Account Based Selling is a B2B sales model that uses an account-based approach, rather than a lead-based or contact based approach, to predict which companies are ready and likely to buy. Under this model, sales teams focus on a set of highly-targeted, high-value accounts with the goal to convert them to customers. To do so successfully requires talking to the right people, at the right time, with the right content and messaging.

We have identified 46 tools and vendors to help sales teams successfully execute an account-based selling strategy and maximize sales effectiveness. These tools are not ranked in any particular order of importance or functionality, but they have been categorized by the sales function we think they would be the most useful.

Targeting

DataFox

Overview

DataFox is a company founded by salespeople, with the intent to be used by salespeople. The software aims to put all the information that sales teams need in one place, without having to do excessive research across multiple website tabs.

Key Features

• View news headlines for accounts directly in Salesforce.com
• Receive updates in the mornings on insights such as which companies have entered your territory, which conferences your accounts are attending, who hired a new VP, etc.
• Identify the main decision makers and their contact information, in the same place
• Ensure accuracy with rigorous algorithms checking your account data for out-of-date, duplicate, or incomplete accounts
• Find new prospects quickly by accessing pre-made lists created by DataFox, searching over 30 data points, or browsing companies that resemble customers

Datanyze

Overview

Datanyze is a sales intelligence platform that gathers buying signals to help companies connect with costumers at the right time.

Key Features

• Target prospects based on technology, revenue, location, industry, and more
• Find new leads with the same technology stack as your current customer base
• Discover when prospects add or drop specific technology providers on the day it happens
• Know who is looking to join your competitors and who is up to renew with competitors
• Export to Salesforce with one click from Linkedin profile or search result page
• Sync company, technology, and contact data, on any account, lead, or record, to any CRM or Marketing Automation platform

Dun & Bradstreet

Overview

Dun & Bradsteet’s data insights connect you to the most valuable customers, prospects, partners, and supplies. DnB’s multi-faceted data quality processes enable you to identify the best opportunities, build stronger relationships, and accelerate growth for your company.

Key Features

• Identify the health of your database and information to ensure you are operating effectively
• Access the Dunn and Bradstreet database
• Clean your database with “CleneStep” to make sure communications go to the right place
• Define a profile of best prospects to search for, and compare new results to past practices
• Organize data by job function, industry segmentation, revenue, employee count, etc.

LeadGnome

Overview

LeadGnome mines emails to generate new contacts, enhances and maintains existing leads, and provides actionable sales intelligence.

Key Features

• Receive notification of trigger events before your competitors
• Add more leads that fit within your key accounts with Account Based Intelligence mined from email replies
• Uncover changes to customer data, both existing and new, and correct them
• Integrate the software with your existing campaign processes, CRM, and marketing automation

Sales Navigator

Overview

Sales Navigator is a LinkedIn solution that helps companies find leads and then build meaningful relationships with value-add information and insights.

Key Features

• Receive custom lead recommendations based off of your preferences
• View real-time updates on prospects and leads
• Unlock profiles of leads that aren’t within your network
• Save recommended leads and create a list that is easy to access and work from
• Leverage your company’s and your network to connect and form better relationships

Social123

Overview

Social123 is a social-sourced data solution that offers data cleaning and enriching, as well as email address validation and hyper-targeted lead lists to increase personalization.

Key Features

• Search from a database of over 225 million professionals based on industry, skills, interests, groups, etc.
• Add more fields than just first and last name, to better target prospects
• Know what your accounts want with insights based on a wide range of data points
• Deliver personal, relevant emails with target information such as alma mater

ZenIQ

Overview

Acquired by 6sense.

ZenIQ gives full vision and control of all account-based programs from a single interface that simplifies gathering information, applies that information to each segment, and plans for next steps.

