Guide to AI sales intelligence tools

Sales reps spend 64% of their time on tasks that don’t generate revenue. 

Wouldn’t it be easier to hit your numbers if you could take a lot of those hours back?

Using AI-powered sales intelligence tools to automate research, lead nurturing, and other crucial yet repetitive sales tasks, reps can reclaim time and focus more on what they do best: selling.

Keep reading to learn more how sales intelligence works, the benefits of AI-driven sales intelligence tools for different teams, and some of the best sales intelligence tools on the market today.

What is sales intelligence?

Sales intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing buyer data to improve sales strategies and help reps close more deals. 

Historically, reps spent tons of time manually researching prospects, tracking leads, and analyzing customer interactions to gather sales intelligence data. 

With the rise of artificial intelligence, however, sales intelligence has evolved into a more automated, data-driven process, giving reps actionable insights in real time without requiring much heavy lifting on their end.

It’s basically like a cheat code.

Using AI sales intelligence tools, reps can automatically identify high-value leads, which makes it simple to figure out which accounts to prioritize. This shift from manual research to AI-driven automation eliminates wasted effort, ensuring reps spend the bulk of their weeks engaging prospects and key decision-makers most likely to convert.

By combining data from multiple sources — company websites, LinkedIn, news publications, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems — and using AI to detect patterns and surface buying signals, AI sales intelligence tools help reps strike when the iron is hottest, responding to opportunities when they arise.

With all this said, it comes as no surprise that teams that use AI sales tools are 30% more productive than their old-school counterparts, and that AI sales technology can help increase revenue by as much as 25%, according to MarketsandMarkets. 

Due to these benefits, 92% of sales orgs are planning to invest more heavily in AI sales solutions over the next three years.

If you want to keep pace with peers, you should, too.

Types of sales intelligence data

Sales intelligence data comes in all shapes and sizes:

• Firmographic data refers to a company’s key characteristics, like company size, the industry they operate in, how many employees they have, how much revenue they generate each year, and where they’re located. Sales teams can use this data to segment prospects, identify high-potential accounts that align with their deal customer profile (ICP), and ensure their outreach strategies actually reflect what each prospect is experiencing. 

• Contact data encompasses a prospect’s job title, email address, phone number, and social media profiles. By equipping sales teams with accurate and actionable B2B contact information, you can increase the chances reps engage the right people in the right place at the right time.

• Technographic data describes a company’s tech stack. Knowing what tools a prospect’s organization uses can help reps sell more; if a company is using software that matches what your ICP uses, your team can position your products as complementary to their existing stack.

• Event-based triggers, including closing a new funding round or hiring new executives, are signals that indicate a company is ready to buy or switch vendors. Reps can act on these triggers to reach prospects when they’re likely to be thinking about adding new tools to their stack.

• Historical sales data, like past deals and customer interactions, can help reps predict future buying behavior. If customers typically visit specific product pages, check out pricing data, and then sign contracts, reps can target prospects who show the same behaviors.

How sales intelligence helps

By transforming data into actionable insights, sales intelligence helps teams improve sales performance. Using firmographic, contact, technographic, event-based, and historical data, sales teams can prioritize leads and engage prospects more authentically, on a more personal level.

Simply put, sales intelligence helps reps remove guesswork from the equation. Instead of spending time researching accounts and figuring out what to do next, AI sales tools become partners focused on helping you maximize each minute. With AI-driven sales intelligence tools at your disposal, you’ll spend more focusing on high-value activities that drive revenue instead of drowning in tasks that don’t. 

Here are five key ways sales intelligence tools help sales teams get more done:

1. Prospecting: By analyzing firmographic, technographic, and behavior data, sales intelligence tools help reps identify high-potential leads. From there, they can spend more of their energy selling to these prospects.
   
   
2. Outbound: Sales intelligence tools supercharge reps’ outbound outreach efforts by surfacing insights salespeople can use to personalize outreach based on previous interactions, recent activity, and company news. Using AI-powered writing partners like LeadIQ Scribe, reps can craft personalized emails in just a few clicks, increasing response rates with more relevant messaging.
3. Land and expand: Sales intelligence tools identify customers that are most likely to be interested in upgrading their subscriptions or adding on other complementary products. Reps can use these signals to fuel land and expand sales strategies, growing existing accounts and unlocking higher customer lifetime value as the relationship matures.
4. Upselling and cross-selling: Reps can also use sales intelligence tools to capitalize on upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Sharing timely, personalized offers at the most opportune times can be an easy way to drive revenue. 

