30M+ companies and 83M+ contacts in Europe alone.
  • In-depth data from specific European regions, such as DACH, Benelux, Nordics, etc.
  • Identifies companies visiting your website.

Who is it for?

GTM teams whose target companies are located in Europe.

Pricing

Dealfront has separate pricing for its sales intelligence and website traffic deanonymization.

Dealfront's sales intelligence plan does not have flat fees, so you’ll need to contact its team for precise pricing details.

When it comes to website visitor identification, there’s a limited free plan that only lets you identify up to 100 monthly website visitors, omitting all other Dealfront features.

The paid plan starts at €99 per month, with the final price depending on the number of identified companies.

You also get 25 free credits for revealing contact details like email addresses and phone numbers. If you exceed the limit, you’ll pay extra.

Note: The website visitor identification plan has a 14-day free trial.

Pros & Cons

✅ Solid international coverage.

✅ GDPR-compliant data.

✅ 30+ trigger events you can set up to alert you when a relevant change in a prospect’s profile occurs (e.g., job changes, bankruptcy notices, etc.).

❌ Separate and non-transparent pricing plans for sales intelligence and website visitor identification.

❌ Issues with website traffic deanonymization, as users report frequent inaccuracies.

Next Steps: Identify Who Your Hottest Leads Are Right Now

By now, you should have a clearer idea of what company research tool is good for you.

Zoominfo and Apollo are good options if you need massive B2B databases, while platforms like Keyplay and LeadIQ deliver a more dynamic company research experience.

Some are focused on a single channel only—like LinkedIn Sales Navigator—while others, like SalesIntel and UpLead, can tackle any lead source on the web.

In the end, it’s up to you to make the call. 

If you decide that you need a solution that goes beyond basic company research and prospecting, then Warmly’s the ideal choice, as it allows you to detect companies that:

  1. Best fit your ICP.
  2. Are most likely to convert right now.

Why take just our word for it?

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and experience its capabilities firsthand.

Or, book a personalized demo with our team to see it in action first.

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Best 10 B2B Marketing Tools in 2024

Best 10 B2B Marketing Tools in 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

No efficient B2B marketing strategy would be complete without B2B marketing tools—and for good reason.

B2B marketing software platforms help improve sales and marketing efforts across levels by:

  • Allowing you to run tailored marketing campaigns on scale.
  • Enabling you to fine-tune outreach strategies to your target market and ICP.
  • Providing leads and existing customers with highly personalized experiences.
  • Boosting B2B marketing teams’ productivity by automating repetitive processes and letting them focus on areas that matter most.
  • Driving collaboration between sales and marketing teams.

However, for a B2B marketing tool to achieve all this, it has to be aligned with your unique use case, business objectives, and budget size.

That's where this guide comes in.

We tested dozens of B2B marketing tools, sifted through user reviews, and interviewed long-term users to find the best B2B marketing software for various user types and requirements.

As a result, we compiled a list of the top 10 B2B marketing tools, ensuring everyone will find their perfect match.

B2B Marketing Software Categories

Since there’s a wide variety of B2B marketing solutions, we divided them into 5 essential categories:

  1. Lead enrichment tools that help you find the hottest leads and ICP matches.
  2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools to ensure your content is optimized for success.
  3. Marketing automation tools to increase marketing efficiency.
  4. Content creation tools to create content that converts.
  5. Ad management tools that help you manage ad campaigns and ensure you’re targeting the right audience.

As most of these tools are not mutually exclusive, you can combine several to create your unique marketing suite tailored to your specific marketing strategy. 

A Few Factors to Consider when Buying a B2B Marketing Tool

There are several characteristics every B2B marketing tool should have, such as:

Intuitive interface (for both managers and contributors)

Prioritize B2B marketing tools with user-friendly interfaces that are easy to learn and navigate.

Avoid overly complex tools that require extensive training or IT support. These platforms are supposed to be used by marketing and salespeople, not technical teams.

Cost-effectiveness (especially at scale)

Ensure that your chosen solution offers a good balance of functionality and size.

Also, ensure that the tool scales well, meaning that the costs won’t explode in your face as your business grows.

Automation capabilities

If you aren't automating, one of your competitors likely is.

Functionalities such as automated workflows, triggered actions, and AI-powered features can significantly boost the success rate of your B2B marketing efforts.

Solid integration range

Your systems must talk to each other to operationalize the best marketing strategy. Make sure the platforms you choose play well with each other.

Personalization flexibility

Sometimes, this means having the right data plugged into your systems.

Sometimes, it means having a platform that can handle deep personalization.

Either way, you can't compete in 2024 without hyper-personalizing campaigns.

Enough said. Let’s dive into our top 10 list!

What Are the Best B2B Marketing Tools?

1. Lead enrichment tools:

  • Warmly - Reveals and enriches website visitors.
  • Datanyze - Affordable 1-click lead enrichment from any web source.

2. SEO tools:

  • Ahrefs - Suite of SEO products for optimization across levels.
  • Frase - Content optimization tool and AI content writer.

3. Marketing automation tools:

  • Marketo - Cross-channel marketing orchestration.
  • Drip - Email marketing solution.

4. Content creation tools:

  • Descript - AI-powered video and podcast editor.
  • Copy.ai - Automated creation of various content types, from blogs to product descriptions.

5. Ad management tools:

  • RollWorks - Account-based marketing and advertising platform.
  • Metadata - All-round management of paid social ads.

Lead enrichment tools:

1. Warmly

We’ll start with Warmly, which is our solution.

Disclaimer: Although Warmly is our platform, we won’t try to convince you to choose it at all costs. We know who Warmly is best suited for marketing and sales teams that want to boost website lead generation and conversion rates.                                                            If that’s you, all the better. If not, we’re sure one of our other solutions will do the trick.

Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that improves sales and marketing strategies by:

  • Identifying website traffic.
  • Enriching each identified visitor with granular data.
  • Automating essential sales and marketing processes.

Let’s look at some key features that make Warmly stand out in the lead enrichment category.

Feature #1: Website visitor identification

Warmly identifies both companies and individuals visiting your website, letting your marketing team:

  • Figure out if your website is optimized to attract your target audience.
  • Detect leads that best match your ICP.

Identify actual stakeholders surfing your website, allowing reps to create a hyper-personalized approach

The platform also offers options for tracking website traffic that came through specific email campaigns, allowing for:

  • More precise marketing attribution.
  • A deeper understanding of which approach works best with your leads.

The whole setup process is easy. 

All it takes is pasting a snippet of Warmly’s code into your website - or emails - and the platform will start identifying companies and persons that land on your website in minutes.

Feature #2: B2B and intent data enrichment

Once Warmly identifies website visitors, it proceeds to enrich each with:

  1. B2B data, including:
  • Contact details (phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, etc.).
  • Firmographic data (industry, size, employee count, location, and other company data).
  • Technographics (a business’s tech stack).
  • CRM data (account owners, ongoing and closed deals, previous interactions with your sales and marketing reps, etc.).
  • SEP data (e.g., interactions with specific outreach campaigns).

2. First-party intent data, which consists of insights into their website session, such as:

  • Pages they visited, with a focus on high-intent pages (e.g., pricing, specific features, comparison with competitors, etc.).
  • Time spent on each page.
  • High-intent questions they asked the chatbot.
  • The content they downloaded (such as whitepapers, playbooks, etc.) or forms they filled out.

3. Third-party intent data that provides insights into your lead’s entire digital buyer journey, like:

  • Recently researched topics on the web.
  • Interactions with ads and social media posts.
  • Job change intent.
  • Visits to competitors’ websites.

Enriching each lead with in-depth data enables marketing and sales teams to:

  • Better understand which leads are most likely to convert right now.
  • Create tailored sales and marketing campaigns that resonate with each individual lead.
  • Qualify and score leads more accurately, allowing for optimal allocation of sales and marketing resources. 
  • Identify potential bottlenecks and high-churn areas on your website.

