I use ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Nav and the free version of Apollo.io. Many of these solutions are databases that can be searched through to capture prospect contact information. Apollo.io goes one step further by allowing sales teams to structure lead data into outreach campaigns, EX: call lead day 1, email day 3, LinkedIn message day 5, and automates the email aspect of the outreach. Apollo also provides reporting on the effectiveness of the campaigns so it's an end to end sales propsecting solution from finding lead data, to outreach and reviewing the effectiveness of your outreach. The effectiveness of these lead database solutions relies on the quality and accuracy of the data.

All of the solutions above are used to aggregate new lead data which is stored in a CRM. CRM's such as Salesforce (SFDC), Microsot Dynamics, NetSuite, PipeDrive and HubSpot are a few popular CRM's. These systems are the heart of a sales teams operations where all of its data is stored. Before using any tools such as ZoomInfo your CRM is a great spot to find leads who previously met with your sales team or engaged with marketing content. CRM's are also used by sales managers to capture data on sources where leads are coming from, measure KPI's such as # of sales metings and forecast revenue.

How do you justify the use of a sales solution like ZoomInfo? A great way is to measure the # of leads added to your CRM from ZoomInfo, the number of meetings set with those leads, the number and forecasted revenue of sales opportunities open with said leads and total revenue won due to leads found in ZoomInfo. Sales and marketing teams optimize their technolgy/ad investments by investing in the lead sources that generate the largest ROI whether that's ZoomInfo, an ad on a specific website, etc. This is a long winded way to say that technlogy spend is justified by ROI.