5. Renewals: Ai-powered sales intelligence keeps tabs on contract timelines and product usage trends to predict how likely each customer is to renew. Using these signals, reps can proactively engage at-risk accounts, addressing their concerns and increasing the likelihood renewals happen when they’re supposed to.

Best B2B sales intelligence tools

LeadIQ

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G2 score: 4.2/5 stars (1,133 reviews)

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LeadIQ is a powerful sales intelligence platform designed to help SaaS sales teams prospect more efficiently. By automating account research, using AI for data enrichment, and equipping reps with a generative AI writing collaborator — Scribe — LeadIQ helps sales teams authentically connect with high-quality prospects at scale, sending personalized messages that land when leads are most receptive to the pitch.

LeadIQ features:

• Find prospect-specific data and capture it in your tech stack in one click.
• Learn when champions and power users switch jobs immediately to engage warm leads when they’re most likely to buy.
• Use generative AI writing tools to personalize outreach at scale using firmographic, technographic, and behavioral data. 
• Enrich data automatically to ensure CRM records are always up to date, accurate, and complete.
• Integrate LeadIQ with the rest of your sales tech stack, including Salesforce, HubSpot, LinkedIn, and Gong, to eliminate manual data entry and ensure data stays actionable, always.

LeadIQ pros:

• Highly accurate contact data, including EMEA and APAC data, to help teams sell to customers all around the world.
• Award-winning platform, including earning G2’s Fall 2025 Most Implementable and Highest User Adoption Awards.
• Intuitive design so sales teams can get up and running quickly, with minimal learning curve.
• Product roadmap filled with AI-driven features giving teams a future-proof tech stack, with new capabilities coming to market regularly.
• Data synced across your entire tech stack automatically, creating a single source of truth, keeping teams aligned, and ensuring reps always have the latest data at their fingertips.

LeadIQ cons:

• Small teams and startups may find LeadIQ to be too complex for their needs (though we do have a free Chrome extension, so you can try our tools for free!).
• Works best with teams that use LeadIQ alongside tools like Clay, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Gong, and Chili Piper. 

Read about how Greenhouse uses LeadIQ to power its global sales operations.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

G2 score: 4.3/5 stars (2,044 reviews)

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s AI-powered sales tool designed to help reps find quality prospects and engage them more effectively. With more than 50 search filters and generative AI writing tools that make it easy to personalize outreach leveraging insights from LinkedIn activity, company news, and industry challenges, Sales Navigator helps reps build stronger relationships and close more deals on a platform their buyers already live on.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator features:

• Identify quality leads faster using AI, which surfaces high-potential leads based on specific buyer criteria with a tool that learns from feedback and improves over time.
• Engage prospects outside of your network with monthly InMail credits reps can use to target high-value accounts.
• Create lead and account lists by organizing and grouping prospects based on specific criteria you define.
• Use genAI tools to personalize outreach, boosting response rates 5x per LinkedIn.
• Jump on opportunities as soon as they materialize using real-time alerts and notifications to accelerate speed to lead. 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator pros:

• Purpose-built sales prospecting tools designed for the world’s largest professional social network — need we say more? 🤔
• Streamline prospect and account research using Account IQ, which surfaces information about financial reports, business challenges, executive voice, and more.
• Integrates with other tools in your sales stack, including CRM software and LeadIQ, for easy data capture and sync.
• Test the platform for 30 days without any financial commitment. 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator cons:

• Can be pricey for some teams, with basic plans starting at $99.99/user/month.
• Some features, including Account IQ research capabilities, are only available at higher subscription tiers.

Clay

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G2 score: 4.8/5 stars (174 reviews)

Clay is a data enrichment and automation platform that gives reps accurate and actionable data pulled from upwards of 130 different sources, with automatic data enrichment to ensure records stay up to date. Clay offers a library of pre-built workflow automations, signal tracking capabilities, and an AI-powered research tool called Claygent built to streamline prospecting workflows, improve sales intelligence, and help teams increase conversion rates.

