ZoomInfo VS LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Comparison Guide 2024

When it comes to B2B lead generation and prospecting, choosing the right tool can make or break your business.

Increase your sales calls and responses, target more leads based on your ICP (ideal customer profile), create quality multichannel outreach sequences (emails, LinkedIn, cold calling), and securely store prospect data.

Before choosing the right tool, ensure it meets all the objective criteria for a seamless and optimized lead generation process.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo are the most widely used B2B lead-generation tools for sales and marketing teams.

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll compare ZoomInfo VS LinkedIn Sales Navigator from various perspectives to see which fits your goals better.

In this article, we’ll see:

1. ZoomInfo VS LinkedIn Sales Navigator Overview
2. Data Quality and Sources
3. Pricing
4. Contact Information
5. Search Engine
6. Intent Data
7. Integrations
8. Data Upload

Let’s get into it.

ZoomInfo VS LinkedIn Sales Navigator Overview

To begin with, let’s see what each tool is and what core features differentiate them.

What Is ZoomInfo?

ZoomInfo is a go-to-market intelligence tool that provides detailed B2B contact information and advanced search capabilities to help sales and marketing teams find and connect with potential leads.

It offers comprehensive databases, intent signals, and seamless CRM integration.

ZoomInfo’s features include:

• Comprehensive Contact Database
• Advanced Search Capabilities
• Intent Signals
• CRM Integration
• Web Insights
• Chrome Extension

What Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a B2B sales tool that leverages LinkedIn’s professional network.

It provides advanced search capabilities, CRM integration, and insight into engagement metrics to help users identify and connect with potential leads on LinkedIn.

With Sales Navigator, you get:

• Professional Network Access
• Advanced Search Features
• Engagement Insights
• CRM Integration
• InMail Messaging

---

I’ve created this detailed and exhaustive ZoomInfo VS LinkedIn Sales Navigator comparison guide to help you make a justified and right decision.

The criteria I’ve chosen for this guide include the most used features that improve prospecting.

A small notice: there are tens of great ZoomInfo alternatives. So don’t hesitate to test them out, too.

In this article, I’ll also talk about using Evaboot with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which will upgrade your lead-generation strategy.

---

Data Quality and Sources

Understanding the sources of your data increases confidence in your decisions.

That’s why it’s important for scraping tools to justify the origin of the data and its accuracy.

We’ll see this in the case of ZoomInfo VS LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo collects B2B data from trusted sources using advanced automation and validation to ensure accuracy.

It uses tools like the Neverbounce, Chorus, or FormComplete features to enrich and verify data accuracy across the platform.

Key data collection methods include:

• Web Crawling: They get publicly available data from websites, social media, and news articles.
• Data Partnerships: Trusted partners help to enrich their databases.
• Human Research and Verification: In-house teams continuously improve the database.
• AI and ML: Artificial intelligence and machine learning analyze existing data patterns and improve quality.
• Contribution Networks: Tracks email signatures from users’ inboxes to collect additional data.

ZoomInfo Data is less real-time than Sales Navigator because it has special data enrichment teams that check the accuracy of the data provided by the users.

This makes the company and contact data even more qualified.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is based on professional data provided by LinkedIn users, making it a unique and reliable source of up-to-date information.

The data is derived from user profiles regularly updated by people who own them.

This ensures that the information is current and reflects real-time changes. However, people sometimes include nonsense in their data or forget to update it, making it less qualified.

If some LinkedIn users have limited access to others’ data, Sales Navigator, a premium tool, gives full access to emails, phone numbers, and other data.

Plans And Pricing

Another factor that determines why you buy this or that tool is the pricing.

It won’t be the same for all of them, but it’s still worth comparing.

ZoomInfo

Like any other scraping tool and software, ZoomInfo also provides pricing variations based on your business needs.

Its pricing structure is determined by several key factors, including:

• Features and functionality: The depth and breadth of functionality a customer requires.
• Number of licenses: The number of user licenses required.
• Credit usage: The consumption of credits representing professional or company profile exports.

However, their website doesn’t provide any exact information about the price of each ZoomInfo Plan.

It’s their policy not to give you any trial or pricing information until you schedule a demo with an account executive.

