ZoomInfo vs. Lusha: Comparison and Objective Evaluation | Avoma blog (2023)

There are two things that SaaS companies want more of: data and money. And only a few companies can boast of having them in abundance. By virtue of the niche in which they operate, most companies in the data-as-a-service (DaaS) space have access to vast amounts of data and generous money.

If you landed on this article after reading the title, you're probably thinking about investing in a good sales intelligence platform like ZoomInfo, Lusha, Slintel, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

It is normal for all growing SaaS companies to invest in such a platform not only to enrich sales, but also to generate marketing leads or find great talent to hire.

For sales teams, sales intelligence software is a boon because lead generation is a top concern for all sales teams. Outsourcing your lead generation activity to specialized software can help you save time and invest your resources in more meaningful areas, such asdiscovery calls, refining your sales pitch or crafting an effective sales strategy based on accounts.

In this post, we'll take a closer look at ZoomInfo and Lusha, two of the many companies in the DaaS capital that have made great strides in recent years.

Through this blog post, we hope to help you decide which one to invest in: ZoomInfo or Lusha based on your business use cases.

The genesis of ZoomInfo and Lusha

ZoomInfo Origen

ZoomInfo (founded in 2000) was acquired by DiscoverOrg (founded in 2007) and was renamed ZoomInfo in 2019. Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown were recent college graduates when they decided to launch DiscoverOrg from their Ohio dorm rooms. They had an uphill battle ahead of them, as they were a brand new two-person company competing with RainKing, a business contact information platform that also started in 2007 but had a better business model.

Over the next 10 years, DiscoverOrg went head-to-head with RainKing, acquiring the competition in 2017 for more than $100 million. Since then, DiscoverOrg has been on an acquisition spree. In the last 6 years, the company has made 12 strategic acquisitions, buying companies such as:

• iPerfil (2015)
• Tellwise (2017)
• King of the Rain (2017)
• Never Bounce (2018)
• New data (2018)
• Zoom Information (2019)
• Comedy (2019)
• Clickagy (2020)
• Eternal Chain (2020)
• Insente (2021)
• Coro.ai (2021)
• Lead Ring (2021)
  

With the acquisition of Chorus.io in 2021 for $575 million, it's clear that ZoomInfo wants to dominate the "sell-to-seller" market segment.

Since February 2019, Henry has been the CEO of ZoomInfo. ZoomInfo became a public company listed on Nasdaq (symbol: ZI) in June 2020, one of the first companies to go public at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak amid a virtual event. Today, the company employs more than 2,800 people in its seven global offices and has a market value of $21.1 billion.

how lusha started

Lusha was founded in 2016 by Israeli founders Assaf Eisenstein and Yoni Tserruya in Tel Aviv. As of this writing, Yoni is running Lusha as CEO, while Assaf is the president of the company.

The duo started Lusha as a side project, originally to help HR teams find better talent to hire. Later, they expanded Lusha's capabilities to serve sales teams with similar requirements—finding the right type of customer—and made that their primary focus. Today, Lusha primarily helps B2B sales teams improve their prospecting with high-quality data and offers overlapping features for marketing and recruiting teams.

Lusha has scaled to gain 12,000 customers and 80 employees in just four years from its fully-booted inception. The company has yet to make any acquisitions, but it was funded in November 2021, when it raised $205 million in Series B capital, bringing its valuation to $1.5 billion and earning it coveted Unicorn status.

ZoomInfo and Lusha: two totally different market approaches

ZoomInfo takes a sales-oriented approach

ZoomInfo has grown into a profitable company primarily through the acquisition of other profitable companies. They have mastered the art of increasing business margins by putting sales at the center of their GTM movement. In fact, the company positions itself as a GTM platform for B2B sellers.

Here's what Casey Hill, Bonjoro's director of growth, had to say about her experience with the ZoomInfo sales team:

In one of his recent podcast appearances, the CEO of ZoomInfo made a bold admission crediting his GTM as his growth lever for success:

There were points in ZoomInfo's history where we had the worst product but still made more. And it's because we had a better GTM movement and we presented our vision better. The entry move to the market can win the day.

-Henry Schuck, CEO, ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo has complex implementation requirements, which may be one reason the company has "ZoomInfo University" to help its users get used to the product. ZoomInfo offers sales touches for customers who want to know more about their pricing plans, turning their SaaS solution into aGTM led by product but assisted by sales.

It's also worth mentioning that Zoominfo had some luck with its GTM strategy (especially in the immediate aftermath of the COVID outbreak) because many users assumed that ZoomInfo was a subsidiary of Zoom, one of the fastest growing companies during the pandemic with an increase of 383%. its value as of January 2020. He rode on the back of a bigger and better company along with his own set of GTM successes.

Lusha takes a PLG approach

Lusha's GTM strategy is at the opposite end of the spectrum. The company prides itself on offering a completely product-oriented, self-service user experience model.

