For an outbound sales team, the biggest challenge they face is filling the top of the sales pipeline. To get highly targeted leads to outreach is perhaps the most important part of a successful and effective sales process.
However, it is not an easy task to get these leads. If the whole process of lead research has to be done manually, it eats up hours and hours of the sales team members' time, which can be utilized for more important aspects like outreaching to them and follow-ups.
Therefore, it will be of huge help to any sales team if there is a database consisting of B2B contacts. It is vital that the quality of the contact database is good which if not would do more harm than good for a company's reputation.
There are quite a few tools in this space, but for a long time, ZoomInfo has been one of the market leaders in providing a high-quality B2B database for their customers.
However, based on your specific needs, ZoomInfo might not be the best choice for your company's needs.
ZoomInfo offers only annual plans and the pricing could be on the expensive side for small & medium businesses.
For smaller teams and companies that need similar high-quality B2B data but could not afford the high annual pricing of ZoomInfo, there are quite a few good alternatives.
We will have a look at the best of these alternatives in this post. Let's get into it.
Pricing - starts at $99 per month for 200 monthly credits.
Free Plan - Yes, available for 5 credits.
Major Integrations - Close CRM, HubSpot, Insightly, Lemlist, Mailshake, Outreach, Pipedrive, Salesloft, Salesforce, Woodpecker, Zapier.
UpLead is easily one of the best affordable alternatives to ZoomInfo that provides a fantastic quality of contact at a low monthly price.
With a database of more than 45 Million contacts spread across over 200 countries and 95% accuracy, it is one of the most reliable sources of B2B data.
One of the significant advantages of UpLead is that all the email addresses you get are verified in real-time. This helps not only in cutting the costs down further as there is no need to invest in an additional 3rd party email verification tool but also improves your campaign performance as the bounce rate is very low.
There are a ton of filters to narrow down the search to get exactly the type of data and your target audience. You can filter based on location, job title, size of the company, revenue generated, industry type, etc.
For sales teams that do Account-Based Marketing, these targeted data sets could be absolutely invaluable.
It is also possible to search based on the technologies used by a specific company you are looking for. So, if you are building or marketing a Shopify app, you can target the e-commerce shops built on Shopify.
Or, if you are an agency helping out companies implementing and utilizing Salesforce to its maximizing capability, you can build a list of companies using Salesforce as their CRM. These are hugely valuable data for a company that would take hours if not days and months to build manually.
UpLead also has a public API if you need it to utilize the database in any of your own products. A chrome extension is also available as well to get all the contact information in a click.
The pricing plans range from $99 to $399 per month, a fraction of what ZoomInfo charges. You get a 25% discount when paying yearly. The monthly plans don't require any contract or commitment.
There is also an Enterprise plan that starts from 10,000 credits per year that can be shared across an unlimited number of users.
Apart from getting data from scratch, UpLead also supports data enrichment where you can input the information available to you like name or company name and get more details like email & phone numbers. etc.
Overall, UpLead is a fantastic feature-rich tool that could be a very good option to choose if you are looking for an alternative to ZoomInfo.
Pricing - starts from $67 per month.
Free Plan - Not available.
ScopeLeads is a lead generation tool that specializes in leads for digital marketing agencies and freelancers.
The best part about ScopeLeads is that it is not just a contact database, but a cold emailing tool as well. Therefore, you can find the contact information of your ideal prospects and outreach to them within the same tool, which saves a lot of money for an agency.
You can get the leads based on location, specific keywords, and businesses that lack a certain feature that your agency can offer. For example, if you run an SEO agency, you can find businesses that have their websites poorly optimized for SEO and that lack proper schema.
Once you find that website, it is possible to run a short audit and generate a report with your agency's logo. You can then send this report to the business owner as an initial outreach email which adds a lot of value to it rather than a simple outreach email listing your services.
If you are a PPC advertising agency, then with ScopeLeads, you can build a list of businesses that aren't running ads, have stopped running ads recently, have active ads but no retargeting set-up, etc. This lets you build a highly targeted list of business owners that you can pitch your services.
Another unique feature in ScopeLeads is that it even gives a list of businesses that don't even have a website. This might be a huge asset for web design and web development agencies.
Pricing - starts from $147 per month for 500 monthly credits.
Free Plan - Yes, available for 25 leads.
LeadFuze is another excellent B2B lead generation database with more than 300 million contacts spread across more than 10 million companies worldwide.
It also has a good free plan for 25 leads to test the quality of the leads in your niche and industry.
You can get the personal and also business email address of your ideal prospects. There are a lot more filters to choose from including job title, location, industry type, no. of employees, revenue generated, companies that spend on advertising including Adwords & other PPC networks, companies that are hiring for a specific department, etc.
Another excellent and unique feature in LeadFuze is an automation bot called Fuzebot. It works as an AI assistant where you can enter your preferred search filters and set them up to send new, fresh leads matching the search criteria.
These leads can be sent directly to your preferred CRM or alternatively to a Google sheet.
This is a huge timesaver particularly for medium to large-sized outbound sales teams where you get a list of fresh leads in your CRM every day that match your ideal customer profile with no hours spent on scraping or organizing the data yourself. All the emails are verified in real-time to reduce bounce rates.