However, I’ve found that the ZoomInfo SalesOS offers 3 main packages:

1. ZoomInfo Copilot Pro
2. ZoomInfo Copilot Advanced
3. ZoomInfo Copilot Enterprise

1. ZoomInfo Copilot Pro $14,995/year

This package is a good fit for small businesses and start-ups and includes features like:

• individual or company searches,
• contact information,
• customized prospect lists,
• and data export to multiple file types.

2. ZoomInfo Copilot Advanced $24,995/year

The advanced plan works well for mid-sized companies. You can find information like:

• company locations,
• data hierarchy,
• departmental organization charts,
• social media links,
• financial information,
• technology adoption trends,
• intent signals,
• and website visitor data.

3. ZoomInfo Copilot Enterprise $32,995/year

Consider the ZoomInfo Enterprise pricing plan if you’re a large business owner and need 20,000 bulk credits a year.

This plan includes all features of previous plans plus:

• real-time intent data,
• sales automation,
• contact tracking,
• departmental headcount,
• and advanced company characteristics.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

For LinkedIn Sales Navigator there are 3 LinkedIn Sales Navigator plans:

• Sales Navigator Core (Professional): $99/month
• Sales Navigator Advanced (Team): $169.99/month
• Sales Navigator Advanced Plus (Enterprise): starts at $1600/year

If you decide to pay Sales Navigator annually, prices drop by 25%.

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator Core (Professional): $79.99/month
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced (Team): $135/month
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced Plus (Enterprise): starts a $1600 /year

Well, the ZoomInfo pricing is quite justified, but it’s that one big drawback that ZoomInfo has.

Compared to other scraping tools, it can be overpriced for many small and medium businesses and companies that don’t need hundreds of credits daily for lead generation.

However, with Sales Navigator plans, you must subscribe to other third-party tools to complete and enhance your lead generation process.

You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Evaboot for $199/month ($1788/year).

Evaboot is a scraping tool that enriches your exported lead lists with GDPR-friendly professional emails, phone numbers, and other important contact and company data.

Contact Information

Another feature to compare between ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the accuracy of contact information, which is crucial for reaching the right prospects at the right time.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo has 321 Million contact profiles and 104 Million Companies, with detailed information on millions of professionals worldwide.

This comprehensive database includes contact information such as email addresses, phone numbers and professional profiles, employee count, revenue, location details, etc.

ZoomInfo also regularly updates and verifies its data to ensure accuracy, making it a valuable resource for sales teams looking to connect directly with prospects.

You can send emails and do direct dials to your filtered decision-makers without leaving your filter page.

Advanced filtering options allow users to efficiently target specific demographics and industries, increasing the effectiveness of their lead-generation efforts.

To get the most out of your research, you can use the following functionalities:

• Advanced Searches
• Recommended Lists
• Tags
• Intent
• WebSights
• Subscription to Updates (Sales Navigator Alerts)

Another interesting fact is that ZoomInfo owns NeverBounce, which offers real-time email verification and cleaning services.

This is why you’ll most likely get accurate and trustworthy contact information.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s contact information comes from LinkedIn’s extensive network of about 1 billion users.

While this includes job titles, company affiliations, and career history, contact information is limited to what users share on their LinkedIn profiles.

This typically means that direct contact information, such as email addresses and mobile numbers, is not readily available within the platform.

In fact, only 5% of LinkedIn users share their emails publicly. This is why you should use third-party tools, like Evaboot, to obtain more direct contact information.

Sales Navigator + Evaboot is a great duo to fill in your leads’ missing emails and phone information.

Search Engine

Having ready-to-use filters is good, but for more personalized results, it’s good to have a robust search engine to find the relevant information we seek.

Let’s see how it’s done with ZoomInfo VS LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo provides an advanced search engine that allows users to filter prospects by multiple criteria to ensure precise targeting.

Users can conduct highly specific searches based on industry, job title, company size, location, revenue, funding type, etc.

ZoomInfo advanced filters include:

• Contact filters
• Company filters
• Locations
• Scoops
• Technologies
• Engagement
• Exclude Exported Contacts

If you want to start your research by typing keywords on the Search Bar, you can type:

• company names
• industries
• contacts

The next search bar you have is only for finding the right filter.

