The B2B sales ecosystem has recently experienced a big revolution, rather than a big hurdle for the B2B Sales and Marketing Community. With LinkedIn’s decision to ban Apollo.io and other platforms like Seamless.ai, a lot of brands are struggling to change their pipelines. Since the announcement on March 7th, 2025, the immediate impact has been evident: disrupted workflows, lost access to real-time updates, and a scramble to find compliant alternatives.
However, this isn’t just about one platform; it signals a broader shift in how B2B sales are conducted, emphasizing compliance, data privacy, and personalized engagement. And we here, are going to focus a lot more on how to move past this and get a solution, but let’s start from the beginning.
LinkedIn Rules and Regulations:
For a long while, LinkedIn has been cracking down on companies that automatically collect user data without permission. This has been part of its long-standing effort to protect user privacy and enforce its rules, which clearly ban data scraping. While this might seem strict, the LinkedIn team says, it is done to keep professional information secure and prevent misuse. The challenge LinkedIn faces is to allow businesses to use its data in helpful ways while stopping bad actors from taking advantage of it.
But as in the last 5 years, LinkedIn as a platform has been growing rapidly, setting clear rules around data access is more important than ever.
Apollo.io’s Path: Key Accomplishments and Takeaways
Apollo.io is among the leaders in the B2B sales intelligence segment with sophisticated solutions that give accurate insight into potential customers and aid sales teams in reaching out to marketers effectively. This remarkable growth was made possible due to the company’s ability to supplement information and contacts of prospective customers from LinkedIn, thus making it easier and quicker for businesses to prospect.
However, this data-gathering approach directly conflicted with LinkedIn’s policies, ultimately leading to a ban. LinkedIn likely took action because Apollo relied on automated tools to scrape data, which violated its Terms of Service. This raised privacy concerns and also posed a threat to LinkedIn’s own business model, particularly its Sales Navigator tool, which provides companies with a legitimate way to find and engage with prospects.
Now, Apollo, Seamless.ai and their users face a significant challenge.
Sales teams that depend on the platform must rethink their strategies, either shifting back to manual prospecting or adopting tools that comply with LinkedIn’s guidelines. This shake-up shows why sales tools need to be fairer and sustainable. Companies should find new ways to grow while respecting data privacy and platform rules.
Exploring Alternatives to Apollo.io and Seamless.ai
With Apollo’s LinkedIn presence impacted, the search for alternatives has intensified. Several platforms offer similar functionalities while adhering to LinkedIn’s policies:
Zintlr is an advanced data and business intelligence platform that boosts productivity and revenue growth for businesses.
Zintlr helps businesses discover and engage with customers through its data bank of more than 250 million business profiles. Zintlr’s unique selling point is its personality insights, enabling businesses to tailor their approach for better success rates. Furthermore, users can rest assured that their information is safe with Zintlr because the company complies with stringent security policies (GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001).
ZoomInfo is an all-in-one AI-driven platform designed to help businesses engage, convert, and target users with greater precision and speed. It possesses a rich database of business contacts along with automatic updates that help market and salespeople reach their goals faster and more easily. ZoomInfo saves revenue and automates processes by providing accurate information, allowing company personnel to work smarter, reduce outreach efforts, and increase the complexity of the strategy.
Cognism is a public data intelligence leader known for its privacy compliance and data quality. It leverages data for various purposes, including enrichment, lead generation, and sales predictive data analysis to help companies in automation and revenue increase.
With mobile numbers guaranteed to be in use, Cognism’s Diamond Data guarantees perfect outreach contact information. This is also known to have an amazing rapport for compliance in business.
Lusha is known for reliable contact information while protecting users’ data privacy.
Relies on their services so that users can speak to their preferred contacts, which allows their sales executives to talk to the ideal customers while protecting company regulatory compliance. For ethical sales practices, companies have preferred Lusha due to the accuracy and compliance in the provided sales data.
As publicly sourced, Clearbit serves as a business intelligence data provider and is uniquely reputable due to the conflict-free information offered. Clearbit’s brand does not need any representation other than the name due to its public appeal.
Access of sales and marketing teams to information regarding contacts and company results to direct approach to custom-tailored campaigns, increasing the likelihood of closed businesses.
Further, Clearbit enriched customer intelligence without restriction, making it a must for companies.
