What Is Lead Intelligence and Why It’s Key to Sales Outreach

Lead intelligence is a smarter way to prospect, as not all leads are created equally.

Everyone has a different opinion on what qualifies leads as sales-ready. Depending on your industry or sales process, the information you need about a B2B lead to consider them ready to pursue will differ. That’s where lead intelligence comes in to help sales professionals like you understand prospects, their needs, and pain points — all key to winning B2B sales. Sales and marketing departments use lead intelligence software to validate lead data and win prospects. 

Lead intelligence is quickly becoming the go-to strategy for supporting B2B lead generation activities in a crowded marketplace. This guide gives you an overview of how lead intelligence works, why it’s crucial for sales, what data you should collect from inbound leads, and a list of the best lead intelligence tools on the market, according to reviews from people like you.

Why is lead intelligence important for sales?

Your sales team likely receives thousands of leads every day. When manually validating these leads, they get less time for lead nurturing. Lead intelligence tools verify contact data like email addresses and phone numbers, so your revenue team has less manual workload. As a result, the sales team gets to spend more time preparing for demos, nurturing qualified leads, and converting them into sales. 

Let’s take a look at an example of lead intelligence in action.

Imagine your company is a crucial real estate CRM software industry player. As a salesperson, you see leads from paid ads, organic search, and landing pages. These leads are realtors looking for CRM solutions to find, track, and manage new and existing property buyers and renters. The leads submit a demo request on your website or want to contact the sales team.

When you get thousands of leads every month, validating and qualifying them becomes an uphill task. With lead intelligence, you can score these leads and segregate them based on filters like prospects who interacted with the features page, visited landing pages with discounts for group plans, or mentioned ‘urgent’ in their demo request submission.

Using lead intelligence tools allows you to validate leads, use lead scoring to prioritize high-quality ones, and nurture them.  

How does lead intelligence work?

Marketers and salespeople consider lead intelligence an incredibly effective strategy for managing information about leads. But that's not all lead intelligence tools can provide your revenue organization.

Lead intelligence also allows reps to automate the tedious tasks associated with lead scoring and focus instead on reaching decision-makers. Lead intelligence data can help sales reps gauge everything from a prospect's interest level in your product to the best ways to contact them.

Scoring leads before you pass them along to sales is a crucial step of lead intelligence. It helps save time and energy that might otherwise be wasted chasing leads who aren't ready to buy your product.

Types of lead intelligence data

Understanding the different types of lead intelligence data and when to use each is as important as purchasing the right software. Lead intelligence tools can do much more than verify you're sending cold outreach to the correct email address.

These tools collect information about when and where prospects interact with your brand. Many lead intelligence tools use predictive analytics to measure these interactions and send sales reps real-time insights into lead behavior.

Once you better understand what actions leads are taking along your sales funnel, you can get a better sense of who your qualified leads are and which accounts need a little more time. All of this can simplify the lead management process.

Here are different types of lead intelligence data available and how it can benefit your sales team:

• Company details contain anything happening within your prospect's organization (a successful round of funding raised, new acquisitions, etc.) that might influence their purchasing decisions. This data can help you position your product as a must-have solution for fixing the pain points they might experience in their next growth stage.
• Demographic details help you with personalization, which is critical to differentiating your sales outreach. Using demographic data about leads can help you tailor your pitch to show how your product can help leads with their specific roles and responsibilities.
• Social media profiles set you up for social selling on platforms like LinkedIn, which are transforming the sales landscape. This casual approach to selling online makes it more critical than ever to ensure you can connect with leads on their preferred social media platform.
• Website visits capture first-time and repeat visitors landing on your website to look up information or purchase products. You should keep an eye on which visitors are making return visits. Lead intelligence can help you gain insights into which leads regularly visit your website, which pages they frequently view, and whether or not they've filled out a lead capture form before.

As you've probably already guessed, manually managing this information is a data privacy nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer volume of consumer data lead intelligence comes in contact with makes lead intelligence software necessary for most businesses.

Best lead intelligence tools

Lead intelligence software allows collecting and managing accurate lead information in a single location. Lead intelligence tools empower everyone in your revenue organization to nurture and convert leads to prospects.

And because several teams within your organization can use lead intelligence software, it's wise to meet with other leaders in your organization when choosing the right lead intelligence technology.

Lead intelligence software shouldn't be confused with other software products that merely collect and store customer data. The primary benefit of lead intelligence software is that it can assist sales professionals in managing the lead gen process. Everything from lead mining, capturing, scoring, and nurturing are available within most lead intelligence tools.

In order to be included in this list, a product must:

• Feature an automatic process for verifying different lead data points, including prospects’ names, phone numbers, and emails
• Enable users to create, merge, and manage lead lists along with data provided by the lead intelligence system
• Find new business opportunities based on internal and external data analysis
  Integrate with marketing automation, CRM, sales, advanced analytics, and data management tools

*Below are the top five lead intelligence tools from G2’s Fall 2023 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.

1. ZoomInfo SalesOS 

ZoomInfo SalesOS is a trusted go-to market platform for B2B companies looking for ready-to-buy companies displaying buying signals. The platform delivers data-driven insights from its large B2B database of 70 million phone numbers and 174 million verified email addresses. It also features conversation intelligence, sales engagement, and data orchestration capabilities to help you efficiently engage with the right prospects. 

What users like best:

“ZoomInfo SalesOS has changed the way we work at Freshworks. The quality of the data it provides is exceptional, allowing our lead generation and market research efforts to be more efficient and effective. The user-friendly interface is revolutionary and makes information easily accessible. It integrates seamlessly with your existing tools, saving you time and streamlining your workflow. The outstanding customer support makes it even better. I highly recommend ZoomInfo SalesOS to anyone who is serious about growing their business and staying competitive.”

- ZoomInfo SalesOS Review, Ravi R.

What users dislike:

“Login is an issue sometimes as the site tends to take time to load. Plus, the contact info of lower management people tend to be wrong at times.”

- ZoomInfo SalesOS Review, Mayank S.

2. Apollo.io

Apollo.io offers a comprehensive B2B lead database and all-in-one sales intelligence platform to aid sales teams prospect in-market buyers, engage with them, and drive revenue. The database offers 265 million contacts from more than 60 million companies worldwide. The product also features an Engagement Suite for scaling outbound marketing activities and sequences. 

What users like best:

“The filters for searches are easy to manage, it will also give you new leads every day. If you play around with it, you can have all the right information in one view, the same as the contact view. Importing contacts is also not complicated. It's compatible with CRMs like Hubspot and Outreach which my team is using. I'd say the best part is acquiring contact numbers though it is not 100% accurate but it is correct most of the time. When issues occur, you can chat the customer support and you can expect assistance right away.”

- Apollo.io Review, Mary Lovelyn A.

What users dislike:

“Occasionally I've found some contact data to be out of date, and I guess the database is only as good as the information put into it. The interface can also be slightly overwhelming as a new user, and I'm sure I'm only using a fraction of what Apollo can do.”

- Apollo.io Review, Paul C.

3. Cognism

Cognism is a B2B sales intelligence platform designed to accelerate your sales performance. Cognism easily integrates with your existing marketing and sales data and uses AI technology to deliver accurate lead intelligence. Sales prospecting, cold outreach, and data accuracy are all made easy with Cognism.

What users like best:

“The ability to quickly build a marketing mailing list using domains and company names is amazing. Our leads list was populated very quickly using Cognism and our sales team has been very busy since. The team is able to provide tailored data upon request which is a little known feature of Cognism that is rarely advertised. Amazing platform.”

– Cognism Review, James O.

What users dislike:

“Nothing to dislike – it's a very well designed and easy to use tool. If I could make suggestions to improve the system, the ability to include file attachments with emails, rather than just including a link to a document or file, and also the ability to customise emails using HTML (or some kind of drag-and-drop builder or templates) would be useful.”

– Cognism Review, Amber S.

4. Seamless.ai

Seamless.ai is a real-time B2B sales lead search engine. The platform features prospecting tools to help you engage with ideal customers, build sales pipeline, and close more deals. Besides simplifying list building, Seamless.ai offers AI recommendations to help you easily find prospective buyers. Moreover, it also provides emails, direct dials, cell phone numbers along with intent data for accounts you target. 

What users like best:

“Seamless.ai offers a user-friendly platform that I found incredibly easy to navigate and learn. Previously, my experience was primarily with Salesforce as a prospecting system, along with the native tools provided by my former company. However, upon joining my new company, adopting Seamless.ai has been a breeze, and I must admit, I'm quite fond of it.”

- Seamless.ai Review, Sanjay K.

What users dislike:

"The data quality seems to be decreasing. Whereas when I first started using it, contact data validity was 40-50% after cleaning. Now, it's closer to 20% which makes it hard to actually build solid email lists. Simultaneously, they reduced the number of leads available daily per license. Meaning rather than 3,000 a day, the cap is now 1,000. They also lock you into contracts no matter what."

- Seamless.ai Review, Jacob V. 

5. UpLead

UpLead is a B2B lead intelligence platform that provides sales teams with high-quality prospecting data and information. UpLead has a full suite of tools, including email verification, account based marketing tools, and integration capabilities with the world's leading CRM platforms. UpLead is a powerful platform that makes sales prospecting simple.

What users like best:

“UpLead makes it very easy to find industries and target companies by use of different technologies. Making a list of companies filtering for size, industry and location is a breeze with the layout. Once you've found your target companies, it's very easy to find specific titles and add them to a customized list. Our company has a CRM integration with salesforce dot com so pushing your new leads over to work with them is incredibly seamless.

I really like the fact that once you try to unlock an email it is tested at time of unlock. If the email is found to be invalid you get your credit back. This is way better than the alternative of scraping the email, sending it off into cyberspace and then getting an Undeliverable or worse yet not receiving an mailer daemon and just wondering where your outreach is sitting.”

– UpLead Review, Connor F.

What users dislike:

“Nothing really to dislike, but I would say the only thing would be that I was in love with version 1.0 and getting used to 2.0 was a bit of a learning experience. That being said the live chat helped me find where things were moved to in the new version immediately. I don’t have any real dislikes of the product and would highly recommend it.”

– UpLead Review, Phillip C.

Get the right insights every time

Lead intelligence is just a small part of a larger lead generation strategy. Collecting this data from leads will give you a significant advantage in understanding your prospects' pain points and needs – which in turn will make it easier to sell.

Ready to take your lead intelligence game to the next level? Learn how companies are leveraging G2 Buyer Intent data to gather real-time insights into buyer behavior.