You can also put search queries wherever you see a free text box.

ZoomInfo’s search engine supports Boolean search logic, allowing for complex query construction that further refines results.

In ZoomInfo Sales, 7 filters support Boolean operators and modifiers:

• Job Title
• College/Degree
• Web Reference Keywords
• Company Name
• Company Description Keywords
• Industry keywords
• Scoops Description Keywords

You can also use ZoomInfo’s Chrome Extension to instantly see contact details and retrieve phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, and key buying signals without leaving your current tab.

It shows how likely a prospect is to engage, so you know who to contact first.

It’s even more scalable with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Once satisfied with your search results, you can create a prospect list directly in the extension and integrate it with your CRM without leaving Sales Navigator, which depends on the subscription plan you get.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s search engine is tailored to find leads within the LinkedIn network and provides detailed filtering options based on professional data.

You can filter accounts (companies) and prospects by industry, company size, job title, location, seniority level, head growth, job opportunities, number of followers, etc.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator uses the Boolean search technique in its search bars.

You can use the AND, OR, NOT, (), and “” boolean operators in the following search fields:

• First name
• Last name
• Title
• Company
• School

The search capabilities are designed to help sales professionals quickly find and connect with the most relevant leads that will optimize and accelerate their sales strategies.

However, the LinkedIn Sales Nav. search engine can sometimes be mistaken.

When you search for job titles, you may see that people have more than one “current job title”, as they forget to update their professional experience on LinkedIn.

On ZoomInfo, each lead’s profile shows well current and former job titles, ensuring the data is 99% verified.

Intent Data

Leveraging data intent can significantly improve marketing strategies and sales targeting.

It provides insight into the behavior and interests of potential customers.

Let’s see how both tools have integrated it into their system.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo’s Intent Data is a tool for understanding which companies are looking for your services and when.

Intent provides lead data and topics, such as your target accounts’ research spikes and content consumption, so you can time your outreach and enter your prospects’ buyer’s journey at the perfect moment.

You can choose from over 4,000 available Intent topics.

You can also use Intent data like:

• New Hires
• Technologies
• Funding Round Types
• Funding Date and all connected to Funding

The more precise you target people and companies, the higher your chance to close deals.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator treats the intent differently. It leverages LinkedIn engagement metrics to identify prospects actively engaging with relevant content.

By monitoring interactions such as post likes, shares, and comments, sales reps can pinpoint prospects interested in their industry or offerings.

And there are also external buyer intents like:

• Changed jobs
• Posted on LinkedIn
• Mentioned in news

These filters are great features to improve your sales prospecting as you target active people on LinkedIn.

This literally means that the user is alive and has some interest. Your product/service can be something they look for.

You can see the intent filters you applied on LinkedIn Sales Navigator in the contact preview of each lead.

When you click the box, you get a detailed explanation of what happened (as shown in the screenshot).

Integrations

The next lifesaver feature is the integration of CRMs with lead-generation tools. It streamlines workflows and improves productivity.

Here, I’ll show how Zoominfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator handle it.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo integrates seamlessly with many popular CRM systems, including Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.

With your CRM synced with ZoomInfo, you can automatically update contact information and maintain accurate records.

ZoomInfo integrations include:

1. CRMs

• Bullhorn
• Dynamics
• HubSpot
• Pipedrive
• Salesforce
• SugarCRM
• Zoho

2. Email & Calendar

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Microsoft Calendar
• Microsoft Outlook

3. Marketing / Sales Management

• Eloqua
• Gong
• Marketo
• Outreach
• Pardot
• Salesloft

4. Ad Channels

• Facebook
• Google
• LinkedIn

5. Applicant Tracking System

• Bullhorn for Talent
• Crelate
• Greenhouse
• JazzHR
• Job Diva
• JobAdder
• Lever
• PC Recruiter
• Salesforce for Talent
• Top Echelon
• Zoho Recruit

6. Collaboration Tools

• Slack
• Slack for Workflows
• Zoom

7. ZoomInfo Products

• Engage for Sales
• Engage for Talent
• Ringlead

8. Intent Data

• G2
• TrustRadius

As you can see, the basic plan gives you access to limited integrations and CRM, and you have to pay more than $25,000/year to access it all.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator integrates with major CRM systems such as:

• Salesforce
• Microsoft Dynamics 365
• and HubSpot

This feature enables a seamless transfer of lead information and engagement metrics and allows sales teams to sync LinkedIn activities with their CRM data.

