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The Top 12 Tools to Maximize Salesforce Data

By Jeremy Boudinet

What keeps Salesforce admin awake at night? One word: data.

Is my company data secure inside Salesforce? Is the data currently in there accurate and up-to-date? Is a system in place to ensure my company can trust the prospect, pipeline, and rep activity data inside of SFDC?

Such questions have led to the rise of a Salesforce-owned website, trust.salesforce.com, a community resource devoted to all things Salesforce.com data security. The site is a one-stop resource that teaches you how to safeguard your data, keep it compliant with industry standards and maintain a secure fortress around your company’s sensitive information.

As for prospect and pipeline data accuracy? This post is here to help. The following 12 of the best-of-the-best for helping Salesforce.com Admin sleep easier about their SFDC data quality.

The Top 6 Prospect Data Quality Tools for Salesforce.com

The following 6 tools are elite options that play well with Salesforce.com and deliver higher data quality than Data.com or Salesforce Clean. Ordered from least costly and comprehensive to most.

#1. Clearbit

Clearbit is our data quality tool of choice here at Ambition. The tool verifies and enriches prospect data instantly, needing only a company email address (ex. john@salesforce.com) or URL.  We’ve run comprehensive tests checking Clearbit’s data accuracy against Data.com’s here at Ambition, cross-referencing fields like Job Title, Location and Employee Size with prospect and company LinkedIn pages. Clearbit was the clear winner. A highly cost-effective solution – $99 gets you 2500 enrichments per month – that also enables batch updates and integrates with Salesforce, Marketo and other leading sales and marketing solutions.  


#2.
LeadGenius

LeadGenius is one of the most powerful data verification and enrichment tools on the market. Think of it as Clearbit on steroids – enabling companies to mass enrich your CRM prospects with fields like, University Attended, Previous Company, and so forth. Use it to ditch bad leads, unearth new stakeholders and decision-makers, and scale your best-performing campaigns with A/B test-ready email outreach capabilities. Plus, you get unlimited users, so you can scale up without scraping the bottom of your budget barrel.


#3.
ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo has been around for awhile – and in recent years, its industry reputation has grown tremendously. Way more data than Hoover’s. Way easier to use than Data.com. Built to work in perfect synchronization with Salesforce.com. If you’re looking for a cost-effective way to start conducting targeted prospect collection, enrichment, and data cleansing en masse, ZoomInfo is for you. Modern sales and marketing leaders swear by it.

#4. Datanyze.

Datanyze is a data management and enrichment tool with three key distinguishing benefits on that front. Number one: Integrates seamlessly with both LinkedIn and Salesforce. Number two: Provides the most powerful firmographic information (i.e. technology usage) on the planet. Number three: Provides a critical additional piece of prospect intelligence – company cycling on or off a competitor’s platform. Great for hard-hitting tech industry sales organizations who love hyper-targeted information and stealing clients from competitors.

#5. RingLead.

Duplicate records, degraded prospect data, reporting inaccuracies, and account mismanagement are all common afflictions sucking the value  from your Salesforce.com investment. If your company is imperiled by these issues, RingLead is an excellent option for fixing data health en masse. Analyze database quality, auto-correct inaccurate and duplicate contact entries, and auto-import new prospects straight from LinkedIn. RingLead is a solid investment for those who suffer from the ailments of bad data.  

#6. DiscoverOrg.

DiscoverOrg is the motherlode. The nuclear option. This is the most robust prospect data solution on the planet. Get full contact lists that auto-update inside Salesforce as prospect and account information changes. Email, phone, social info, organizational charts and buying trigger data are all included. An elite option for big league sales organizations that are data-driven and account-oriented.  

#7. UpLead.

UpLead is a B2B sales and marketing prospecting tool that gives you instant access to 30+ million contacts. You can filter by 50+ criteria to find your ideal next customers and download their direct contact information to excel.

UpLead differs from others for:

• Accuracy: We’re one of the only providers with real-time email verification ensuring 97%+ accurate contact data.
• Depth: Search by 50+ criteria including industry, title, revenue, location, technologies used and more to find your ideal next customers and push their direct contact information to excel or CRM.
• Affordability: We built UpLead for SMB’s and it’s really affordable with no long term contracts.

Top 6 Pipeline Data Quality Tools for Salesforce.com

Prospect data looking good? Great. Now let’s tackle pipeline data. These are the 6 best tools for ensuring sales team activities, pipelines, and projections are accurate and up-to-date.

#1. RingDNA.

RingDNA is an auto-dialer that comes equipped with powerful automation, intelligence, and analytics to spur more efficient workflow, more effective conversations, and cross-channel insights between sales and marketing. A product that Jordan Belfort and his “telephone terrorists” would have killed to have in the Stratton Oakmont sales bullpen, RingDNA doubles as an excellent way to ensure sales team phone activities are 100% up-to-date inside Salesforce – without costing your reps an extra second of time spent on data entry.

#2. Ambition.

Ambition’s gives sales managers 360° visibility into individual and team performance. Better yet, it gives reps direct visibility into their real-time metrics from Salesforce, phone systems and other data sources. Ambition lets managers set daily, weekly, and monthly benchmarks for standard and custom Salesforce objects, so you can score reps based on outbound dials, stage updates, social touches and more. Custom scorecards, dashboards, TV notifications and contests keep reps motivated and accountable to their Salesforce metrics, earning Ambition a double shot of endorsements from AA-ISP and the Harvard Business Review.