Try it 👇

Feature #3: Automated outreach

Warmly lets you create automated sales and marketing sequences, leveraging data it uncovered on your website visitors.

The platform’s Orchestrator feature adds website visitors that meet certain requirements (i.e., match your ICP or show high-intent behavior on your site) to automated outreach campaigns like:

  • Sending personalized emails.
  • Connecting with qualified prospects on LinkedIn. 
  • Sending contextual LinkedIn DMs to key accounts.
  • Adding leads to outbound sequences.

The Orchestrator has an intuitive workflow-building interface that lets you customize each part of the flow, including:

  1. The automation trigger, i.e., the signal or activity that will initiate the workflow (e.g., identified company lands on your website or visits a high-intent page, etc.).
  2. Filter accounts you want to add to the sequence (by size, industry, deal stage, etc.).
  3. Specify which personas you want to be targeted in each account (by role, seniority, etc.).
  4. Decide on the number of personas you want included from each company.
  5. Choose the automated sequence you want to add them to (LinkedIn, email, or both).

This way, you’ll ensure that no qualified lead goes under the radar, as the Orchestrator will automatically detect and engage them in real-time.

Pricing

Warmly has a free forever plan that lets you reveal up to 500 people and companies visiting your website. It’s the perfect plan for getting a taste of one of the platform’s key features.

If you expect higher traffic volumes and need more advanced capabilities, you can upgrade to one of three paid options:

  1. Startup: $700/mo, includes 3 users, up to 10,000 monthly visitors.
  2. Business: From $1,440 to $1,740 per month, depending on the number of visitors you expect to have. It includes 10 seats.
  3. Enterprise: Custom plan. Created for users with an estimated traffic of 100,000+ visitors per month who need more customization. Includes 20 seats, advanced AI personalization, custom integrations, etc.

Note: All paid plans provide access to all of Warmly’s features and include deep integrations with sales intelligence tools such as Clearbit, Bombora, and 6Sense, allowing you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

Integrations 

Warmly integrates with OpenAI and most modern SEP and CRM software, in addition to the data solutions we mentioned above, meaning it will easily fit into any business’s tech stack.

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies both companies and individual website visitors.

✅ Enriches each visitor with detailed B2B and intent data.

✅ Automates sales and marketing outreach.

✅ Includes all features in all paid plans.

✅ Deep integrations with data solutions enable you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

❌ Annual pricing only.

2. Datanyze 

Best for: Simple lead enrichment on company websites and LinkedIn search results.

Datanyze is an easy-to-use lead enrichment and prospecting tool with a Chrome extension that lets you scrape relevant B2B data online.

It provides particularly detailed information on current industry trends and rising technologies, making it a nifty tool for conducting market analysis and identifying businesses that use products similar to yours.

Features

  • Chrome extension for revealing basic contact details anywhere on the web.
  • Enriches relevant prospects with “icebreaker” data, such as information from their social media profiles, local news publications, company news, etc., letting you create a warm introduction.
  • Market Share Reports provide actionable insights into industry trends, rising technologies, and key market competitors across various industries (e.g., marketing automation, email hosting, e-commerce, and more).

Who is it for?

Datanyze’s affordable pricing and user-friendly interface make it a good option for smaller marketing teams with basic needs.

Pricing 

Datanyze has a 90-day free trial that includes just ten monthly contact information credits.

Since you’ll probably need more, there are two paid plans to choose from:

  1. Nyze Pro 1: $29/mo, 80 credits, additional credit at $0.363
  2. Nyze Pro 2: $55/mo, 160 credits, additional credit at $0.344

Pros & Cons

✅ Budget-friendly.

✅ Easy to use.

✅ Strong technographics coverage.

❌ Data is often outdated.

❌ Limited functionality - no automation features or intent data enrichment.

SEO tools:

3. Ahrefs

Best for: Getting an all-in-one SEO toolset.

Ahrefs is one of the most popular platforms for handling SEO thanks to its wide range of powerful features, which cover everything from content to website optimization.

If you’re into digital marketing, at least one of Ahref’s numerous tools will probably be a good match.

Features

  • Unified SEO dashboard for monitoring SEO performance of all your projects, from blogs to web pages.
  • Site Explorer lets you research your competitors’ websites, including backlinks, organic search results, paid traffic performance, and website structure, allowing you to create content that outperforms them.
  • Keywords explorer helps you find the best-performing keywords in your industry along with difficulty scores, ranking potential, etc.

Who is it for?

Ahrefs is best suited for enterprises relying mostly on digital marketing to generate leads.

Pricing 

Ahrefs has 5 pricing tiers:

  1. Starter: $29 per month, limited access to Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and Site Audit.
  2. Lite: Starts at $129 per month, 1 user included, $40 per additional user, up to 3 users in total.
  3. Standard: Starts at $249/mo, 1 user, $60 per additional user, up to 6 users in total.
  4. Advanced: Starts at $449/mo, 1 user, $80 per additional user, up to 11 users in total.
  5. Enterprise: Annual only, starts at $14,990 per year, 3 users, $1,000 per additional user, you can add unlimited users.

Pros & Cons

✅ Lets you handle various SEO elements from a single platform.

✅ Intuitive interface.

✅ Strong backlink analysis.

❌ Very expensive.

❌ Frequent issues with data inaccuracies.

4. Frase

Best for: Optimizing written content such as blogs.

Frase helps you create optimized content by taking you from keyword research to creating article outlines and optimizing them for high SERP rankings.

It can significantly boost your writers’ efficiency, ensuring they have all the help they need to create the best-performing content from start to finish.

Features

  • Runs SERP research for you, analyzing best-ranked articles and delivering actionable insights, such as word count, domain rating, and heading count.
  • Lets you quickly create outlines by using headings from top SERP results or letting AI generate one based on those results.
  • Helps optimize content by providing a list of topics best-performing competitors covered, keywords you should use, and more.

Who is it for?

Frase is best suited for content agencies that need to optimize blogs at scale.

Pricing 

Frase has a free trial that lets you optimize one document for one search query.

If you want to optimize more documents and additional features, you can choose from three plans:

  1. Solo: $15/mo, 1 user, 10 SEO documents
  2. Basic: $45/mo, 1 user, 30 SEO documents
  3. Team: $115/mo, 3 users ($25 per additional user), unlimited SEO documents

Pros & Cons

✅ Intuitive interface that provides good user experience.

✅ Lets you create and re-use templates for content briefs, custom AI prompts, etc.

✅ Enables unified content creation by letting you research, write, and optimize content from a single point of control.

❌ The AI writer often creates repetitive, generic content.

❌ Sometimes includes irrelevant results in the SERP research, making optimizing content for the intended topic more difficult.

Marketing automation tools:

5. Marketo

Best for: All-in-one B2B marketing automation.

Marketo is Adobe’s B2B marketing automation platform that lets you build and run marketing campaigns across various channels.

In addition to creating marketing workflows, Marketo has other advanced features that enable account-based marketing, multi-touch attribution, and email marketing, allowing you to cover various marketing channels and needs.

Features

  • AI-powered audience building and segmentation lets you automatically create targeted audiences by applying filters (demographics, firmographics, simple and cross-channel behavior, etc.).
  • Cross-channel personalization enables real-time personalization of web pages, emails, social media, ads, and SMS, in addition to letting you create responsive landing pages with lead-capturing forms.
  • Offers a variety of triggers that set off workflows, including actions such as lead filling out a form, visiting a specific page on your website, or when their lead score changes.

Who is it for?

Marketo is best suited for enterprise businesses that need to run cross-channel marketing campaigns on scale.

Pricing 

Marketo has 4 pricing plans:

  1. Growth
  2. Select
  3. Prime 
  4. Ultimate

The platform doesn’t offer fixed subscription fees for any package, meaning you’ll have to contact sales for a custom quote.

Pros & Cons

✅ Robust reporting features.

✅ Lets you create all kinds of marketing campaigns and run them on autopilot.

❌ Expensive.

❌ Unintuitive interface that may be overwhelming for marketing professionals.

