The solution is a B2B contact database. I only used the tool to get contacts.

Generally, small companies try to get contacts from free databases. Sometimes, when we call people, we find out they have left the organization. It would waste our time. Verified platforms like ZoomInfo provide us with genuine contacts. The solution saves us time and money.

The contacts available in the solution are genuine and verified. The tool provides us with the hierarchy of the organization. We can contact the right person.

ZoomInfo must provide a cheaper subscription package for smaller companies. The vendor must provide a free version with a limited number of credits per month and basic features.

I have been using the solution since 2020.

The product is quite stable.

The technical support was good. I had a couple of conversations with the team about licensing.

The setup is straightforward. It is an online platform. I didn't find any difficulty. It takes a maximum of 10 minutes to open an account.

I used the free account. The vendor provided a certain number of credits every month. Suddenly, they turned it into a paid tool. The pricing is way too high. The product does not have a price package for small companies. It is suitable for huge corporations. The paid version has lead generation and email campaign features.

Lusha is cheaper, but ZoomInfo has more contacts. Other tools I have used include integrations with CRMs. Lusha has a free version and a gradual upgrade option.

I did not use even 5% of the product. I do not know how the tool works in a collaborative environment. It is a good platform for those who want verified contacts, get good leads, and expand their business. The solution provides global data. Wherever we are, we can get contacts of the targeted place and targeted industry. The platform features are good. We must fine-tune the solution to use it. Overall, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

I use it to acquire data. For example, I have a product I'm selling and need to identify my target audience. ZoomInfo is similar to LinkedIn Sales Navigator or other products in that way. 

I purchase data with proper consent, as per compliance regulations like the TransUnion Act in the UK or GDPR. We can directly import this compliant data into our marketing cloud or any database and then use it for outreach and communications about our product. 

For example, if I have an HR product, my target audience might be all HR professionals in the world or just in North America. I can apply filters in ZoomInfo's interface to identify users already in my database and find new leads. I can then purchase credits to access their information and start communicating with them.

The filters are very good. We can completely customize the filters, like targeting specific job levels (executive, manager, etc.). Also, the real-time updates are valuable. They refresh their data every week, which is important because people change companies, old data expires, and emails become invalid. 

ZoomInfo's data refreshment helps overcome those issues. Overall, it's very user-friendly in terms of filtering and data accuracy.

There are many areas for improvement. For example, unlike 6sense, ZoomInfo lacks features like lead scoring, that focuses solely on data. Sometimes, it is really difficult to identify the right data. 

In my experience, around 30% to 40% of the records extracted are bounces or invalid, making it cost-ineffective. I spend a lot of money purchasing data from ZoomInfo, but end up with low quality and a high bounce rate, yet they still charge for those bounces.

ZoomInfo could improve data validation by introducing features like integrating with bounce-checking tools, removing invalid records, and ensuring better quality for customers. This may affect pricing and revenue, but it would benefit customers. A data cleanup feature within the admin tool would be helpful.

I have been using it for four years and two months. 

I don't see any bugs in ZoomInfo. It's dependent on the setup. In one of the projects I handled, it was our mistake. We downloaded data using our credits but applied the wrong filters because we didn't have an expert initially. We lost some credits due to this, but we learned a lot over two to three months. We realized that initially, we applied the wrong filters and got the wrong data, losing 50% of our credits. 

However, after a few downloads, we understood how to do it correctly. From those learnings, there is no breakdown from ZoomInfo. It's essential to have a person who knows how to utilize the tool properly.

So, it is a little difficult to learn to use ZoomInfo for the first time. Not that much difficult compared to their competitors, but it is not that user friendly. The combinations of filters and identifying the features are not user friendly. 

Initially, we always had to depend on support before losing our credits. So, starting from today, if you want to use ZoomInfo, you need an expert or you'll end up depending on support or losing credits. It's not rocket science, but a little difficult compared to other tools.