#3. Outreach.

In the sales automation space, Outreach is becoming the go-to solution thanks to its tight integration with Salesforce and crazy automation abilities, which essentially assure that every prospect touchpoint gets logged in Salesforce. Managers can establish workflow, analyze effectiveness, and run coordinated, multi-channel prospect communication. An all-in-one sales automation solution with fantastic dialer and email capabilities.

#4. Cirrus Insight.

Use Salesforce and Gmail? Cirrus Insight is going to tightly sync your email, calendar and Salesforce accounts so that every prospect email, meeting, and follow-up is seamlessly updated inside Salesforce.com. This is the 2nd highest-rated Salesforce application of all-time for two simple reasons: it’s remarkably user-friendly, and consistently upgraded with new features and functionality.

#5. HelloSign.

An agile and affordable eSignature solution that also spurs your sales team to keep bottom-of-the-funnel opportunities updated in Salesforce. Why? Slick integrations with Slack and other team collaboration and communication tools – which send automated notifications about new contracts going out for signature and new deals being closed straight from Salesforce. A great tool that incentives pipeline data accuracy via real-time recognition.

#6. Troops.

A tool specifically for Slack users, Troops is a GIF-driven Slackbot that auto-sends Salesforce updates to team members via Slack. It’s quickly winning over numerous growing sales teams thanks to its live updates on prospect activity and newly closed accounts, which pop up inside your team’s Slack channels in the form of compelling, humorous visuals. If you use Slack and struggle with pipeline data accuracy, Troops is a charming addition worth checking out.

#7. Nextiva

Nextiva is an award-winning enterprise phone system that integrates with Salesforce and lets you log calls automatically, make new contacts, leads, opportunities, or accounts, and type notes that will create tasks automatically. Nextiva’s Natural Language Processing feature also interprets words like “tomorrow” or “next week” as dates for your tasks. You can also have incoming calls pop right onto your screen. One-click brings up the customer’s Salesforce record. If the caller is a new phone number, you can associate it to an existing record – all of this before you even pick up the phone.

The Author

Jeremy Boudinet

Jeremy Boudinet is the Marketing Manager at Nextiva, the leading enterprise phone system for Salesforce users.

Comments:

    David Brenner
    March 08, 2017 5:29 pm
    Truly surprised that your lists don't include CRMFusion DemandTools. IMHO it offers the best in power & flexibility.
    Assaf
    March 12, 2017 1:16 pm
    Many thanks for sharing Jeremy You might want to check out Lusha.co Lusha is a powerful chrome extension that allows you to find contact details, such as email addresses and phone numbers through social networks. The basic plan is free. Thanks
    Kirsten Hendricks
    May 10, 2017 2:22 pm
    Great list Jeremy! You might also want to check out Action Grid: https://getconga.com/solutions/data/actiongrid/ as a data management tool for sales teams. By enabling in-line editing, mass updates and real time views ActionGrid allows reps to work in a much more efficient manor, giving them time back in the day to SELL!
    Priyanka
    January 19, 2018 10:33 am
    Hey Jeremy, this is an interesting list of tools to maximize Salesforce data. There are also few other automation tools like Aeroleads, Rapportive, that helped me to get verified list of emails.
    Appelie Awards
    February 06, 2018 10:19 pm
    CLEARBIT is also a winner of our 2017 Appealie award, check here: appealie.com/saas-award-winners-2017/
    Jeannie
    May 03, 2018 6:36 pm
    Hi Ben, Let's talk about distribution of leads in Salesforce. (Confidentially of course!) This is an issue in our office. The administrator doesn't care. How can I use Salesforce, fine tune the results and show the administrator that the leads are giving an advantage to one rep in particular!
    Keith Jeffries
    September 05, 2018 2:16 pm
    Thanks for the great list of tools. I would like to suggest another tool TruCadence from ConnectLeader. TruCadence is a personalized sales cadence software and it executives personalized interactions at scale via email, call and social. https://www.connectleader.com/trucadence-connectleader-sales-cadence-solution
    B2B Data Provider
    April 02, 2019 10:18 am
    Thanks for the great list of tools.
    Mike
    March 02, 2020 3:08 am
    Clearbit is the market leader as far as the database size and the overall technology. As far as #2 and #3 - there are many data enrichment companies that could easily be considered. Perhaps one of the more data enrichment tools is MARCOM Robot Data Quality Engine: https://www.marcomrobot.com/solutions/data-enrichment-email-and-phone-validation. The reason they are an interesting vendor is because they I believe they are the only ones with the "continuous data enrichment" feature - it's like a never ending enrichment.
    Brandon Flynn
    April 22, 2020 11:56 pm
    We've recently evaluated three data enrichment vendors - MARCOM Robot, Clearbit and FullContact. The top performers were Clearbit and MARCOM Robot with roughly 75% match rate on 2,500 records we tested. Pricing wise, Clearbit is like a BMW, while MARCOM Robot is more like Honda. https://www.marcomrobot.com https://www.clearbit.com
    Sidharth Agarwal
    February 09, 2021 12:33 am
    Search, download, categorize, visualize, and optimize all of your Salesforce org’s metadata with "Plus". A comprehensive metadata dictionary.  Learn more: https://sidagarwal22.medium.com/plus-metadata-dictionary-for-salesforce-5ad546479e6b Free Download: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3u00000ONDwTEAX
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