6. Drip

Best for: Automating email marketing campaigns.

Drip is an email marketing software that claims to reduce bounce rates and improve open and response rates.

Its user-friendly interface makes it a popular tool for email sequencing among B2B marketers.

Features

  • Visual drag-and-drop workflow builder lets you create automations of various complexity and set up custom rules to tailor them to your specific goals.
  • Dynamic segmentation analyzes relevant data from your email campaigns, store, website, and integrated tools and creates targeted audience segments, ensuring each lead gets added to the sequence that will resonate the most with them.
  • Intuitive email builder lets you add store products directly into emails, promote top-sellers to newcomers, and send dynamic content like cart URLs.

Who is it for?

E-commerce marketers that want to generate more qualified leads and get more conversions through their email campaigns.

Pricing 

Drip has a 14-day free trial that lets you try it out.

Its pricing is based on your list size and send volume.

It starts at $39 per month for lists of 1-2,500 people and goes up to $1,899 for 165,001-170,000 people.

If you need more than that, Drip offers custom packages as well.

Pros & Cons

✅ Easy to use.

✅ Solid range of integrations allows you to connect it to the rest of your sales and marketing suite.

❌ Can be costly for larger users.

❌ Doesn’t perform as well outside of the e-commerce industry.

Content creation tools

7. Descript

Best for: Creating and editing video content.

Descript is an AI-driven video editor with a wide range of features built to help B2B marketers improve their video marketing strategies.

Its feature-rich interface allows almost anyone to create professional-looking videos faster and more easily.

Features

  • AI helps curate the videos most likely to go viral, allowing you to choose the version that will perform the best.
  • Near-real-time translation, captions, and auto-transcription.
  • Automatically removes filler words and fixes eye contact, making it appear like you were looking at the camera the whole time (even if you were actually reading from a script).

Who is it for?

Marketing teams who use video content as a vital part of their marketing strategies.

Pricing 

Descript has a free plan that provides limited access to its features. 

If you like what it can do for you, you can upgrade to one of four paid plans:

  1. Hobbyist: $19/mo
  2. Creator: $35/mo
  3. Business: $50/mo
  4. Enterprise: Custom pricing

Pros & Cons

✅ Good transcription and caption accuracy.

✅ Wide range of features allows for versatile use cases - from ads to podcasts.

❌ Issues with audio editing.

❌ Learning curve.

8. Copy.ai

Best for: Generating various types of written content.

Copy.ai is a versatile GTM platform that offers solutions for sales and marketing teams.

However, one of its most prominent strong points is its ability to generate all kinds of content, from product descriptions and LinkedIn posts to social media content and blogs.

Features

  • Automates SEO content production from research to creating article briefs to writing the entire piece from scratch.
  • Lets you transform transcripts into blogs, social posts, press releases, etc., allowing for content repurposing.
  • Enables automatic localization and translation of landing pages and product marketing content, allowing you to easily tap into the global market.

Who is it for?

Content marketing teams that want to speed up the process of creating written content and optimizing it for different audience segments.

Pricing 

Copy.ai has a free forever plan that includes 1 user, up to 2,000 words in chat, and limited access to its features.

For more, you can subscribe to one of three paid options:

  1. Starter: $49/mo, 1 user, unlimited words in chat.
  2. Advanced: $249/mo, up to 5 users, and access to advanced sales and marketing workflows.
  3. Enterprise: Custom pricing, custom number of users and more advanced features geared toward large-scale users.

Pros & Cons

✅ User-friendly interface.

✅ Optimized for creating various content types.

❌ Can’t create original content, human editing and proofreading are required.

❌ Limited information on more niche topics.

Ad management tools

9. RollWorks

Best for: Account-based advertising.

RollWorks is a powerful tool for managing account-based marketing and advertising.

It lets you create, run, track, and optimize ad campaigns from a single platform.

Features

  • Lets you create highly personalized multichannel ad campaigns tailored to your target accounts' detected online behaviors and needs.
  • Allows you to build custom dynamic account and contact lists with extensive filters to keep your advertising audiences fresh and relevant.
  • User-friendly campaign set-up engine provides targeting and retargeting best practices, helping you build winning campaigns.

Who is it for?

RollWorks is best suited for mid-size and enterprise B2B companies that want to find and target high-value accounts with personalized advertising campaigns.

Pricing 

RollWorks has separate plans for ABM marketing and advertising.

It doesn’t publish prices for either, so you’ll have to contact sales for a custom quote.

Pros & Cons

✅ Robust analytics tools for measuring marketing performance.

✅ Solid range of integrations.

❌ Steep learning curve.

❌ Non-transparent pricing.

10. Metadata

Best for: Paid social media ad campaign management.

Metadata lets you create and run targeted and personalized ad campaigns for various audience segments.

It simplifies multichannel ad campaign management by allowing you to automate various parts of the process, such as ad and budget optimization.

Features

  • Automatically optimizes campaigns and budgets by letting you set up relevant criteria (e.g., campaign objectives, audience segments you want to target, etc.).
  • Campaign experimentation lets you test several campaign versions with different audiences, messaging, offers, etc., uncovering insights into what works and what doesn’t.
  • Lets you visualize every customer interaction with your ads and website, allowing you to better target and retarget them with personalized campaigns based on the insights the platform revealed.

Who is it for?

Advertising agencies that juggle multiple clients or large businesses that need a holistic approach to managing advertising campaigns.

Pricing 

Metadata has 4 pricing plans:

  1. MetaMatch: From $295/mo
  2. Spotlight: From $1,200/mo
  3. DemandHub: From $4,200/mo
  4. Agency: From $12,000/mo

The DemandHub plan has a few optional (and mandatory add-ons), including:

  • Onboarding package (obligatory): $5,000 one-off
  • Google Search: $495/mo
  • Spotlight: From $500/mo

Pros & Cons

✅ Automatic ad optimization across B2B marketing channels.

✅ Nuanced audience targeting options.

❌ Very expensive.

❌ Difficult to master.

Next Steps: Start Capturing More MQLs & SQLs

Now, all that’s left is to decide which solution—or solutions—best fits your vision and business goals.

Each of these B2B marketing tools is good in its own way, although some offer more versatile use cases and a wider range of features than others.

One thing is certain, though.

Many potential customers visit your website daily, so a website traffic deanonymization platform—like Warmly—is a good place to start when crafting any marketing strategy.

In addition to identifying website visitors, Warmly also enables you to:

  • Detect the leads that are most likely to convert right now.
  • Handle marketing attribution.
  • Design winning outreach sequences based on buying signals the platform detected.

The best way to find out for sure if Warmly can deliver is to try it on for size.

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and provide your sales and marketing teams with a swarm of qualified leads.

Or, if you’d prefer to see the platform in live action first, book a personalized demo with our team, and we’ll be happy to show you around.

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Why B2B Sales Teams Need Contextual and Actionable Insights

Why B2B Sales Teams Need Contextual and Actionable Insights

Time to read

Alan Zhao

‎This blog post was co-created with the team at Pod, the first AI pipeline coach for B2B sellers.

Since the dawn of modern-day B2B sales, a battle has been brewing between the sellers who think a fully personalized, human approach is always best and those who believe 100% tech-supported (or entirely AI-led) selling is the future. 

Unfortunately, if you’re here for a straight answer to the above dilemma, we can’t give you one. The secret to successful B2B sales lies somewhere between ‘chatbots will die out’ and ‘our AI bots are 100% independent, and we human sellers retain no responsibility for their work’ (as an airline argued recently.) 

Successful selling has always been about knowing your customer. That means building out your ICP before you start selling, plus empowering your sales team to adapt to the prospect in the moment—whether that means adapting an offer or signing a deal on conditions. 

This kind of sales process requires a combination of best-in-class data and the personal relationship-building that only a human sales rep can do. Luckily for B2B sales teams, getting top-quality data to inform your selling strategy has never been easier. 

