Companies wanting to do business in Germany turn to Cognism for two main reasons:
Cognism is a leading B2B data provider in Germany, known for following strict compliance protocols, including GDPR.
In this article, we’ll show you how Cognism compares to other vendors and walk you through the best ways to expand into the DACH market.
Cognism is the European leader in GTM intelligence and a provider of data infrastructure for mid-market and enterprise organisations. It provides the highest quality B2B data in Germany, including B2B emails, phone-verified mobile numbers, and intent data.
Cognism is particularly competitive in EMEA data, due to its focus on quality.
Unlike other providers, Cognism offers unrestricted access to regional databases, enabling you to prospect in different EU markets.
Cognism’s database adheres to the strict privacy rules in Germany and other European countries (GDPR) to ensure our customers receive data that’s within the law. It means:
Cognism has the largest global mobile numbers database.
It includes our verified mobile dataset and an on-demand mobile phone verification service to reach and win more qualified prospects faster.
If you’re cold calling in Germany, you can increase connect rates by 3x and reach 9 in 10 prospects using these numbers.
If you can’t find your prospect’s phone number, you can request that Cognism’s data team verify it.
With our verified mobile data for outbound prospecting, teams don’t have to worry about data quality affecting their ability to hit quota. This, in turn, saves them a huge amount of time and enables them to book more meetings.
Cognism offers superior integrations with CRMs and sales enablement tools. If you’re a Salesforce, Outreach, or HubSpot user, you’ll find it easy to integrate the data into your systems.
Cognism’s browser extension is a must-have tool for enriching LinkedIn profiles and Sales Navigator lists.
Choose a package to suit your needs:
Both packages include:
Filipa Enes is a Sales Administrator at simpleshow, based in Berlin. Their German sales team struggled with ZoomInfo’s data quality in the DACH region. They also hit a bottleneck when manually exporting leads to Salesforce.
The DACH sales team consists of 16 account managers, 4 inside sales reps, and 3 BDRs. They target DACH 500 accounts and occasionally approach SMBs.
They booked a demo with Cognism, and here are the results:
Another Swiss-based company, Certifaction, switched to Cognism after using a local German data provider to fuel its ABM campaigns.
Before Cognism, they couldn’t accurately filter the database to their ICP: senior tech decision-makers, such as CTOs, CIOs, and CSOs, in enterprises across Germany.
Dealfront is another GDPR-compliant B2B data provider for Europe. It was created after Echobot and Leadfeeder merged.
The database specialises in B2B data in Germany and the DACH region. It also allows you to identify anonymous companies visiting your website and automatically send them to your CRM for sales teams to convert.
There are, however, several differentiators that may influence you to try Cognism over Dealfront.
Dealfront claims broad contact data in the DACH region, but overall, if you intend to prospect in other EU countries, its coverage is weaker than Cognism’s. Moreover, you can access Dealfront’s EU data only on their highest plan, whereas with Cognism, it’s guaranteed across all plans.
Like Cognism, Dealfront is GDPR-compliant. According to their website, they check numbers against DNCs in many countries, but it’s not specified which.
Dealfront’s offering of intent signals is limited to website visitor data sourced from Leadfeeder. It means the provider collects intent from a single domain and may not provide a holistic view of the German market.
If you’re looking to precisely capture buying intent signals and enable reps to prioritise prospects, Bombora’s intent embedded in the Cognism platform is your answer.
It aggregates consent-based intent data from a cooperative of 5,000 B2B sites where B2B buyers search for solutions. It also considers the historical baseline or typical content consumption when calculating intent.
Dealfront integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot and other tools to automate and track marketing campaigns.
However, some users find that the customisation and flexibility of Salesforce fields are limited. We’d recommend testing integrations during the trial period.
Dealfront doesn’t integrate with Outreach or Salesloft. If you rely on these tools, check out Cognism’s offering. You’ll be able to immediately plug all leads from Cognism’s DACH database to Outreach and add them to sequences.
Dealfront’s Chrome Extension’s functionality is also limited.
Global data providers such as ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, or Lusha also offer B2B data in DACH.
However, their coverage in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland is weaker than that of UK-based data provider Cognism. To check the exact data footprint in your niche, we recommend trialling each vendor before signing a contract.