However, to integrate CRMs with your Sales Navigator, you must be an Advanced Plus (Enterprise) user, which starts at $1600 annually.

However, a cheaper way to do that is to:

1. Export lead data with Evaboot
2. and import it into your CRM

Data Upload

If you have lead lists, you can incorporate lead lists with up-to-date contact information into the new data you’ll soon find.

You can implement it with both tools, but both have their way.

Here is how.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo allows users to upload lists of prospects and companies for comprehensive lead management.

This feature helps sales teams organize and prioritize their outreach efforts by streamlining, adding, and managing new leads.

It helps sales professionals maintain an organized database and execute targeted campaigns more effectively.

It’s you who decides what to do with the uploaded list. You can:

• ListMatch: Find matches from your company or contact list and easily search or export with updated data
• Enhance: Clean, de-dupe, and enrichment of the missing emails or phone numbers
• NeverBounce: Check the accuracy and validity of emails with NeverBounce
• Preview File: Upload your file now and process it later

The “Enhance” option is like finalizing and completing your lead lists. It shows where you miss information and improves the data by adding:

• emails
• company domain
• revenue
• and other important data

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

On the other hand, LinkedIn Sales Navigator supports only Company/Account data uploads.

You upload a CSV file with all the data.

Below you have must-have fields in your list, like:

• company ID
• LinkedIn company URL
• Website URL
• Country, city
• Etc

However, you can use LinkedIn Ads if you still need to upload contact lists to your LinkedIn Stack.

You create ad audiences by uploading your lead lists for more precise targeting.

It’s a huge advantage to connect your LinkedIn Sales Navigator or any other contact data to your Ad management system.

In ZoomInfo’s case this feature is still cooking.

So you can profit from the Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Ads option until it’s ready to test.

Conclusion

And the best tool for your sales pipeline is…

ZoomInfo OR LinkedIn Sales Navigator: each tool excels in its lead generation and management area.

ZoomInfo specializes in generating lead lists with highly accurate contact data. It offers advanced search capabilities, intent signals, and seamless CRM integration for efficient data management.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator enhances networking within the LinkedIn platform. It opens relationships, starts conversations, and moves them to email or a discovery call.

Both tools provide essential functionality tailored to different aspects of B2B sales strategies.

However, the factors that will 100% influence your choice are the filters, the data you get, and the pricing.

So, test it to see which matches your business development needs.

FAQ

Is ZoomInfo better than Sales Navigator?

Both products are easy to use and give quality data.

G2 reviewers think ZoomInfo better meets their business needs than LinkedIn Sales Navigator and prefer ZoomInfo Sales for ongoing product support.

However, ZoomInfo remains expensive for many SMBs and startups, making LinkedIn Sales Navigator with third-party scraping tools like Evaboot a better and more affordable option.

What is better than LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

If you’re looking for a LinkedIn Sales Navigator alternative, consider the search function and email data quality.

Other alternatives that you can try are ZoomInfo Sales, Apollo.io, Seamless.AI, UpLead, and Clearbit, etc.

Who is better than ZoomInfo?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Evaboot is an effective and accessible alternative to ZoomInfo, ideal for data-driven sales strategies for SMBs and large enterprises.

It has over 1 billion contacts with key details such as names, job titles, and email addresses. It offers key features like advanced search filters to find specific leads, lead-saving options, and alerts on new leads.

Do you think LinkedIn Sales Navigator is worth paying for?

ZoomInfo is a great tool for lead generation. But it’s worth it for large, enterprise-level companies.

These companies have the resources to justify the cost and need a way to quickly route and nurture leads within a larger sales and marketing ecosystem.

For smaller companies and startups, other budget-friendly tools, like LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Evaboot, Apollo.io, and UpLead, match prospecting business goals.

Disclosure

This content was partly written by AI (ChatGPT 4), I added my own perspective, fact-checked it and made sure it is helpful for you.