The Consequences of Flying Blind in B2B Sales

Any B2B company worth its salt knows that data is vital to operational decision-making. According to McKinsey research, companies that employ a data-driven sales method report above-market growth and an EBITDA that’s 15% to 25% higher. 

Surprisingly, though, many sales teams still aren’t using their data effectively. 40% of companies say their sales teams lack the right account intelligence to sell effectively, and 60% of marketers say the data they do have is unreliable.

Whether you’re yet to gather sales intelligence or collecting mountains of inaccurate or outdated data, the consequences for your B2B sales process are monumental. 

Inefficiency 

At any given time, as few as 15% of your buyers are actually in market. Combine this stat with the average B2B sales conversion rate, which stands at a little over 2%, and it’s obvious that the chance of inefficient selling is high for B2B sellers.

There’s also a very small window for converting each prospect. Talking to people who aren’t ready, aren’t the decision-makers, or aren’t even part of your ideal ICP (or all three) is a significant drain on your sales resources, which—let’s face it—are probably already stretched. 

When B2B sellers spend just two hours a day actually selling, you need to make those hours count. (Or find a way to reduce admin time and grant your SDRs more selling time, but we’ll cover this later.) 

Missed opportunities

What’s even worse for your revenue than selling to prospects who aren’t ready to buy? Missing the opportunity to sell to people who are

B2B buying cycles are getting longer. Typically, buyers don’t engage with sellers until about 70% of the way through the decision-making process, by which point, the chances of influencing a decision are slim. 



Image Source

Without accurate data to identify these decision-makers early, you’re likely letting ideal prospects slip through the net instead of giving yourself time to nurture the right people. 

On the other side of things, you should be fighting to keep those customers that you’ve already converted. Just a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to anywhere between a 25% to 95% profit increase—but unless you fancy manually reaching out to every existing customer and asking if they need additional services, you’ll need sales enablement tools to help you out. 

Poor customer experience

Cold door-to-door selling might be a thing of the past, but receiving email marketing for a product you have no interest in and no intention of buying can be just as annoying. 

Not only does intensive cold outreach increase your risk of selling to people who aren’t the right fit (see point one above), but it can also impact the overall customer experience. 

If you’ve been spamming a prospect for weeks who simply isn’t interested, chances are they’ll remember that experience in the future—and may pass you up for a competitor who understands them better.

Cold outreach can be a valuable tool, but only when you know who it is you’re selling to. That’s where personalized selling can come into play: giving your prospect what they need at the most opportune time. 

Enabling the Right Action at the Right Time

No B2B seller should be flying blind when talking to a prospect. The moment you hop on a call with them, you should be absolutely sure that you’re speaking to someone who can buy from you (“I’ll need to discuss this with X” is the last thing you want to hear) and is showing intent to purchase.  

Understanding who will buy and when they’re ready to buy are the biggest factors influencing your success in B2B sales. Accurate sales insights are the only way to get this information. 

Without comprehensive sales data, you’re essentially leaving your B2B sales reps stranded in the Wild West of sales calls without any of the tools they might need to survive. Grit and creativity will only get sales reps so far when the person they’re selling to just isn’t right.

Accurate research into your ICP, leads, and sales process turns every interaction with B2B buyers into a warm interaction, giving your team the best chance of converting. 

What are Contextual and Actionable Insights?

The best sales teams make decisions based on real-time data from three distinct areas of a prospect’s profile. 

Everything starts with your ICP. If you’re following an account-based marketing strategy, this includes insights related to your target companies and their firmographic data. 

After gathering data on your ICP, look at the data on your leads. How are you determining what an MQL or an SQL is? Do you have fully-enriched data on each of your leads?  

Finally, your sales reps can use signal data to determine whether the leads arriving at your website are in the market to buy and how likely they are to purchase at any given moment. This signal data provides the crucial ‘timing’ component to your sales strategy, ensuring your reps devote their valuable time to people more likely to convert. 

Together, these three data strands help you tap into buyer behavior and interest across the entire sales funnel


Image Source

ICP data

To build an effective sales funnel, you need to start with an accurate list of ‘right fit’ accounts. Both internal data (from your CRM) and external research can help you better understand who you’re targeting and why.

Start with the existing data in your CRM. Gather and analyze metrics such as the number of repeat customers and closed won or closed lost deals to determine which kinds of accounts typically buy from you. 

Afterward, you can use sales enablement software to help you identify similar accounts in the categories of repeat customers or closed wins. 

Meanwhile, closed lost data is a valuable source of information on why certain B2B buyers don’t purchase. For example, you can track how many closed lost accounts have recently purchased a competitor product, giving you a time frame for re-engaging. 

Lead data

Once you’ve clarified the types of accounts you want to prospect and adjusted your demand creation strategy accordingly, you should notice an uptick in qualified leads. Ideally, the process of acquiring qualified leads should be assisted by a tailored SEO strategy.

Your first step should be enriching your lead data as it enters your CRM. Data enrichment tools can fill your CRM with up-to-date contact information and identify additional buying committee members. 

Other data you can extract from your leads to influence your selling strategy include firm and technographic data. This could consist of company details such as:

  • Company size
  • Location
  • Revenue
  • Their current tech stack
  • Recent software renewals/purchases

Signals

Buying signals can massively enhance your sales strategy. In the past, sellers were limited to collecting signal data from lead magnets, newsletter sign-ups, and in-person interaction at a trade show or conference. Today, however, there are far more ways to understand if a prospect is likely to buy.

The first kind of signal you want to track is buyer intent: any signal that shows that a potential customer is researching or showing interest in your product or service. 

Intent signals can be divided into first-party (data that comes from your website or direct interactions with prospects) and third-party (signals collected by external software like Bombora or 6sense), and you should use a combination of both to evaluate interest. 

Other buying signals could come from the company itself. For example, if it’s just raised a funding round or has recently been hired in a key decision-maker role, you can assume it’s somewhere in the market for a new purchase. 

Not all intent signals show the same amount of intent, so evaluating the intent data you receive (or using a platform that evaluates it for you) is essential. 

Someone from a right-fit company engaging with your social content and subscribing to your newsletter is good, but if they arrive on your website and navigate directly to your pricing page, that’s an even stronger signal. 

This kind of signal-based selling is becoming more critical for sales teams. However, buying signals are part of a broader B2B sales strategy that draws accurate data from various sources to make smarter sales decisions. 

Insight-Driven Sales Strategies for Your B2B Sales Team

So, you’ve decided to turn to a more data-driven sales strategy. How do you give your sales team the best chance of success?

1. Gather the right data.

Not all data is created equally. Consider the source of any third-party data you’re considering using in your strategy and how accurate or up-to-date you expect it to be.  

Likewise, although we’ve outlined a range of data you could use, not every signal will be relevant to your company. Efficient data-driven sales depend on choosing the right data, not all the data.

2. Train and empower B2B sales teams.

The latest HubSpot Sales Trends report found that 82% of sales professionals say building relationships and connecting with people is the most important and most enjoyable element of selling. Spending weeks implementing new software is the opposite of empowering, meaning sales reps have less time than previously. 

So, preparing your sales team is just as important as finding the right data. Find tools that can make evaluating all those juicy insights quick and seamless. 

It’s not about cramming your tech stack full of trending AI assistants but selecting the tools that offer instant insights and a clean UX to boost sales productivity. 

3. Evaluate and refine. 

A data-driven sales strategy provides more opportunities for iterative improvements—but only if you regularly evaluate sales performance. 

Additionally, the problem for many sales teams when implementing a data-driven approach is adding too many tools simultaneously. Almost half of sales professionals are overwhelmed by the number of tools in their tech stack, and 29% said that actually reducing their tech stack would make them more efficient. 

So, if something isn’t working, reevaluate your strategy. The core advantage of a data-driven sales process is providing holistic insights, and your operations should be adaptable enough to change if necessary.  

Top Tools for Optimized Sales Insights

1. Warmly

Warmly combines best-in-class intent data with seamless tech stack integrations to help your sales teams work smarter, not harder. Starting with website visitor deanonymization, live video chat, and AI chatbots, we enrich your CRM with accurate prospect data and pull in buyer intent data to show you which prospects are really in the market to buy. 

After that, the magic really happens. Warmly uses those insights to automatically implement outreach sequences to the best-fit prospects. This personalized messaging co-occurs across email, chatbot, and LinkedIn, enabling you to find your prospects wherever they are and nurture them accordingly. 

2. Pod


Pod is the first AI pipeline coach for B2B sellers. It gives Account Executives direction on what deals to focus on and the information they need to close those opportunities. 

When sellers log into Pod, they can find their deals prioritized, telling them exactly what to focus on and what is at risk. Then, throughout the workday, Pod keeps reps focused on the sales tasks, including preparing for meetings and prioritizing upcoming sales deals. 

3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn is a powerful space for B2B selling, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you harness the power of that social network more efficiently. It can help you prioritize accounts engaging with your content and give you essential company signals like recent hires or job changes.

4. ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a full-stack GTM solution for enterprise organizations. Its capabilities range from visitor identification and intent data to marketing, talent outreach, and hiring. Given its extensiveness, ZoomInfo can be an excellent option for teams with the budget to invest in an end-to-end solution. 

5. HubSpot

Since it acquired Clearbit, HubSpot has significantly enhanced its sales enablement solutions. Clearbit is now the ‘HubSpot Native Data Provider,’ providing users of HubSpot’s sales solutions with tools like real-time data enrichment. Like ZoomInfo, it’s not the best solution for smaller sales teams. Still, given the breadth of HubSpot’s features and market-leading marketing solutions, it can be a valuable all-around solution. 

The Future of B2B Sales: Warmbound

‎We built Warmly to empower smaller sales teams to sell more efficiently by prioritizing warm leads over all leads. If signal-selling is the next trend in B2B sales, warmbound is the inevitable next step. 

Warmbound means identifying only the most accurate warm signals and using them to inform your outreach strategy. When all the data you’re reviewing points to a prospect being genuinely interested in your brand and product, your sales team can sell faster.

Interested in seeing how we enable smarter, warmer selling? Book a demo today, or get started with Warmly for free.

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Best 16 Sales Tools to Close More Deals in 2024

Best 16 Sales Tools to Close More Deals in 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

In 2024, modern revenue teams' sales tools will have completely changed due to AI and a tightening of companies’ budgets. 

If chosen wisely, the best B2B sales tools can significantly improve your teams' performance, accelerate your sales cycle, and boost conversion rates.

The key is to find the B2B sales software that is perfect for your specific use case, business requirements, and budget.

In this guide, we reviewed the top 16 sales tools for 2024 - covering their features, advantages and limitations, pricing structures, and more.

We divided them into 8 categories:

  1. Signal-based selling
  2. All-in-one sales 
  3. Sales prospecting
  4. Lead generation 
  5. Sales automation 
  6. Account-based sales
  7. Sales intelligence
  8. Data enrichment

Let’s go!

What to Look for in a Sales Tool?

Before we get to the list, we’ll quickly outline a few key questions you should consider when buying B2B sales software, according to what keeps coming back in public reviews and online communities.

1. Will sales teams actually adopt it?

Reps are busy. They already spend a quarter of their time on non-sales activities.

If you try to introduce software that takes them out of their workflows or isn’t easy to use, it’s a waste of money, regardless of its capabilities or features.

It’s such a crucial part of modern sales tools that Dooly built a multi-million dollar business simply by making a smoother interface on top of Salesforce. 

Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time and money on rep training and depend too much on the solution’s customer support team.

2. Does it play well with others?

Modern sales tools integrate well with the rest of your tech stack, such as CRMs, productivity and collaboration platforms, analytics software, etc.

Before subscribing, check which out-of-the-box integrations the tool you’re interested in offers and how easily it can be connected to other third-party solutions without tapping into developer resources or consultants.

3. Will costs sneak up on you?

Be wary of gatekeeping too many features and volume-based pricing that increase exponentially. 

4. Are AI features just a marketing stunt?

Every sales product claims to be “AI-powered.” Most of them plug ChatGPT for simple use cases that add little value. 

Some solutions listed below are expectations, and have truly introduced novel capabilities that either save salespeople time or improve the quality of their work. 

Is it an all-in-one sales solution, or is it more focused on one sales segment, e.g., prospecting, engagement, etc.?

💡 Tip: Look for concrete mentions of AI-enabled capabilities in case studies or public reviews, like this one 👇

What Are the Best Sales Tools in 2024?

Signal-based selling:

  • Warmly - Enriches visitors with intent data and helps convert them.
  • Koala - Reveals first-party intent and product usage data.

All-in-one sales:

  • Zoominfo - Sales operating system.
  • Apollo - Sales intelligence and automation in one.

Sales prospecting:

  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator - LinkedIn-based prospecting.
  • Lusha - Sales prospecting anywhere on the web.

Lead generation:

  • Chili Piper - Inbound lead routing.
  • LeadGenius - Industry-specific lead generation.

Sales automation:

  • Clay - Personalized outreach powered by intent data.
  • Outreach - Cold email outreach on autopilot.

Account-based sales:

  • Demandbase - One of the more popular account-based marketing and sales platforms.
  • Keyplay - Advanced filtering and custom lead scoring for better targeting.

Sales intelligence:

  • Gong - AI-powered revenue intelligence platform.
  • Fireflies.ai - AI-driven meeting assistant.

Data enrichment:

  • Clearbit - AI-powered data enrichment.
  • Clay - Waterfall data enrichment.

Signal-Based Selling

1. Warmly

We’ll start with Warmly - our solution.

Disclaimer: We won’t try to convince you to choose our platform at all costs. We know that Warmly is the best fit for growing sales teams looking to drive more pipeline from their existing traffic and orchestrate intent-based campaigns that convert. 

Unsure if that’s you? Subscribe to our free plan and try it out - no strings attached.

Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that:

  1. Identifies website visitors
  2. Enriches them with B2B and intent data.
  3. Automates sales operations (e.g., prospecting, engagement, etc.).

Let’s look into why Warmly’s stands out in the signal-based selling category ⤵️

Reveal and enrich your website visitors

Most signal-based data and workflow solutions can identify accounts, but not visitors. Warmly finds both and gives your sales reps the data they need to craft outbound that prospect reply to. 

This feature can be a game-changer when dealing with larger companies, as the right message at the right time to the wrong person won’t generate a qualified meeting.

Secondly, it lets you track visitors who come to your website through specific email campaigns, allowing for more precise marketing attribution. 

The tool enriches each identified visitor with:

1. Essential B2B data, such as:

  • Firmographics (job titles, email addresses, company addresses, phone numbers, etc.). 
  • Technographics (a business’s tech stack).
  • CRM data (account owners, ongoing and closed deals, previous interactions with your sales representatives, etc.).
  • SEP data (e.g., interactions with specific outreach campaigns).

2. First-party intent data (i.e., visitors’ interactions with your website), including:

  • Which pages they visited.
  • How long they stayed on each page.
  • The forms they filled out.
  • The content they downloaded (e.g., whitepapers, playbooks, case studies, etc.).

3. Third-party intent data (i.e., insights into visitors’ entire digital buyer journey), including:

  • Recently searched for topics.
  • Ads they clicked on.
  • Social media posts they posted/interacted with.
  • Job changes.
  • Visits to competitors’ websites.

Signal-based automation (prospecting, engagement, and lead routing)

Warmly offers several options for streamlining sales processes, letting you:

  • Automate manual, repetitive tasks.
  • Shorten time-to-lead.
  • Replace SDRs in activities that don’t require human attention.

Here’s how ⤵️

1. Orchestrator

Warmly’s Orchestrator adds leads that match certain criteria (i.e: match your ICP or show high-intent behavior on your site) to automated engagement campaigns like:

  • Sending contextual emails.
  • Connecting with qualified prospects on LinkedIn. 
  • Sending personalized DMs to key stakeholders.
  • Adding leads to outbound sequences.