Lusha grew rapidly in the first four years from its founding with a zero marketing budget because we took a product-based approach to growth. Back then, we didn't know the term PLG existed, but that's what we unknowingly did.

Lusha made it easy for our users to sign up, start using the platform, see the quality of the data first hand, and buy the product if they needed to scale. This ended up creating word of mouth for us and brought more people to Lusha.

- Yoni Tserruya, CEO, Lusha

The main difference between ZoomInfo and Lusha

ZoomInfo's strength lies in generating high-quality intent data

At its core, ZoomInfo gives you access to comprehensive business contact information about your target audience, combined with accurate real-time analytics on buyer intent. This information can help you improve the quantity and quality of your leads.

At a more advanced level, ZoomInfo offers advanced sales intelligence features such as CRM integration, lead capture, market intelligence, and providing accurate buyer intent data. With business contact data from 130 million users, ZoomInfo has an extensive database in the B2B space.

Compared to other sales intelligence tools, ZoomInfo offers buyer intent analytics that improve the accuracy and quality of lead data. This is a huge advantage for teams looking to get high-quality lead insights, because cheaper point solutions like Apollo.io don't provide the same depth of intent data as ZoomInfo, requiring your sales team to sort through manually a large amount of information to qualify prospects.

Lusha is easy to use and affordable

Lusha's biggest differentiation with ZoomInfo is that its market positioning, features, and pricing are optimized for small startups. Lusha offers a clean user interface that is easy to navigate and get started. Novice users don't have to spend a lot of time getting used to Lusha's interface because the product has little to no learning curve.

In keeping with standard practice in the field of sales intelligence, Lusha offers a Chrome browser extension that users can install to massively enrich lead data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Salesforce, or other online portals without switching tabs. from the browser.

How to choose between ZoomInfo and Lusha?

Both ZoomInfo and Lusha have hundreds of thousands of customers and rave reviews on software review sites, and have fairly comparable offerings from a product and functionality standpoint. Considering all this, it's hard to choose between the two. But at the same time, both are aimed at different audiences.

That is why we are here to help. But before you pull the trigger on choosing between the two, let's first consider the two key factors in evaluating these tools.

Key factors for evaluation

1. Features or functionality of the product

This is probably the most important aspect of evaluating two similar solutions to see if they offer comprehensive and comparable functionality.

Some questions to consider:

• How complete is the functionality and features of the product?
• What integrations do you support?
• Do they support it natively or through some 3rd party API connectors?
• What functionality is flexible, customizable, etc.?
• What are your needs? Do you need all the bells and whistles?

2. Prices

This is not the most important aspect of the purchase decision, but everyone wants to buy an affordable solution that is also best in class.

Some questions to consider:

• Do you really need all these features?
• Is it overkill at your current stage of business or not?
• Are you going to pay for something that looks fancy, but won't have time to actively use it?
• Is there a minimum platform fee?
• Is the price affordable, flexible and fair?

Comparing ZoomInfo and Lusha

Having seen the overview of how ZoomInfo and Lusha rate and the main factors for the evaluation, let's now move on to the evaluation itself.

The TL;DR version

See how Zoominfo and Lusha compare.

1. Features

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo's delivery of business contact information data is truly granular, and arguably the best in the sales intelligence category. This is what one ZoomInfo user had to say about his experience with ZoomInfo:

Zoominfo has a sophisticated industry leading filtering process. For example, if you want to find a list of second-tier banks right away, Zoominfo will provide it for you. If I want to find companies that have more than three trucks in operation, Zoominfo is probably the only place you'll find that kind of information.

- Jack Reamer, B2B Lead Generation Specialist, SalesBread

Here is a list of all the features that ZoomInfo offers:

• constructor principal
• Lead Intelligence & Analysis
• Native integration with 25 other apps (including 14 CRMs)
• data enrichment
• data segmentation
• people alerts
• data report
• Market insights at the account level
  

ZoomInfo's wide range of integrations across all features gives it an edge over smaller players like Lusha.

For example, ZoomInfo natively integrates with 14 different CRMs and marketing automation platforms like Hubspot, SalesForce Pardot, and NeverBounce, making it a useful tool for sales and marketing teams. Furthermore, its seamless integration with JobDiva and Greenhouse also makes it an enticing option for HR teams.

Compare that to Slintel, another heavyweight in the sales intelligence space, which only integrates with the top three CRMs: Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. Even Sales Navigator offers limited CRM integrations with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 - you have to go the API route to integrate Sales Nav with other tools.

Lozano

Following our research and also speaking with some customers, Lusha doesn't seem to match ZoomInfo when it comes to providing accurate and up-to-date information.

According to Richard Lubicky of RealPeopleSearch, "Some of the information (found on Lusha) was out of date or false."