Clay features:

• Robust contact and account data pulled from over 130 sources, including firmographic data, intent data, financial data, and more, giving reps a more detailed picture of each prospect.

• Pre-built workflow automations and the ability to create your own, which helps teams minimize busywork and spend more time selling. For example, Clay lets you automatically score leads and enrich records before starting cold outreach sequences using that data.
• Track all sorts of buying signals, including when high-value accounts visit your website and funding announcements, to engage leads at the best moments.

Clay pros:

• AI-powered features speed up prospecting, reduce errors, and keep manual tasks to a minimum.
• Integrates with other tools your sales team uses every day, including Salesforce, LeadIQ, Outreach, Gong, and Salesloft.
• Captures all sorts of signals, including tech stack changes, website content changes, and specific keywords posted on social media.

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Clay cons:

• G2 reviewers express concerns over Clay’s user-based pricing, which can make billing hard to predict.
• Users also report that Clay’s user interface is tricky to navigate and requires a steeper learning curve; someone on your team will need to integrate Clay’s data API into your sales tech stack.

Crunchbase

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G2 score: 4.5/5 stars (385 reviews)

Crunchbase is a business information platform that provides data about specific companies, including funding rounds, investors, firmographics, and industry trends. Reps use this sales intelligence data to identify and qualify leads, keep tabs on business growth signals, and identify the best sales opportunities.

Crunchbase features:

• Source data from over 4 million companies, including private market research that predicts future funding rounds and potential exits, using AI agents to streamline the process and learn more about target accounts faster.
• Connect Crunchbase data to your own tech stack via an API to automate data analysis and enrichment.
• Use predictive signals to target companies about to fundraise, release new products, or expand their executive team.

Crunchbase pros:

• Users report that Crunchbase is easy to use; get up and running quickly for fast ROI.
• Pipe real-time data directly into your sales dashboards to ensure your team is always leveraging accurate, up-to-date data.
• Take the platform for a test drive with a 7-day free trial to explore it without a financial commitment; currently, new customers can save 38% on Pro subscriptions when they pay annually.

Crunchbase cons:

• Crunchbase offers tools beyond sales intelligence, like the ability to find investors and investment opportunities, which may be unnecessary for GTM teams.
• Some users express frustration over the caliber of the platform’s data, saying it’s incomplete and outdated.

Bombora

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G2 score: 4.4/5 stars (155 reviews)

Bombora is a sales intelligence platform and intent data provider that uses AI to accurately identify website visitors and inform sales teams about which companies are most likely interested in what they’re selling. Using this data, teams can prioritize the highest quality leads and target them based on their buyer intent (e.g., visiting a pricing page or looking at a specific solutions page). 

Bombora features:

• Leverage intent signals to determine which potential customers are visiting your company’s website and the specific offerings they’re most interested in, along with which of your competitors’ websites they’re visiting, too.
• Re-engage website visitors by building optimized retargeting campaigns fueled by previous behaviors.
• Personalize website experiences based on what visitors are looking at so prospects see what they want to see every time.

Bombora pros:

• Identify anonymous website visitors with a high degree of accuracy.
• CRM integration with platforms like Marketo, Salesforce, and HubSpot, which lets you add intent data into dashboards and email sequences right away.
• Craft more effective messaging using intent data to understand what your prospects are most interested in and working backwards from there.

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Bombora cons:

• Built for bigger teams by Bombora’s own admission; best suited for organizations with at least 100 employees.
• Pricing data isn’t publicly available on Bombora’s website, so you’ll have to talk to sales to figure out whether you can afford it.

Who should use sales intelligence tools?

Sales intelligence tools can obviously help sales teams sell more. But the insights they provide benefit all sorts of teams across the organization. 

From sales and marketing to customer success, RevOps, go-to-market (GTM) teams, and even leadership, all departments that use customer and market data to figure out the best path forward can benefit from sales intelligence solutions. 

Here’s how.

Sales teams

Sales teams can use sales intelligence tools to identify high-value leads and prioritize accounts based on firmographic, technographic, and behavioral data. They can leverage that data to personalize outreach with detailed insights into the unique pain points each customer faces, firing out emails and LinkedIn messages when buying signals and event-based triggers suggest it’s the best time to reach out.