You can build workflows of various complexity and scale with Orchestrator, as it lets you customize:

➡️ ‎ The orchestration trigger, i.e., the signal or activity that will initiate the workflow (e.g., identified company lands on your website, identified prospect visits a high-intent page, etc.).

➡️ ‎ Account-level targeting (e.g., size, deal stage, industry, etc.).

➡️ ‎ Lead-level targeting (e.g., role, seniority, etc.).

➡️ The number of personas you want to be included from each company.

➡️ The sequence you want to add them to (LinkedIn, email, or both).

➡️ CRM sync to automatically create new records or edit existing ones based on the Orchestrator’s activity.

You can also choose to have Warmly’s AI engage prospects live on your site. 

2. AI Chat

Timing is everything. 

That’s especially true for website visitors. 

AI Chat engages leads that land on your website and showcase certain behaviors.

The chatbot can be trained to answer product-specific questions, book meetings, offer product tours, share case studies, and more.

While AI Chat can automatically engage all website visitors, you can configure it to target only:

🎯 ‎ Certain visitor segments (i.e., visitors who came via an email campaign or those who fit your champion persona).

🎯 High-intent visitors (i.e., accounts visiting pricing pages, read a competitor comparison blog, etc.).

3. Automated lead routing

Automated lead routing lets you set up automated Slack alerts that will notify sales reps when a website visitor:

  • Comes through one of your outbound campaigns, indicating that they’re interested in learning more.
  • Asks a high-intent question in the chatbot (inquires about the pricing or a specific feature).
  • Asks to speak with a human SDR.
  • Is part of a highly-qualified account or takes high-intent actions on your site (to be defined by you).

Alters can be customized to alert the right rep based on criteria such as previous interactions, account ownership, industry, experience, etc.

Or you can opt for round-robin lead routing. 🔄

Note: Alerts can be used separately from other automation options. 

Live engagement

While some processes can be automated, companies like Caddis Systems grew website conversions by 500% in 7 days by engaging prospects in real time on their sites.

Warmly helps them nurture leads into qualified conversions via text chat and live video calls.

In the “Warm Calls” section of Warmly’s dashboard, you’ll find all the qualified visitors surfing your website right now.

Clicking on each will reveal enriched profiles and let you monitor their web session in real time. 

Once reps assess that a visitor is qualified enough, they can:

  1. Send a contextual message, emphasizing they're talking to a real human.
  2. Initiate a video call right on the website.

The two options can be combined for the best results, as you don’t want to jumpscare your leads by video-calling them out of the blue. Here’s an example 👇

Check out our Warm Calls best practices to ensure high response rates.

Pricing

Warmly offers a free forever plan that lets you reveal up to 500 people and companies visiting your website. It’s the perfect plan for getting a taste of one of the platform’s essential features.

If you expect higher traffic volumes and need more advanced capabilities, there are three paid tiers to choose from:

  1. Startup: $700/mo, includes 3 users, up to 10,000 monthly visitors.
  2. Business: From $1,440 to $1,740 per month, depending on the number of visitors you expect to have. It includes 10 seats.
  3. Enterprise: Custom plan. Created for users with an estimated traffic of 100,000+ visitors per month who need more customization. Includes 20 seats, advanced AI personalization, custom integrations, etc.

Note: All paid plans provide access to all of Warmly’s features and include deep integrations with sales intelligence tools such as Clearbit, Bombora, and 6Sense, allowing you to get a bundle of products at the price of one.

Integrations 

In addition to these data solutions, Warmly integrates with OpenAI and most modern SEP and CRM software, meaning it will easily fit into any business’s tech stack.

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies both companies and individuals visiting your website.

✅ Enriches identified visitors with B2B and intent data.

✅ Lets you streamline sales prospecting, outreach, and engagement.

✅ Enables live video calls.

✅ Automated lead routing.

✅ All features and integrations are included in each paid plan.

❌ Annual pricing only.

2. Koala

Best for: Revealing first-party intent and product usage data.

Koala is a new website visitor identification solution that also provides product analytics.

Combining first-party intent data and insights into how customers interact with your product helps unearth new lead generation and cross- and up-selling opportunities.

Features

  • Reveals website visitors and enriches them with first-party intent data.
  • Intent and ICP scoring enables you to identify heating accounts and prioritize those that best fit your ICP. 
  • Tracks product usage data and translates it to actionable insights, letting you monitor your customers’ product journeys and detect important milestones.
  • Has options for automating email outreach.

Who is it for?

Koala is a good fit for Product-Led Growth businesses that want to track their customers’ product journeys and important touchpoints and capture new leads on their websites.

Pricing

Koala has a free forever plan, which includes up to 3 users and 250 identified visitors.

If you decide you need more, you can upgrade to one of two plans:

  1. Starter: $500/mo, up to 3 users ($300 a year per additional user), unlimited visitors
  2. Business: Custom plan, includes custom number of users, access to automation capabilities, lead scoring, signal reports, and more

Pros & Cons

✅ Tracks product usage and translates it into actionable insights.

✅ Automated lead scoring.

✅ Solid CRM integrations.

❌ No third-party intent data.

❌ Best features kept behind a paywall.

❌ Limited automation options.

❌ No live engagement features.

All-In-One Sales

3. Zoominfo 

Best for: Managing the entire sales process from a single point of control.

Zoominfo is one of the most popular sales tools thanks to its wide range of features and massive B2B database.

However, it’s worth noting that it comes with a price tag to match.

Features

  • Large B2B database with over 260M professional and 100M company profiles and 135M verified phone numbers.
  • Automated multichannel sales workflows (such as cold email or cold calling campaigns) triggered by specific buying signals.
  • AI-driven sales assistant, Copilot, which can summarize key info on each important lead, give outreach suggestions based on Zoominfo’s data, uncover potential sales opportunities, etc.

Who is it for?

Enterprise businesses that need to streamline a variety of sales processes.

Pricing

Zoominfo has separate plans for Sales, Marketing, and Talent teams.

No prices are disclosed, so you’ll have to contact its sales team for a custom quote.

How much you'll actually pay depends on:

  • Features and functionality you need.
  • Number of licenses.
  • Credit usage.
  • Other factors.

Pros & Cons

✅ Excellent B2B data coverage, especially regarding phone numbers.

✅ Wide range of features for handling various sales operations.

✅ CRM enrichment.

❌ Expensive.

❌ Limited website visitor identification functionality.

❌ Not as many automation options, focused on email outreach primarily.

4. Apollo

Best for: Sales intelligence and automated email outreach.

Apollo is a B2B sales intelligence and engagement platform that aims to provide a holistic approach to sales and marketing.

It has a solid range of features built to help GTM teams handle most of their day-to-day operations from a single platform.

Features

  • B2B database with 275M contacts and 73M companies with solid international coverage.
  • Automates email outreach, monitors and improves email deliverability, and has an AI-powered email writing assistant.
  • Inbuilt dialer for cold calling that comes with call recordings, transcripts, and CRM logs.

Apollo.io, a full-stack sales tech platform, bags $100M at a $1.6B  valuation | Medial

Who is it for?

GTM teams that need a solution optimized for outbound sales.

Pricing

Apollo has a free forever plan that includes unlimited email finder credits, 5 phone number credits, and 10 contact export credits.

If you need more, you can upgrade to one of three paid plans:

  1. Basic: $59 per user per month
  2. Professional: $99 per user per month
  3. Organization: $149 per user per month

Note: Professional and Basic plans come with a 14-day free trial.

Pros & Cons

✅ Advanced filtering options for more targeted prospecting.

✅ Good data accuracy.

✅ Lets you put email outreach on autopilot while reducing bounce rates.

❌ Dual credit system (you spend one credit for revealing an email address and another for getting a phone number), which scales badly.

❌ Best features available only on its higher tiers.

Sales Prospecting

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator 

Best for: LinkedIn prospecting and lead generation.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s native sales prospecting solution built to provide unlimited access to LinkedIn’s vast prospect pool.

Unlike third-party browser extensions that can get you banned from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator can be freely used on the platform, which is essentially its key selling point.

Features

  • Advanced filtering options that let you run segmented and precise searches across industries.
  • Tracks key signals indicating the right time to engage quality prospects (e.g., job change, posting or interacting with a particular LinkedIn post, etc.).
  • Lets you export prospect lists, which you can feed into sales engagement platforms. 

Who is it for?

Businesses that rely on LinkedIn as their primary prospecting and lead generation source.

Pricing 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of LinkedIn’s most expensive solutions.

It has three pricing tiers:

  1. Core at $74.31 per month when billed annually. 
  2. Advanced at $125.87 per month when billed annually.
  3. Advanced Plus at a custom price.

If you need access to features such as CRM integrations, data verification, etc., you'll have to upgrade to the Advanced Plus plan.

Pros & Cons

✅ Optimized for LinkedIn prospecting.

✅ Nuanced filtering.

✅ Provides 50 InMails per month to contact even the prospects you’re not connected with.

❌ Limited use case.

❌ No automation options.

6. Lusha 

Best for: Finding B2B prospects anywhere on the web.

Lusha is a sales prospecting tool and B2B intelligence database with good international coverage.

In addition to its prospecting database, it has a Chrome extension that lets you scrape relevant data and build targeted prospect lists on LinkedIn, company websites, etc.

Features

  • 45M CCPA-compliant North American contacts and 21M GDPR-compliant European contacts.
  • Chrome extension for 1-click prospecting on LinkedIn, company websites, and CRMs.
  • Lets you create automated email outreach sequences that leverage Lusha’s data.

Who is it for?

SMBs looking for a multichannel sales prospecting solution.

Pricing 

Lusha has a free-forever plan with 50 email and 15 phone credits.

If you need more, you can upgrade to one of three paid plans:

  1. Pro: Starting at $49 per user per month 
  2. Premium: Starting at $79 per user per month
  3. Scale: Custom price

The total costs will depend on the number of phone credits you need. 

Each plan claims to include unlimited email credits. 

However, keep in mind that a limit is in fact set on 2,000 revealed emails per month.

Pros & Cons

✅ Various filters (such as technology, funding, buyer intent, etc.) for better-targeted prospecting.

✅ Budget-friendly.

✅ User-friendly interface.

❌ Most of its advanced filters (e.g., intent signals) and sales intelligence features (bulk enrichment, CRM enrichment, etc.) are available to top-tier users only.

❌ Limited phone number data and issues with its accuracy.

Lead Generation

7. Chili Piper

Best for: Reducing time to lead.

Chili Piper is a demand conversion platform that excels at qualifying and routing inbound leads.

It heavily relies on website forms to detect warm leads, so it’s a good option if lead capturing forms a vital part of your lead generation strategy.

Features

  • Customizable lead qualification rules, allowing you to use your CRM data or data captured in web forms.
  • Advanced lead routing options that include letting you set up customized routing triggers, auto-removing out-of-office sales professionals from round-robin distribution, etc.
  • Chatbot that can engage leads, book meetings, and handle lead routing.

Who is it for?

Chili Piper is best suited for teams that primarily rely on inbound lead generation and sales.

Pricing 

Chili Piper has a specific pricing structure.

If you’re just starting, you can choose between:

  1. Chili Cal Free: Base plan that includes just a few essential features
  2. Chili Cal Teams: $22.5 per user per month that includes more advanced features, such as instant booking, round-robin, etc.

Note: Chili Cal Teams is available only for Salesforce users. If you have HubSpot, you can’t access it at all, and if you use another CRM software, you won’t get all the functionalities.

If you want additional features, you can upgrade to one of four product packages:

  1. Concierge: $45 per user per month + platform fee $225-$1,500/m based on the number of inbound leads submitted each month
  2. Chat:  $45 per user per month + platform fee of $1,500/month
  3. Distro:  $45 per user per month + platform fee of $225/month
  4. Handoff:  $45 per user per month + platform fee of $225/month

If you want access to all its products, you can opt for the bundled plan dubbed Demand Conversion Platform at $108 per user per month + $1,000/mo platform fee.

You can also create your own combinations:

  1. 2 Products: $25 per user per month per product + 1 platform fee
  2. 3 Products: $20 per user per month per product + 1 platform fee
  3. 4 Products: $18 per user per month per product + 1 platform fee

Chili Cal is included in all plans.

Pros & Cons

✅ Significantly reduces time to lead. 

✅ Customizable lead qualification rules that can be fine-tuned to your business.

❌ Complex pricing policy, the costs can quickly add up.

❌ Optimized for Salesforce, users of other CRMs can’t access its full potential.

8. LeadGenius 

Best for: Industry-specific lead generation.

LeadGenius is a B2B lead generation platform that delivers custom-curated precision data tailored to each client’s specific needs and customer base.

This approach helps you find ideal leads more easily, especially if they’re coming from a specific vertical.

Features

  • Provides on-demand data and detailed insights based on users’ ICP, target market, and other unique business requirements.
  • Combines AI and human expertise to ensure the data it delivers is industry-relevant and verified.
  • Artificial Intelligence-powered web scraper that collects custom-tailored actionable insights from anywhere on the web.

Who is it for?

Sales teams dealing with specific industries and lead bases that need bespoke data beyond typical B2B intelligence.

Pricing 

LeadGenius is yet another sales intelligence solution with a non-transparent pricing policy.

The only thing stated is that each price is based on the needs and scale of a user’s business.

Contact sales for more pricing details.

Pros & Cons

✅ Delivers bespoke data tailored to your needs.

✅ Tracks 40M+ businesses and 350M+ decision-makers. 

✅ Provides 100+ deep insights on individuals and companies, allowing you to easily pinpoint the leads that best match your ICP.

❌ Non-transparent pricing.

❌ Limited functionality.

Sales Automation

9. Clay 

Best for: Data-driven inbound and outbound sales automation.

Clay is a data enrichment and sales automation tool that leverages relevant lead data to build sales workflows.

It can automate inbound and outbound lead generation and outreach.

Features

  • Automated lead scoring based on the criteria you set up and the data Clay uncovers.
  • AI-powered assistant that does automatic lead research, drafts personalized emails, and adds them to email sequences.
  • Library of outreach sequences templates to help you kick-start outbound.

Who is it for?

GTM teams looking to automate and scale their outreach by leveraging quality data.

Pricing 

Clay has a free forever plan that provides 100 search credits per month and limited access to its features.

If you need more credits and features, you can choose from 4 pricing tiers:

  1. Starter: $149/mo
  2. Explorer: $349/mo
  3. Pro: $800/mo
  4. Enterprise: Custom pricing

You can try Clay out with a 14-day free trial of its Pro plan.

However, if you’re interested in using Clay to automate outbound, you’ll have to choose between the Pro and Enterprise plans, as they’re the only ones that let you automate outreach at scale.

Pros & Cons

✅ Helps create personalized outreach sequences based on the data points it collects.

✅ Can be used for data and CRM enrichment as well.

✅ AI-powered agent for pulling data from anywhere on the web and crafting tailored messages based on it.

❌ Learning curve.

❌ Automation features available only on its highest tiers.

❌ Doesn’t have native email sequencing capabilities, you need to connect it with an email outreach tool.

10. Outreach 

Best for: Automated email outreach.

Outreach is a sales execution platform that helps sales teams close more deals by putting parts of the sales pipeline on autopilot.

Its strongest feature is email sequencing, making it perfect if you mostly rely on cold email outreach for lead generation and sales.

Features

  • Automated email sequences, including auto follow-ups, out-of-office detection, and sentiment analysis.
  • Automated syncing of all reps’ activities with your Customer Relationship Management tools.
  • Customizable templates of outreach sequences.

Who is it for?

Outreach is the best fit for larger teams that want to streamline their outreach via email.