If you’re a ZoomInfo customer investigating B2B data providers in Germany, here are some solutions for you.
Depending on the size of your team, the scale of your outbound prospecting, and your budget, you may be considering different B2B data providers to serve different international markets where you’re present.
Global companies headquartered in the US and with offices in Germany often use ZoomInfo in the US but look for its European alternative to ensure sufficient coverage of the German market or a specific niche in DACH.
Other companies decide to find a supporting provider to cover German territory while continuing to use ZoomInfo as their primary database.
The choice of an EMEA B2B data provider is a strategic decision influenced by factors such as data quality, compliance, and coverage requirements. Opting for a multi-provider approach empowers businesses to ensure in-depth and complete information about leads.
If you use ZoomInfo as your sales intelligence provider in Germany, but your team suffers from list fatigue (connect rates have suddenly dropped) or can’t find decision-makers in your target accounts, you may need a provider that covers all your international offices.
Cognism has a strong presence in EMEA but also covers NAM and APAC, and may be a great ZoomInfo alternative for Europe.
Cognism and ZoomInfo are both GDPR and CCPA-compliant and have a comparable coverage of mobile numbers in the US.
For example, UserEvidence switched from ZoomInfo to Cognism after conducting a “Bake-Off” test.
Amanda Newman, SDR Manager at UserEvidence, discovered that Cognism’s match rate was 98% vs 72% by ZoomInfo, and she found that Cognism returned a ton more phone numbers.
“That convinced me to make the switch to Cognism even after using ZoomInfo for about 3 years.”
Cognism also displaced ZoomInfo and LeadIQ across all of Drift’s global teams.
Sending cold emails in Germany is legal as long as the data subject (the recipient) has consented to email marketing or there is another legal basis, such as the controller’s legitimate interest in sending emails.
Legitimate interest means you’re contacting prospects in Germany about a product or service that is genuinely appropriate for them.
That’s why buying German B2B data lists from sources that take a relaxed approach to data processing may put your business at legal risk and result in steep fines, such as the £20M fine Experian received in 2020.
Find out more about the concept of legitimate interest from Cognism’s legal team.
Cognism prides itself on providing CCPA and GDPR-compliant, validated, accurate contact data in Germany that helps you reach decision-makers at scale without worrying about deliverability or legality.
Some providers offer pre-built bulk business contact lists in Germany, which you can buy and download in a couple of minutes. However, these lists may contain emails that are likely to be noncompliant or inaccurate. These providers don’t offer much customisation when you download the list.
The best way to obtain B2B email addresses for your prospects in Germany is to run the search yourself in a compliant B2B email database like Cognism. You’ll be able to create multiple email lists in the DACH region.
Here’s how to search Cognism’s German email database:
Cold calling in Germany is legal as long as you do it in accordance with GDPR rules.
In short, you can cold-call prospects in Germany and other EU countries if you have a legitimate interest and allow them to opt out of future calls.
The legitimate interest can be overridden by a person’s wish not to be contacted. That’s why Cognism checks phone numbers against Do Not Call (DNC) lists in Germany - that’s a list of people who never want to receive sales calls.
Cognism’s commitment to providing the highest level of compliance and the most complete EMEA B2B data makes it the best business phone number provider in Germany. It’s GDPR compliant and checks numbers against DNC lists in Germany and over ten other countries around the world.
It also provides a premium phone-verified mobile dataset with up to 87% accuracy.
You can also request our data team to verify a German prospect’s phone number if you can’t find it in our database. It means you can speak directly to the decision-makers and save time on calling the wrong numbers or switchboards.
To evaluate your TAM or build a list of prospective companies in Germany or other EU countries, it’s best to use sales prospecting databases that enable you to run multiple searches and generate lists on demand.
Tools like Cognism allow you to narrow down your search with multiple firmographic criteria, such as territory, company size, headquarters, etc.
For example, if you’re targeting manufacturing or logistics leads in Germany, you can even narrow your search down to specific cities in its industrial region, like Bonn, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Dortmund, and Essen.
You can then narrow down your search using:
Then you can simply export the list to your CRM or a sales engagement tool and identify key prospects in those accounts.
If you’re looking for a data provider to cover the German market, here are some questions you might ask during a sales call: