Overview
I am not pitching OceanFrogs here. You will see that nowhere have I mentioned OceanFrogs below. I used ZI Engage for more than 2 months before writing this article.
ZoomInfo Unbiased Analysis
Table of Contents
ZoomInfo Customer Support
ZoomInfo has great customer success/support tools and a team. Their AI enabled chart helped me answer all questions that I had as a first user/recurring user. In fact, I did not have a need to go to customer support for setup questions. Very well done, ZI.
Ease of Usage
Muti-factor authorization, connection to the ESP (Email service provider), csv upload, Admin portal, connection to the CRMs was easy.
ZoomInfo Sales Review
Pro
1. ZoomInfo’s filter capabilities are great.
2. GUI is mature. You can search for companies as well as contacts. The speed of results being displayed is quite good given that the database is large.
3. Good depth of companies for fields such as automotive, glass, manufacturing, textiles, software and others where it is not easy to update company data.
4. I changed my linkedin profile a few months back and ZoomInfo captured it now. In other words, they are refreshing the complete dataset every 6 months. That is remarkable.
5. Ease of access intent data.
6. I like the updates to the saved list. I do get updates to the company list, contact list every morning.
7. 2-factor authentication, rich configuration settings
Cons:
1. Technographics leave a lot to be desired. For example, OceanFrogs provided 3000 users of Anaconda but ZoomInfo provided only 750 users.
2. Though ZI provides confidence scores with email address and contact data, we will still lose out on good % (more than 30) of people data.
3. ZoomInfo has disabled the option to share a list with your colleagues. That was a big disappointment to whoever I share.
ZoomInfo Engage Review
Pro
1. Identifies duplicates, removes invalid emails, and you can load 1000 contacts per user to a campaign at a given time. Rest of the expected functionalities are there.
2. Their AI based chatbot is very efficient, schedules tickets automatically, Engage related responses are to-the-point.
Cons:
Cold emailing as well as newsletter marketing have moved to the next generation. This is one area where ZI needs to improve. I can understand that their suite of products is large. I also love the sales intelligence part. I believe that community will benefit if these items can be improved:
1. ZI will allow one domain to be registered. If your company has multiple domains to email, you cannot link them all to your ZoomInfo account. THis is what SmartLead and new generation email marketing tools provide.
2. It will not give an option to warm your emails. Email marketing is dead without warming your inbox first.
3. ZI platform gets stuck when you upload a large number of contacts (less than 1000 as per the rule). You can try again after a few minutes and it will upload some more. This process goes on and on.
The lack of these two features broke my heart. These two features are an important part of the new generation of email marketing tools. Cold email marketing requires more investment on setup such as warming, # of domains, and health of domains. Other tools such as SmartLead claim to segment via email service provider also.
Author Details
Vinay Mehendi
Vinay Mehendi, PhD focuses on customer engagement, alternative data, technographics, and CRM data management. he was listed as Top 20 B2B Marketer by Ruth Stevens in 2020. He is a Clemson graduate.
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