Key Features

• Create multiple target lists and update them automatically according to a set of rules
• Measure each account based on engagement, coverage, reach, etc.
• Expand the roles that you are trying to reach and identify targets to match
• Move people and accounts in and out of execution platforms, like DemandBase and LinkedIn

ZoomInfo

Overview

ZoomInfo is a B2B data software that gives actionable information to empower sales and marketing. The technology provides accurate databases to improve campaign effectiveness and better reach decision makers.

Key Features

• Gather and organize relevant information from millions of news sources
• Access contact information from a community of over 300,000 ZoomInfo members
• Integrate with CRM to manage both prospect and customer data from within the CRM platform
• View department structure, personnel hierarchy, and contact information for an organization in order to identify decision makers
• Create “watch-lists” of companies to receive up-to-date insights and structure changes
• Form more personal relationships with prospects by accessing their web mentions, employment history, educational background, and social media activity

Intelligence

6sense

Overview

6sense gives companies access to information such as who is in an active buying cycle, what products they are looking for, where they are in the buyer’s journey, and when they are most likely to buy.

Key Features

• Target new prospects as soon as they enter the market
• Gain insights and scores for key decision makers
• Access close-looped reports to increase communication between sales and marketing
• Personalize the selling strategy by knowing where the prospect is on their buyer journey

Everstring

Overview

Everstring offers a full lifecycle, predictive platform to help B2B companies build new pipeline and increase conversion rates.

Key Features

• Define the profile of your company’s ideal customer and then identify prospects, inside and outside of your pipeline, that fit that mold
• Build your pipeline with net-new accounts and a search on accounts similar to your existing ones
• Employ predictive scoring to organize existing accounts and tell you where salespeople should be spending their time
• Access new insights from thousands of signals, across millions of accounts

INfer

Overview

Infer delivers a predictive sales and marketing platform that leverages proven data science to rapidly model untapped customer profile data, along with thousands of signals from the web. This information helps to drive a company’s growth strategy through valuable predictive workflows.

Key Features

• Utilize Infer’s Profile Management platform to get the most accurate information to make informed decisions, no matter the cleanliness or size of your database
• Identify which prospects are ready to buy with behavior models that show activity data from within your marketing automation
• Integrate data between Infer and many of the major sales and marketing technologies

InsideView

Overview

InsideView is a platform that places research and key data in the daily workflow of teams. The software is designed to be task-based, allowing sales teams to sell smarter and quicker.

Key Features

• Determine what data is inaccurate, incomplete, or duplicated
• Compare your data to your sales strategy and ideal customer profile
• Build new lists of targets by accessing customer look-alikes, advanced demographic searches, and custom criteria searches
• Utilize smaller forms on your website to increase the number of people that convert
• Create highly customized pitches with access to over 40+ fields of actionable information
• Explore connections and organizations to find more ways to interact with an account

InsightSquared

Overview

InsightSquared is a sales performance analytics solution that provides hundreds of pre-built reports on virtually every revenue metric. The technology is designed to fit fast-growth SaaS companies.

Key Features

• Predict more effectively by accessing historical data for stage-specific conversion rates
• Track which reps are more likely to get deals pushed out and identify the characteristics of the opportunities that get pushed
• Assess all members of your sales team to determine best coaching practices
• Compare periods of time next to each other to determine the effectiveness of changes

Lattice

Overview

Lattice is a predictive account-based selling and marketing technology. Lattice has created the first enterprise-grade solution that addresses the entire customer journey.

Key Features

• Score leads based off thousands of buyer signals, as well as usual buyer profile and engagement
• View scores and insights from within your marketing automation platform
• Know which companies are ready to buy now, presented within your CRM
• Leverage outreach to leads based on real-time updates on buying signals
• Launch campaigns across sales and marketing using account-level insights

Leadspace

Overview

Leadspace offers predictive applications to help marketers find and target ideal prospects through net-new discovery, on-demand enrichment, and predictive scoring.

Key Features

• Customize the solution to reveal which prospects are most ideal for your company
• Target prospects with a blend of social, web, and structured data
• Act on customers as soon as they are ready to buy
• Track changing indicators to make sure that your information is always up to date
• Use the software to design your “Ideal Customer Profile” and then continue to search for prospects that fit

Mintigo

Overview

Mintigo’s predictive marketing and sales platform helps find buyers quicker, prioritize those leads, and determine the right time to start selling to them.