LeadFuze also has an unlimited agency plan that gives you access to an unlimited number of leads. It is a huge value for money particularly for marketing agencies as you can manage multiple campaigns of yourself and your clients.
You can also add sub-accounts under the unlimited plan and resell LeadFuze for additional profits. You will be charged only $49 per user and anything above that is your profit. It is possible to set up limits on how many leads they can access.
Get the Unlimited Agency Plan of LeadFuze
With regards to integrations, all major CRM's and cold emailing tools including Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesflare, Close CRM, Freshsales, Lemlist, Mailshake, Reply, Woodpecker, etc. are available along with Zapier integration to connect with other third-party applications.
Pricing - $15 per month per user for CRM + $39 per month per company for LeadBooster
Free Plan - No, but a free trial is available.
Pipedrive is a very well-known CRM tool that is extensively used by sales teams of many small to medium businesses, startups, etc. However, not many are aware that it has an add-on that comes with a lot of additional features including a complete B2B database of millions of contacts.
LeadBooster's Prospector has a database of more than 400 million B2B contact profiles from more than 10 million companies. The add-on can be added to any plan in Pipedrive. The database is constantly updated and verified periodically to add fresh leads for your outreach campaigns.
Along with this database, LeadBooster has other features like web forms, live chat, and chatbots. The add-on costs just $39 per month per company and for all the features included, it is an incredible value for money.
If you do not want to pay monthly, there is also an option to buy top-up credits that last for 60 days. The price for top-up credits ranges from $9.99 to $599.99 depending on the number of leads you need.
With web forms and chatbots, in addition to the database, it works as a complete lead generation and sales engagement platform.
Having a lead generation and sales engagement platform built in with your CRM is a huge time saver and makes it incredibly easy for your sales team to have everything in one place. This helps the sales team to be organized and share information very effectively.
You can set up different chatbot messages on different pages of your website and based on the answers, you can qualify the leads, and route the lead to a specific salesperson.
The integrated live chat might save you a lot of money as you can stop using dedicated live chat tools like Intercom, Drift, etc.
If you have an on-field sales team, Pipedrive's mobile apps are rated to be one of the highest on both iOS & Android which makes it easier to manage everything on the go.
Get a 30-day Free Trial of Pipedrive
Also, if you need any additional functionality to your CRM & lead generation system, Pipedrive has a huge marketplace that has an incredible number of extensions to add the specific feature you need.
Pricing - starts from $49 per user per month for unlimited email credits.
Free Plan - Yes, available for 150 email credits per month.
Apollo has a huge database of more than 200 million contacts across 10 million companies worldwide. Apollo is not just a database, but it has also cold emailing with campaigns, and a dialer built-in to keep all your outreach efforts within a single tool.
Apollo has an excellent free plan as well that you can use to get 150 email credits per month. The best part is the free plan is not very limited in terms of features you get. It includes cold emailing with up to 2 sequences where you can send up to 250 emails per day, basic filters, LinkedIn extension, email tracking, CRM integration, etc.
The two paid plans cost $49 and $100 respectively. Both the plans give access to an unlimited number of credits and the major difference is that you get 50 direct-dial credits in the higher professional plan.
You also get advanced features like A/B testing and call recording in the professional plan. Also, there are no limits on the number of sequences and the number of emails sent.
Apollo also has a custom enterprise plan that gives you super-advanced features like fully customizable dashboards & reports, custom permission for team members, custom domain tracking, client management for agencies, custom training & onboarding, a dedicated account manager, etc.
The enterprise plan also comes with the job change alerts feature, which gives you real-time updates whenever a contact's job title is changed, removed, or promoted. This is very helpful to have your CRM data fresh and clean at all times.
When it comes to filtering the available data, Apollo has more than 60 data points to run and filter the searches. Based on the filters and searches you have run and saved, the system continuously scans the database and the AI engine periodically recommends fresh leads that match your search criteria.
Some of the filters include job title, name, location, industry type, company size, funding stage, technologies used, hiring activity, number of employees, revenue generated, department size, etc.
With Apollo, it is also possible to add contacts from LinkedIn directly to an email sequence or an outreach campaign consisting of emails and calls.
Apollo also has a built-in AI that can automatically generate highly personalized emails based on your prospects.
The AI can also write follow-up sequences based on the sentiment of the responses you receive for each email in the chain.
For a medium to big-sized sales team, this can save up a massive amount of time and help to scale up the outreach efforts to unprecedented levels.
Pricing - starts from $49 per month.
Free Plan - No, but a 14-day free trial is available for unlimited searches and exporting 100 leads.
One of the best aspects of Soleadify is that all the data it provides is crawled from publicly available sources like company websites. This makes it very much compliant with all the privacy laws like GDPR.
When it comes to the size of the database, Soleadify covers more than 43 million companies spread across 100+ countries. The filers for search can be very targeted like niche & type of industry, company size & employee count, year established, tech stack used, etc.
The tech stack filter is very extensive in Soleadify and covers hundreds of technology used by companies. This is of great use for software development agencies where you can target specific companies using the exact technology you work with.
Similar to ScopeLeads, you cal also send cold outreach emails directly from Soleadify without paying for an additional cold outreach tool.
Exclusive discount - Use the Coupon Code "FRIENDOFYUSUFF" and get 25% off all the plans in Soleadify
Pricing - starts from $59.99 per month per user for cold emailing and $300 per month per user for B2B contact data.
Free Plan - Not available, but a 14-day free trial is available.
Autoklose is another excellent lead generation database and data enrichment tool that you can use to get verified professional emails and also direct-dial phone numbers of your prospects.
It has a database of millions of companies. You can get access to the data by subscribing to the Enterprise plan or also can be purchased as an add-on that will cost $300 per user per month.
Even as a standalone cold emailing tool, Autoklose is quite excellent and has a lot of useful features to ramp up your sales engagement process.
All the emails are verified in real-time. When it comes to integrations, Autoklose natively integrates with Salesflare, Calendly, Vidyard, and Piesync. Zapier integration is available as well to integrate with thousands of more apps.
Autoklose has some powerful A/B testing features as well to optimize your email campigns to get the best possible results. You can effectively collaborate with your team members to get the most converting email copy and save it as a template for each cadence.
Pricing - starts from $39 per month for 1000 credits, unlimited users, and 5000 unique recipients.
Free Plan - Yes, available.
Snov is one of the most complete all-in-one outreach platforms that consists of an email finder, a cold emailing tool with sequences, an email tracker, a technology tracker, an email verifier, mass emailing for Gmail, etc.
It has an excellent visual drag & drop campaign builder to map out your outreach sequences effectively. You can easily set up custom triggers, delays, and automated follow-ups to maximize the reply rates.
It is also possible to get detailed and real-time metrics of your campaigns to track and keep improving them. You can build a multi-flow cold email campaign based on the replies you receive to have a super-personalized campaign running completely automated.
You can schedule the emails based on the recipient's time zone. Once you get a reply from your prospect, the system automatically stops the campaign, so that you can continue the engagement privately.
Pricing - starts from $50 per month for 300 verified emails per month.
Free Plan - Yes, available as a pay-as-you-use option.
Wiza is quite a unique tool. It is not a standalone database, but it does something really smart. It helps you get the email address of the contacts from LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches.
If your organization has already invested in LinkedIn Sales Navigator for your team members. Wiza saves a lot of time and money by providing accurate & verified emails of your ideal connections.
You can either pay a monthly subscription or Wiza also has an option to pay as you go for the email credits you get. The subscription plan costs $50 or $100 per month based on the number of verified emails you get per month.
The pay-as-you-go plan costs $0.15 per valid email. You can also get a custom plan designed specifically for the needs of your company.
Pricing - starts from $49 per month for 500 email searches and 500 email verifications.
Free Plan - Yes, available for 50 email searches and 50 email verifications.
Hunter is one of the best and well-known email finders in the market. The process is quite simple, where you just enter the website domain of the company you want to target, and Hunter scrapes and gives you the list of all the available emails in this domain with the name, job title, department, etc.
There are many useful filters in Hunter. For example, you can search for emails that have a personal name or a specific generic name such as 'contact@', 'sales@', support@', 'hello@', etc.
Hunter also lets you know the common email pattern used by an organization to find out the best possible email address combination of your prospects. You can just enter the name of your prospect to get the possible email address based on the email pattern used by the company.
All the email data shows a confidence score based on a lot of factors to determine how close to 'verified' the email is and how safe it is to send a cold email. The emails with the best confidence scores are marked in green and you can select to download only these leads.
Hunter also shows the actual public source of the emails which will help in confining with privacy-based laws like GDPR.
Hunter also supports data enrichment where you can upload a list of domains or company names and you get a list of enriched data complete with the email details along with the verification status.
You also get an official Google Sheets add-on which saves a lot of time while doing a bulk search for the emails.
Apart from being an excellent email finder, Hunter also has a feature called Campaigns which lets you send outreach emails right within Hunter.
You can send one-off cold emails and also schedule periodic sequence emails with your existing Gmail account. The emails can be completely personalized and it is also possible to set a daily limit on the number of emails sent.
Apart from the personalization already available in the campaigns, you can also add custom attributes to build hyper-personalized email campaigns for a specific use case. Hunter also lets you connect multiple Gmail accounts with a single Hunter account.
Hunter also has an API that you can use in your own apps or custom-built applications to add the email finder as a feature.
Pricing - starts from $100 per month for 250 monthly credits.
Free Trial - Yes, available.
WhoKnows ProspectR is a database of more than 370 Million profiles that can be filtered based on the company name, job title, seniority level, industry type, location, size of the company, skills & interests, education, work experience, etc.
All the data are verified in real-time and update based on any job change of your prospects. You also do not get charged for non-verified data if any.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. To wrap up, the above are some of the best affordable and feature-rich alternatives you can find for ZoomInfo to assist in your lead generation process.
While ScopeLeads and Soleadify are excellent for marketing agencies, UpLead and LeadFuze are fantastic choices for an outbound sales team.