Pricing 

Outreach has five pricing plans:

  1. Engage
  2. Call
  3. Meet
  4. Deal
  5. Forecast

Each is geared toward a specific team and business requirements (e.g., revenue forecasting, deal management, sales engagement, etc.).

If automated sales engagement is what you’re looking for, then the Engage package would be best suited.

Pros & Cons

✅ Intuitive interface.

✅ Solid range of integrations with CRM and other popular sales tools.

❌ Non-transparent pricing, indicating it’s expensive.

❌ If you want more than sales automation, you’ll have to buy several product packages.

❌ Limited customization options.

Account-Based Sales

11. Demandbase

Best for: Advanced account-based sales and marketing.

Demandbase is an account-based sales and marketing platform that uses sales intelligence and intent data to help you create better-targeted campaigns across levels.

It also has orchestration features, allowing your teams to streamline sales activities more efficiently.

Features

  • Real-time website personalization lets you customize the customer journey of your target accounts by displaying unique copy, offers, images, ads, etc.
  • Account-based marketing orchestration enables you to create customizable workflows aimed at specific accounts/audience segments.
  • Customizable forecasting reports that let you score accounts and identify high-value ones.

Who is it for?

Larger businesses looking to boost and track ABM and ABX across channels.

Pricing 

Demandbase has three essential plans that include access to all its key features:

  1. Professional
  2. Enterprise
  3. Elite

However, Demandbase doesn’t have one-size-fits-all pricing, as each package is tailored to individual users.

Some of Demandbase’s features, such as its B2B data and personalization options, are available as add-ons only.

If you’re not interested in paying for all of Demandbase’s products, the platform lets you buy “A La Carte,” i.e., purchase only those you need.

In that case, you can choose from 4 product packages:

1- ABX, which includes 3 plans:

  • Professional
  • Enterprise
  • Elite

2- Advertising, that comes with two plans:

  • Self-Serve
  • Supported

3- Sales Intelligence with:

  • Enterprise
  • Elite

4- Data

Again, Demandbase doesn’t publish prices for any of these plans, so you must contact sales for more details.

Pros & Cons

✅ Lets you build data-driven sales and marketing workflows.

✅ Actionable analytics reports.

✅ Targeted B2B advertising and retargeting.

❌ Expensive.

❌ Learning curve.

❌ Limited integration capabilities.

12. Keyplay

Best for: Building customized target accounts list and account prioritization.

Keyplay helps users find prospects who fit their ICP and prioritize the hottest accounts by tracking various relevant signals.

It’s highly customizable, meaning it can easily fit into different business goals and requirements.

Features

  • AI Lookalike helps you find accounts that match your best-performing clients and deals.
  • Lets you build custom account-scoring systems for better prioritization.
  • Tracks intent signals and lets you set up custom signals tailored to your industry and needs.

Who is it for?

Businesses looking to find their TAM more efficiently and design better-performing marketing and sales strategies for converting high-value accounts.

Pricing 

Keyplay doesn’t have a free trial for its paid plans.

However, it has a free forever plan that provides access to its basic features, and subscribing to the PeerSignal community lets you access a more limited number of records. 

If you need more records and advanced features, you can subscribe to one of two paid plans:

  1. Growth: $12,000/year
  2. Scale: Custom pricing

Pros & Cons

✅ Highly customizable lead scoring features. 

✅ Nuanced signal tracking, including HR tech, accounting software, recruiting activity, etc., helping you find qualified leads more efficiently.

❌ Integrates with only two CRMs, Hubspot and Salesforce.

❌ Offers only annual paid plans.

Sales Intelligence

13. Gong

Best for: Analyzing customer interactions and unearthing actionable insights.

Gong is a sales intelligence platform that harnesses the power of AI to analyze various interactions your team has had with potential customers, translating them into valuable insights.

Features

  • Gong’s AI model processes the entire context of all correspondence with your leads, highlighting key topics, top questions, and overall relationship dynamics.
  • Tracks over 300 unique signals to predict the outcome of any deal, allowing reps to prioritize winning deals.
  • Robust analytics tools that track KPIs and can be integrated with your CRM software or other business intelligence tools.

Who is it for?

Large sales teams looking to improve their performance and productivity by discovering hidden opportunities and bottlenecks in their communication with leads.

Pricing 

Gong doesn’t have fixed subscription fees.

Instead, it urges potential users to complete a simple questionnaire and specify their team size and requirements to get a custom quote. 

The pricing depends on the number and type of licenses you need.

Pros & Cons

✅ User-friendly interface.

✅ Its AI model provides concise and actionable insights that boost sales efficiency across levels.

✅ Can be used for coaching new reps.

❌ Non-transparent pricing.

❌ Limited features.

14. Fireflies.ai

Best for: Analyzing sales calls with potential customers and detecting important touchpoints, potential opportunities, buyer sentiment, etc.

Fireflies.ai transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes meetings with leads, providing sales reps and managers with insights into key moments, topics, and action items. 

Features

  • Transcribes and summarizes meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and other video call platforms.
  • Lets you create custom topic trackers to easily find details relevant to your business goals.
  • Allows you to filter conversations by speaker, detect buyer sentiment, identify talk-to-listen ratio, etc.

Who is it for?

Sales teams that use video meetings for prospecting and closing deals.

Pricing

Fireflies.ai has a free forever plan with unlimited transcriptions, limited AI summaries, and 800 minutes of storage per seat, and access to some of its basic features.

More advanced users can choose from three paid plans:

  • Pro: $18 per user per month
  • Business: $29 per user per month
  • Enterprise: $39 per user per month

Pros & Cons

✅ Has a mobile app, providing on-the-go access.

✅ Highly accurate transcriptions and summaries.

✅ Affordable plans.

❌ Has a learning curve.

❌ Issues with accurately identifying buyer sentiment.

Data Enrichment

15. Clearbit

Best for: HubSpot data enrichment.

Clearbit is a real-time data enrichment tool that collects data from 250+ proprietary and external sources and transforms it into over 90 B2B attributes for individual and company profiles.

HubSpot acquired it late last year, which resulted in some of its features being discontinued and Clearbit becoming primarily oriented toward HubSpot record enrichment.

Features

  • Automatic data refreshes when a change is detected.
  • Form shortening for capturing more leads without losing relevant data.
  • White-labeled API to enrich records in your own SaaS product.

Who is it for?

HubSpot users looking for quick, seamless, and accurate CRM enrichment. 

Alternatively, since it can be white-labeled, Clearbit might be a good choice if you have a SaaS product you want to improve by embedding a rich B2B database.

Pricing 

Clearbit doesn’t reveal its pricing structure, meaning you’ll have to contact sales for more details.

The plan is volume-based and can include add-on functionalities like Forms, Advertising, and Capture. (The add-ons are probably charged extra).

❗Note: Warmly's pricing plans include access to Clearbit’s extensive database.

Pros & Cons

✅ Accurate data.

✅ Can be integrated into your app as a white-label solution.

✅ Pulls data from a variety of sources.

❌ Opaque pricing.

❌ Some of its key features are only available as add-ons.

16. Clay 

Best for: Waterfall enrichment.

Clay made our list twice. This time, for its remarkable waterfall enrichment capabilities.

Features

  • Data coverage of 75+ data enrichment tools ensures that all your account and contact records have the most up-to-date information.

Who is it for?

GTM teams looking to automate and scale their outreach by leveraging quality data.

Pricing 

See section #9 above.

Pros & Cons

See section #9 above.

Next Steps: Finding the Best Tool for You

Now that you’ve got all this information at your fingertips, what next?

Well, there’s only one thing left to do.

The best way to find out which of these powerful tools is the best fit for your specific use case is to take a few of them you like the most on a test ride and see how well they perform firsthand.

If increasing website conversions and automating a good part of your prospecting and outreach efforts sparked your interest, then you might start with Warmly.

Subscribe to its free plan and start identifying quality leads that land on your website today.

Want more information on Warmly? Book a live demo with our team, and we’ll be happy to show you what Warmly can do for you.


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