There are around 40 end users in my organization. 

I have contacted customer support and service several times. For every login, ZoomInfo gives a thousand or two thousand credits. So, we'll take ten logins. If we need additional logins, any additional downloads, or any sample data, we reach out to them for support. They give us some point of contacts when we purchase the tool. We first reach out to them, and if they don't respond properly, we directly reach out to ZoomInfo support and see how they can assist us.

There is still room for improvement because they are not proactive. There are proactiveness and delays. It takes a lot of time to get responses from them.

Mostly, these kinds of tools focus on sales. Once the sales are done, the service is slow. We cannot escalate to a higher level because they say they have so many tickets and are going by order. Delay is the main reason I cut it down to eight. Otherwise, the service is good.

Positive

The main thing my company chose ZoomInfor is compliance. We have a lot of partners, but compliance is the main issue, where the UK market is the most restrictive. We don't want to end up losing our tool or paying fines if they complain about receiving emails. There are a lot of tools, but compliance is the big issue. 

And the data that's available in ZoomInfo is more than their competitors. LinkedIn Sales Navigator also has good data, but it depends on pricing and data availability. We use LinkedIn to manually capture data, but it's not the same. They don't provide it. We manually go to them and grab their data, so that is different. 

ZoomInfo has GDPR-compliant data where you can directly communicate with the audience. So that's why we are good with the compliance process.

The setup is not a big deal as long as you have a clear goal and know your target.

My experience with the initial setup: 

If you have a properly defined goal, you can go with any of the available options. For example, you need to determine how many leads you want in Q1 and Q2, your budget, and what tools you need. Once you onboard ZoomInfo, you also need to budget for credits. Everything needs to be planned properly, so onboarding isn't a big deal.

First, define your goal clearly. Then, you can talk to ZoomInfo and see what they offer. They can give you some raw data, which is how I onboarded. I asked ZoomInfo for a sample of 100 or 200 records so I could manually check the quality on LinkedIn.

I had a team that manually checked the data using tools like SMARTE or ZoomInfo ONE. We gave them our target audience, such as VP-level or finance leaders, and asked for a sample to assess the quality. I could then verify the sample data manually to see if it was 70% or 80% accurate compared to our competitors. If it met our standards, we would purchase credits, apply filters, clean the data, and start using it.

Deployment model:

I just use credentials to log in and purchase credits to access the data. It's not deployed on the cloud for us.

There is a project in the pipeline to fully integrate ZoomInfo data into our Salesforce cloud, with two-way syncing of directors. Currently, we manually log in to ZoomInfo, but in the future, our plan is to completely sync ZoomInfo data with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

This will eliminate manual tasks, and any new leads or data acquired by ZoomInfo will automatically reflect in Salesforce.

The pricing is moderate. It's not highly-priced, nor is it low-priced.

I always suggest checking out competitors. Analyze four or five tools and check the data they have. Some providers do live extraction of data; they start extracting when we send the request. But ZoomInfo already has the data; we directly use the tool to purchase it. So, there are different approaches. 

But if you go with ZoomInfo, just compare with the competitors about pricing and the data they have for your audience. And if everything looks good with ZoomInfo, go ahead. It's good for executing campaigns in different marketing automation tools, and it has compliance approvals. The data should have consent from the audience. That is also a major thing to consider. ZoomInfo, I would suggest. But before going ahead with ZoomInfo, understand your requirements, then match it with competitors and make a decision.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. The major positives are TAM size data. The data is reliable in ZoomInfo. Second, the consent they're giving, the GDPR compliance. They have everything. Some other providers don't even have a support team. At least ZoomInfo responds, albeit lately. But there are some teams that don't have any support at all. 

So, ZoomInfo has a proper setup, but the only minuses are the delay in support and the somewhat moderate pricing. The pluses are the data size and compliance approvals, and another minus is the user-friendliness of the tool. It's not as user friendly compared to other tools.