The best B2B database is rarely the one with the largest number on a sales slide. Coverage changes by country, company size, department, seniority, and how quickly people move jobs. A useful evaluation starts with your accounts and your definition of a usable record.
Ask for the same 200 accounts
Give every vendor a blind list drawn from the segments you care about. Score named contacts found, current title, email confidence, mobile coverage, company match, duplicate rate, and the number of records a rep would actually call or email. Split results by country and persona before calculating an average.
A single global coverage percentage can hide the exact market where your team struggles. The community reports around these vendors are useful for finding questions, but they are not substitutes for your sample.
Decide whether you are buying data or a platform
Apollo combines prospect data with self-serve sequencing, which can get a small team moving quickly. ZoomInfo makes more sense when a RevOps group will use account intelligence, enrichment, intent, and governed workflows. Cognism is commonly shortlisted by teams that sell into Europe and care about phone coverage and compliance posture.
Those are different purchases. A team that needs a clean export should not pay for orchestration it will never implement. A large team should not choose a cheap database if operations will spend the savings repairing records and routing duplicates.
Run the rep test
Give five reps the same account task in each product: find the buying group, save contacts, identify recent changes, push them to the CRM, and start the next approved step. Time the work and count how many records survive without manual cleanup.
- Can a rep explain why a record is current?
- Does the CRM receive the right owner and source?
- What happens when two vendors disagree?
- Can ops suppress countries or data types?
- How are stale records credited or corrected?
Negotiate after the sample
Quote-based vendors are easier to compare when the evaluation sheet is already agreed. Put coverage, implementation, enrichment volume, seats, exports, API usage, renewal terms, and support in the same model. Negotiate from the gaps your sample exposed, not from a generic competitor discount.