Key Features

• Target the right account and prospects with technology that looks for specific technology usage, personas, social influences, department size, etc.
• Prioritize leads by assigning a predictive score to prospects as they enter the pipeline
• Create micro-campaigns to target specific personas
• Determine which leads to reach out to and which to continue nurturing

Radius

Overview

Radius is a cloud-based intelligence solution that uses powerful data science to enable companies to find new prospects and markets and target them more effectively.

Key Features

• Identify the accounts most likely to convert
• Segment accounts to create personalized campaigns
• Align sales and marketing by creating a list of prospects and segments to unify strategy
• Target similar accounts based on historical customer data
• Discover which leads within your database should be revisited and re-nurtured

SalesPredict

Overview

SalesPredict uses predictive analytics to help B2B marketing and sales teams drive more revenue by identifying the best prospects/accounts, as well as insights to help target those leads.

Key Features

• Dynamically score leads and opportunities
• Use micro-segment analytics to determine the best way to replicate success
• Operate at an accelerated pace by using buying signals and insights to have focused conversations

Engagement

Jumplead

Overview

Jumplead helps to turn website visitors into leads, then continues to follow and nurture those leads until they become customers.

Key Features

• Leverage your chat feature with follow up emailing, automatic contact creation, and the ability to assign specific questions to specific teams
• Add triggers to forms, including automatic sales rep follow-up, email automation, and contact tagging
• Email campaigns to prospects based on their activity
• Create specific contact lists, then generate email campaigns to fit
• Understand how your traffic compares to previous time periods, as well as the cause of an increase or decrease in engagement levels

PFL

Overview

PFL provides sales enablement and marketing automation solutions, as well as printing, mailing, and fulfillment services.

Key Features

• Receive notifications on the ideal time to send tangible items to prospects
• Choose gifts from a customized store to send to prospects, which PFL will ship
• Prompt mail to be sent automatically based on engagement
• Send personalized direct mailing from within your marketing automation platform

Salesloft

Overview

SalesLoft is a sales prospecting and automation platform that helps sales organizations establish a consistent workflow around prospecting activities.

Key Features

• Create email templates to share across sales teams
• Organize contacts so reps are calling people within their area codes to increase the odds prospects answer the phone
• Evaluate your team with a leaderboard based off of opportunities created, positive phone conversations, and email responses

Sparkpost

Overview

SparkPost is an email delivery service that provides deliverability, scalability, and speed in an easily integrated cloud solution.

Key Features

• Use the emailing platform to reduce time creating and personalizing emails
• Add conditionals to emails to ensure that certain people are receiving specific messages
• Guarantee that emails are being delivered, with immediate notifications of emails that cannot be delivered
• Organize your data by a variety of metrics

Terminus

Overview

Terminus enables B2B marketers to target accounts, engage decision-makers, and accelerate pipeline.

Key Features

• Build segments of best-fit accounts within Salesforce and Terminus integration
• Access a database of over 200 million B2B professionals and decision makers to discover target personas
• Utilize ad exchanges across digital channels to engage decision makers where they are
• Attribute ROI on an account-level attribution

Triblio

Overview

Triblio’s software combines actionable insights with intuitive features; it increases brand awareness and number of qualified leads for its customers.

Key Features

• Organize messaging, content, and calls-to-action by segment
• Integrate marketing and sales messaging across multiple channels to target specific accounts
• Engage unknown contacts and visitors within target accounts
• Determine the purchase intent and content interest of visitors

Vendemore

Overview

Vendemore alters mass advertising to deliver focused and targeted messages to individuals in high priority accounts, whether it be prospects or customers.

Key Features

• Engage with customers after they visit your website to make sure that they return
• Create a lasting impression with prospects to ensure they remember you now or later when they decide to purchase
• Decide when and where your company should be seen, from a network of over a million websites

Orchestration

Demandbase

Overview

DemandBase offers account identification, account-based advertising, B2B website personalization, account-based marketing automation, sales insights and integrations into CRM so that ABM results are optimized around sales activity.

Key Features

• Reach your target accounts and decision makers where they are online with personalized messages
• Discover opportunities and move prospects to conversions with “Account Based Retargeting” that zeroes in on companies visiting your website
• Leverage a mix of data (behavioral, firmographic, and contextual) to create an advanced list of high value accounts
• See where and how your accounts are spending the most time on your website
• Compile information from advertising, website activity, and your CRM to get a wide view of all activities

Engagio.com

Overview

Engagio is a software designed for account-based strategy. The product integrates with CRMs and marketing automation to deliver analytics centered around accounts and to aid in communication across companies as they maneuver the sales process.

Key Features

• Utilize “Lead to Account Matching” to automatically attach unconverted leads that should be associated with target accounts
• Create multi-step plans that span across departments and all communication mediums (email, phone, social…)
• Coordinate communication between everyone on your team and on an account
• Send personalized, reviewed, human-generated emails to create quality connections

Gainsight

Overview

Gainsight is a customer success technology that helps businesses grow by giving them insights into the needs and problems of their customers. The technology allows companies to get a full view of their customers in order to identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

Key Features

• Structure your workflow to center around the customer lifecycle
• Monitor the health of customers using analytics that pull sales data, usage, surveys, financials, and more
• Organize customer references on a role-based dashboard
• Identify which current customers have the highest odds of up-selling or cross-selling

IgnitionOne

Overview

IgnitionOne provides insights and offers robust targeting of individuals through the use of proprietary engagement scoring and integrated marketing and advertising solutions.

Key Features

• Target one-on-one with messaging placed in the channels prospects visit
• Determine separate budgets for each account and then place ads accordingly
• Personalize your website based on data and algorithms to better engage prospects visiting your site

LeadGenius

Overview

LeadGenius continually cleans up data and updates it with new, personalized data to save time and effort researching. This allows sales reps to get back to more core sales activities.

Key Features

• Prospect and sell more effectively with up-to-date data
• Save time by having customer data handpicked and presented to you
• Get qualified responses delivered directly to your inbox
• Utilize a tailored email outreach that is designed to test strategy and retarget based on results

LeanData

Overview

LeanData is an account-based platform that allows sales teams to coordinate their efforts and gain insight into accounts in a way that allows reps to take action immediately.

Key Features

• Save time by utilizing the unique algorithm, “Lead2Account Matching Engine,” that operates within Salesforce.com
• Act efficiently with notifications about when inbound leads match existing targets or opportunities
• Automate lead processing to streamline account-based selling and eliminate time spent researching

Outreach

Overview

Outreach is an account-based selling platform designed to optimize the workflow for every role within an organization.

Key Features

• Ensure all prospects are assigned to the right accounts to create a full-account picture
• View all team communications with an account in the same place
• Strategize ways to engage multiple personas at every step of the sales process
• Track strategy ROI to determine what factors are driving sales
• Create strategies optimized to fit different personas

TheBigWillow

Overview

The Big Willow aims to improve how sellers find buyers and enable organizations to successfully execute ABM strategies.

Key Features

• Identify new deals earlier in the process and then continue to track their buying signals through the progression of the deal
• Target net-new audiences showing buyer intent with online ads
• Track in-category web traffic that comes to your website

Automation Support

Act-On

Overview

Act-On is a marketing automation company that powers the customer experience from brand awareness and demand generation all the way to retention and loyalty.

Key Features

• Create a custom dashboard with key features specific to your company’s goals
• Effectively send emails with features such as A/B testing and scheduled sends
• Segment prospects by any combination of profile characteristics
• View customer activity history including which websites they’ve visited, posts they’ve viewed, and media they’ve downloaded
• Automate campaigns with a drag-and-drop feature to organize and automate key processes

Eloquoa

Overview

Eloqua enables marketers to plan and execute marketing campaigns while delivering a personalized customer experience to prospects.

Key Features

• Create campaigns that are easily scaled across audiences and channels, including email, video, display search, and mobile
• Engage the right audience with integrated campaign creation and lead management
• Match contacts by domain, LinkedIn, and email
• Locate anonymous users that are in-line with your ideal customer profile

Hubspot

Overview

Hubspot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies change the way that they interact with accounts to create more interested and engaged prospects.

Key Features

• Access personalized email templates and content from your inbox
• Receive data on which strategies from your library are being engaged with the most and then easily share that information with your team
• Set up emails to automatically notify specific team members about which accounts they should prioritize
• Give prospects a personalized link so that they can book a meeting in seconds

Marketo

Overview

Marketo is an engagement marketing software that is designed to nurture relationships and create and keep customers.

Key Features

• Access real-time data, such as the best time to call a specific customer
• Connect each marketing channel and engagement back to revenue
• Assess measurable metrics throughout the customer journey to determine the best strategy to sell at each stage
• Use social media to learn more about existing customers and find new ones

Pardot

Overview

Pardot is a B2B marketing automation solution by Salesforce that allows teams to create, deploy, and manage online marketing campaigns that increase revenue and maximize efficiency.

Key Features

• Personalize each prospect engagement by tailoring emails to fit their interests
• Maintain a steady flow of high quality leads using Pardot inbounding tools
• Save time by automating time-consuming tasks
• Create more meaningful conversations by accessing complete conversation history

Salesforce

Overview

Salesforce is a customer success platform that leverages social and mobile cloud technologies to help organizations connect with customers, partners, and employees in new ways.

Key Features

• View a complete customer history, including activity, contacts, communications, internal discussions, and social media insights
• Track your team’s deals by stage, products, competition, quotes, etc.
• Benefit from the knowledge of your entire team with the social collaboration network
• Access and interact easily with pipeline forecasts

SendBloomin

Overview

SendBloomin is a prospecting automation software that allows companies to hyper-personalize targeting while minimizing hours spent on activities that take away from core selling.

Key Features

• Send specific, individualized emails with SendBloom’s segmentation tool
• Create a multi-step, multi-type cadence for follow-ups
• View email data such as opens, clicks, replies, bounces, etc.
• Share email templates and cadences across your team
• Integrate with your email account so that SendBloom’s involvement is invisible

IBM Marketing Cloud

Overview

IBM Marketing Cloud uses customer data and individual behaviors to inform and drive personalized interactions in real time.

Key Features

• Understand universal buyer behaviors to identify when to reach out to prospects
• Deliver high personalization at scale using the interaction engine
• Apply multi-channel capabilities to interact with prospects in their preferred channel
• Create a single, unique identity for each prospect to create consistency and offer data to your team on each of the individuals interacting with the brand

Measurement

Amacus

Overview

Amacus is a software designed to increase the impact of reps by identifying how your company’s actions are translating into results.

Key Features

• Access data to validate the value of best practices
• Analyze how different practices affect the quality of conversations
• Use analytics to uncover best practices that can be replicated across the organization
• Adjust strategy quickly with real-time information

Ambition

Overview

Ambition is a sales performance management platform that helps to enhance sales force productivity, transparency, and recognition.

Key Features

• Monitor real-time sales performance across individuals, roles and teams
• Combine metrics from different data sources like Salesforce, Cisco and PeopleSoft
• Use dynamic TV leaderboards, contests, reporting and recognition that are easy to launch and completely customizable

Leveleleven

Overview

LevelEleven is a sales performance platform that seeks to alleviate salespeople’s greatest pains and helps to create a culture of performance for its customers.

Key Features

• Monitor real-time sales performance to help hit your sales goal
• View your “Scorecard” within Salesforce.com to easily and accurately track sales progress
• Create sales team motivation campaigns within Salesforce.com based on sales activity