For example, sales intelligence software might detect that a target account with 500 employees using a certain CRM recently posted a job for a new sales ops manager — data that suggests the company may be reevaluating its tech stack in the near future, the perfect time to reach out.

Sales intelligence tools can also automate follow-ups, ensuring no leads slip through the cracks. 

Altogether, these capabilities help teams nurture leads more effectively, which ultimately makes it easier to win new business.

Marketing teams

Sales intelligence software helps marketing teams segment their audiences more granularly, making it easy to engage prospects at scale with more precision. The technology also helps marketers measure the impact of their campaigns by tracking how each account engages with specific pieces of content and using those learnings to improve future campaigns.

Sales intelligence also helps marketing build better account-based marketing strategies, using relevant and timely insights to personalize messaging. With a single source of truth tying colleagues together, marketing and sales can also stay aligned, telling the same story and ensuring a consistent buying journey.

Customer success teams

Customer success teams can use sales intelligence signals to identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities. For example, a customer who’s consistently hitting usage limits tied to their subscription might be happy to hear from a rep who reminds them about the headaches they’d lose by moving to a higher tier.

Leading sales intelligence tools can also help customer success teams reduce churn by notifying them about at-risk accounts ahead of time so they can intervene and fix any issues before they spiral out of control. On top of this, sales intelligence helps customer success see what the optimal customer onboarding experience looks like, using those insights to mimic that experience across all new accounts.

Altogether, sales intelligence gives customer success the data to ensure their customers are, well, successful. 

RevOps teams

By consolidating data from multiple systems — your CRM, marketing automation tools, and sales tech stack — sales intelligence technology gives RevOps teams a single source of truth, which they can use to confidently identify bottlenecks in the sales funnel and figure out a better way forward. After analyzing data, RevOps might find out that deals in a specific industry (e.g., finance) take longer to close and begin to study why that’s the case and what can be done to fix it.

Sales intelligence also helps RevOps increase forecasting accuracy by combining historical data analysis with predictive analytics. This gives RevOps a better idea of what future revenue looks like while ensuring all departments are using the same data to inform their strategies, which keeps everyone on the same page. 

GTM teams

Sales intelligence platforms help GTM teams build data-driven strategies while ensuring sales, marketing, and customer success stay aligned. 

Imagine GTM leaders realize that logistics companies using legacy ERP systems that have recently hired new IT leaders are highly interested in your company’s offerings; they’d probably decide to double-down on efforts targeting this cohort. 

Sales leadership

Sales intelligence tools give leaders more visibility into pipeline health, enabling them to track team performance metrics in real time and stay plugged into revenue trends. 

With user-friendly at-a-glance dashboards, sales leaders can quickly spot coaching opportunities, allocate resources more strategically, and use real-time market data and competitive insights to refine strategies and steer their teams to more deals.

Add it all up, and sales intelligence platforms help cross-functional teams make smarter, more informed decisions. They’re the lifeblood of revenue engines. 

LeadIQ is a leader in sales intelligence

Here at LeadIQ, our mission is equipping sales orgs with actionable insights and tools they can use to streamline prospecting and win more business.

We do this by providing highly accurate contact data, including firmographic, technographic, and demographic data, and making it super easy to capture contact data from the tools you’re already using.

Our platform also automatically tracks behavioral signals, like job changes, so reps can immediately engage champions and power users right when they switch companies or get promoted. 

With automatic data enrichment — and an unrivaled contact database that includes EU and APAC data sources — LeadIQ gives reps the data they need to prospect with purpose all over the world.

We’re incredibly proud of what we’re building, and the market is, too. G2 recently gave us several Fall 2025 awards — including Highest User Adoption, Mid-Market; Most Implementable, Mid-Market; Regional Leader, EMEA; and Regional Leader, Enterprise, Americas. 

And with a jam-packed roadmap of new AI-powered sales features coming down the pipeline, we’re just getting started. 

Try our free Chrome extension today to see the power of LeadIQ with your own eyes. 

Like what you see? Schedule a one-on-one demo to learn more about how LeadIQ can transform the way your team sells.