Why Companies Switch to SalesIntel: The Journey of Evaluating a Reliable B2B Data Provider

Maybe you’re perfectly happy with your current data provider, but the fact you’re here might mean you’re at least curious if the grass is really greener on the other side of the fence. Based on our recent case study with Alleyoop, we wanted to share reasons our customers had to switch to SalesIntel and how they evaluated us before switching.

Data providers are multi-year partnerships. Your data system is baked deep into your sales and marketing operations. The wrong choice can hurt your sales and marketing efforts longer than you’d like to consider.

So, let’s review how you can be confident you’re ready to switch and how others have evaluated SalesIntel as their best bet.

When Should You Consider Switching Data Providers?

If you have zero complaints about your current provider, that’s fantastic! 

But our customers that have switched to SalesIntel tell similar stories of having a single provider they were using. Over time, they noticed the results were getting worse and worse. Maybe the price went up. Maybe new types of data, like buying intent, weren’t being added to the platform. Most commonly, data accuracy decreased. Call connection rates went down, and more and more emails began to bounce.

For Alleyoop, the biggest issue was direct dial numbers. Alleyoop needed contact data and access to a wide variety of industries to service their clients. Any B2B company using an SDR team relies on accurate data to start conversations. The first sign of trouble was finding inaccurate data and the provider not having a process in place to refresh the data. 

Before you even start outreach, accurate data is essential for assessing your total addressable market, ideal client profile, and brand positioning. Without the data you need, you can’t plan revenue growth accurately. You’re only making guesses otherwise. 

Accurate and accessible data becomes even more imperative when sales and marketing get into the nitty-gritty of growing revenue. If your company isn’t happy with revenue numbers, then you’re not closing enough deals. Closing deals depend on setting meetings. Even if your team is working hard and doing everything else right, if the connection rate when trying to call and set meetings is terrible, you will see low meeting numbers.

How do you know it’s time to switch? from SalesIntel on Vimeo.

All your efforts are intertwined with your data provider. If a new provider will increase your connection rates, the impact should go all the way to increasing revenue. If you feel you’re doing everything right but not seeing the results you’d expect, consider testing new data providers. 

The low connection rates with their previous provider pushed Alleyopp to start building their own. They started paying for their own data researchers and miners. But, the idea of having to pay extra to do the job their data provider was supposed to do felt absurd. That was their tipping point to start searching for a new provider.

If you’ve seen your ROI lower with your current provider, key metrics are dropping, or the database is sufficient for your company to scale, it’s time to consider a switch.

How Should You Evaluate New Providers?

We’ve established how important a data provider is. So, you don’t want to jump on the first option you see or the cheapest you can find. You don’t benefit from data being super cheap if the ROI is low, and you’re not able to continually grow and scale. 

First, consider what’s most important to you for a data provider. Depending on your company size, industry, and revenue generation strategy, you’ll have your own criteria. For Alleyoop, they needed a big contact database to handle multiple ICPs, so they immediately ruled out smaller and brand-new data providers. They also wanted Buying Intent data to be part of the solution. Allyoop depends on using intent data to prioritize and segment their prospects so their team is dialing smart instead of merely cold calling.

Once you have your list of priorities, you can start having conversations with the companies that meet them. Once they started looking closely and started initial conversations, Alleyoop dropped from being interested in 15 data providers to wanting demos from 6. After their demos, Alleyoop had 3 candidates left they wanted to run a full test with. The final 3 were Cognism, ZoomInfo, and SalesIntel.

The first way to narrow data providers? Is the provider willing to do a full trial and test? If you’re not able to test drive the data when making this big of a decision, that’s probably a sign you should consider someone else. 

The second big concern for narrowing down providers is direct mobile numbers. If you have an SDR team making calls and setting meetings, you’ll want phone numbers front and center for testing and review.

The final consideration as you narrow down and make your decision on who to trial is customer service. As you have the sales conversation, is the provider responsive and personal? Are you receiving timely replies that directly address what you need? If a provider can’t communicate and work with you well when there is a deal on the table, how likely are they to provide customer service down the road?

For testing their final 3 providers, Alleyoop picked 3 different ICPs struggling with connection rates for their clients. They looked to where they were seeing the biggest, current issues to decide their testing criteria, so the focus was on seeing who would have the highest call connection rate across different ICPs given a one-week trial for each provider. A connected call only counted if it was an actual conversation with the prospect. No voicemail.

Each week, Alleyoop had 3 SDRs making calls and using contact data from one data provider. The next week they would switch to using a different provider. They focused on having multiple ICPs and multiple SDRs using the data to reduce the impact a single variable would have on the results. Each week about 1,000 contacts from each provider went through their marketing and sales cadence. 

When evaluating data providers yourself, you can set up a similar test. If you’re not focused on calls, you could use email response rate or whatever is your key metric for starting your sales process.

How Did SalesIntel Perform? 

In Alleyoops’ test, Cognism came in last place at an 8% connection rate. ZoomInfo had a 16% call connection rate. 

SalesIntel came in first with a whopping 35% call connection rate. After choosing to partner with SalesIntel, Alleyoop has continued to operate with an over 30% call connection rate.

Alleyoop data test: what it was, results and pricing comparisons from SalesIntel on Vimeo.

Besides having the best results, SalesIntel had the best price point for Alleyoop. So, picking the highest ROI with the lowest upfront cost was an easy choice.

As Alleyoop has worked with SalesIntel, our Research on Demand Team has continually been impressive. While other providers would take almost a week to return updated contact data, SalesIntel would have fresh data back within hours. After months of using SalesIntel, the quality of customer service hasn’t dropped. 

SalesIntel also provided a user-friendly interface and easy migration process. SalesIntel was able to plug right into Alleyoop’s current workflows and tech stack. Hands-on, personal training had all the sales reps up to speed without any adoption issues. 

SalesIntel has continued to pay dividends for Alleyoop. Now, Gabriel Lullo, CEO of Alleyoop, checks the SalesIntel enrichment every morning.

“I get [the enrichment details email] in the middle of the night and I wake up to it every morning. It’s like my alarm clock. It showcases all of the contacts within our database and all of the contacts that have been enhanced and refreshed. It’s never zero. I wake up to enhanced and enriched data every day.”  

Start Your Own Test

Alleyoop isn’t the only one who has switched to SalesIntel and seen better results. After switching to SalesIntel contact and intent data, CDYNE saw a 50% increase in their call connection rate. Within their first quarter of using SalesIntel, Northern Safety & Industrial had an additional million dollars in opportunities they could trace to SalesIntel’s data that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

But that’s their stories. We’d like you to have an opportunity to test our data and see how it compares. We pride ourselves on wanting to be your best choice for a data provider. 

Design your test, start your free trial, and see the difference a new data provider can make.