But with that being said, data accuracy is an ongoing job for all providers. Lusha offers some amazing features for SMB SaaS that speed up time to customer value.

One of Lusha's features allows you to improve email prospecting and increase your chances of getting a response by providing verified email IDs. This is a good deal as it helps you filter Lusha's 100 million business contacts and save time by contacting the right accounts.

If you dig even deeper into the database, Lusha has a constantly growing list of 60 million email addresses, 50 million direct dials, and 15 million company profiles listed on their platform.

Lusha also has an active community of contributors who provide their data to Lusha. They encourage their users to contribute data to the platform in exchange for selected Lusha features that they can use for free.

In Yoni's words, Lusha's idea to create such a community stems from the vision of wanting to build the largest community of sellers in the world who can help each other to validate the quality of the data on the platform.

This is a shrewd move by Lusha to verify user data from multiple sources and keep the information up to date as much as possible. Today's B2B space is extremely dynamic: people change jobs roughly every three years, their companies go through mergers and acquisitions, and a lot of information can change over time. Having an open source, community-developed data aggregation and verification process can help a business maintain data sanity in the long run.

Does ZoomInfo have a community?

To be fair, ZoomInfo also has acommunity editionwhich encourages similar participation from its users, but does not highlight its community features as much as its other features.

Here is a list of other important features that Lusha offers:

• lead intelligence
• lead monitoring
• One-click integration with top 3 CRMs
• Custom API integration
• Data cleaning and enrichment
• Verified email lookup only
• Easy to manage user role and access
• Reports and analysis
  

Compared to ZoomInfo, Lusha disappoints on the integration front. As of now, Lusha only offers out-of-the-box integration with Salesforce CRM, HubSpot, and Outreach. To integrate other tools with Lusha, you'll need to rely on custom APIs, which don't offer as seamless data flow between tools as native integration.

When we first bought the platform, we thought that Lusha could integrate with some of our other systems. But it doesn't work like that. We had to hire several programmers to help integrate Lusha with our website's shopping cart and another to help with email marketing.

- Madilyn Hill, Executive Director of TruePersonFinder

2. Prices

ZoomInfo

Because ZoomInfo serves cross-functional use cases, it is priced to suit different use cases in sales, marketing, and HR.

ZoomInfo offers a free trial on all of its plans, but the website copy doesn't say how long the trial period lasts. People who have tried ZoomInfo confirm that the trial period lasts 14 days.

The platform provides basic and high-level data for free, but you'll need to pay a premium subscription fee to access granular data like email addresses, organizational charts, and employee details.

From there, it gets even trickier, as ZoomInfo doesn't have fixed pricing plans available on their website. Instead, they encourage potential customers to get personalized price quotes from their sales team. ZoomInfo also doesn't communicate the fact that it doesn't have monthly plans, but does require customers to sign annual contracts, which start at around $15,000 a year.

It's a good move to balance the self-service product experience with the right kind ofsales assistantfor customers who want to talk to sales. But not having initial clarity on subscription costs adds a layer of complexity for users who want to know if ZoomInfo fits their budget.

However, ZoomInfo's satisfied customers don't seem to complain about its complex sales cycle:

We pay about $25,000 a year for the ZoomInfo subscription and the results so far have been phenomenal. I would definitely recommend others to use it.

- Doug Pierce, director de marketing, Sigma Computing

This is in stark contrast to ZoomInfo's smaller clients, who find its price exorbitant. For example, users like Jack (of SalesBread) find ZoomInfo too expensive and the export feature "clunky at best".

The bottom line is that ZoomInfo may be better suited for larger companies with deep pockets than for small and medium-sized businesses on a tight sales or marketing budget. 🇧🇷

Lozano

Lusha has a wide range of pricing plans, and luckily, it's all on their website for users to compare. The few hiccups are in its Starter plan, which allows users to earn 5 credits each month. It's not immediately clear if this is a limited-time trial offer, but further investigation shows that it's a forever free plan with limited offers.

But Lusha doesn't have monthly plans either. Force your customers to buy annual subscription packages in advance.

It also doesn't have a specific price on its Enterprise plan, which is common for many SaaS brands that want to customize their pricing on a case-by-case basis.

Lusha may be better suited for SMBs with smaller sales and marketing budgets and has built-in capabilities to validate intent data. 🇧🇷

final verdict

Comparing ZoomInfo vs Lusha head to head, both are great tools in their own right. When it comes to deciding which platform is best for you, it comes down to two things: data quality and budget.

1. If you can afford to spend thousands of dollars each year for high-quality purchase intent data, go for ZoomInfo.

2. If you're a growing business that can't afford exorbitant tech tools, and if you have other resources to validate intent data internally, test the waters with one of Lusha's low-commitment subscription plans. You can upgrade to a platform like ZoomInfo later if needed.