Hunter.io focuses on verification and email hunting, providing aid in sales outreach efforts through a powerful tool. It assists users in locating and confirming business email addresses so that the sales team can engage prospective customers optimally. Hunter.io ensures lower barriers to target email addresses and improves the efficacy of email campaigns which enriches the resources of companies with email marketing objectives.
Salesmotion.io is a sophisticated account intelligence system that employs public signals for prospect analysis and issue diagnosis. It assists marketers in gaining insights into their intended target accounts so that they can plan and implement more precise and efficient sales approaches. With a focus on public data marketing, Salesmotion.io serves as these companies’ cornerstone to improving their account-based marketing strategies. Each of these platforms holds its own power to make your sales conversion better than ever.
Beyond Alternatives: A New Approach to Sales and Pipeline Generation
Relying solely on contact information is no longer sufficient in today’s B2B sales world. The importance of relevance, research, and understanding a prospect’s challenges cannot be overstated. Today, people are searching for “cold email outreach,” “How to set up campaigns,” and “who to target” more than ever. And with a ton of software available, it is no hassle to gather data.
But what’s more important is getting the right data.
Traditional “spray-and-pray” outreach methods are becoming less effective, as they often result in irrelevant messages that fail to resonate with potential clients. LinkedIn’s crackdown on data scraping is, in part, a response to these tactics, which can be seen as intrusive and inefficient.
The concept of “deep intelligence” offers a more effective alternative.
But what’s that?
Deep Intelligence or one can call it Sales intelligence, it allows sales teams to engage with leads in a more thoughtful manner. Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, this strategy seeks to gather information about a prospect’s specific requirements, obstacles, and objectives.
This set of techniques enables sales teams to tailor their outreach, making conversations less superficial. With an understanding of a prospect’s situation, sales employees can provide targeted solutions instead of simply pushing a product. This results in greater trust, improved rapport, and a higher likelihood of converting prospects into lifetime customers. In the end, deep intelligence prospects the sales cycle, transforming unorganized efforts into efficient relationships and undeniable results.
Deep Dive: How Zintlr Offers a Different Approach
Zintlr stands out as an advanced sales intelligence platform that goes beyond traditional data scraping. Instead of relying only on LinkedIn profiles, Zintlr analyzes public signals such as SEC filings, earnings calls, news articles, job postings, and podcasts. This approach provides real-time account intelligence and contextual insights via AI, enabling a more focused prospecting strategy.
Take a look at some of the most important elements that emphasize its distinctive sales system:
1. AI-Powered Sales Intelligence: A robust CRM integration alongside a fully developed B2B contacts database allows Zintlr to employ AI in accelerating sales cycles.
2. zPersonality: Enables communication strategies through psychological analysis of prospects with DISC and OCEAN framework,s enabling unparalleled strategic communication.
3. All in One Database: Contains over 500 million contacts and 75 million companies, which can be filtered by size, area, revenue, and multiple other indicators.
4. Human-Centred Interface: Increases user satisfaction and adoption by providing a highly intuitive interface together with efficient integration tools that improve user experience.
5. Affordable and Scalable: Cost-effective and flexible solutions are ideal for small to mid-size companies who are aiming for controlled growth.
6. Improved Lead Generation: Lookup and zScout tools enrich company intelligence with valuable contacts, greatly improving lead generation.
7. zBizLocator Global Reach: Makes it possible for businesses to find and sell to companies all over the world by providing detailed information, enlarging sales horizons and enabling global connections.
What’s Better?
Try Zintlr Chrome Extension: Get a Jumpstart on Your Prospecting
Sales teams can now get contact details, business intel, and even personality details from LinkedIn and company websites using the Zintlr Chrome Extension.
If you are actively trying to find new leads or looking through LinkedIn profiles, the extension lets you:
- Get verified emails and phone numbers with a single click.
- Put the CRM on autopilot for instant callback saves.
- Conduct a Personality Insight Analysis to optimize communication style. This way, you know that you are not using words that they don’t like and things that they love to start a conversation with.
How to Sell Smarter Using Personality Intel
Each prospect has a unique way of thinking and communicating.
Zintlr’s Personality Intel monitors online activity, especially on LinkedIn, to extract vital details concerning a prospect’s personality, decision-making style, and preferred style of communication.
- DISC & OCEAN Profiling: Zintlr captures other social channels and applies the popular DISC (Dominant, Influencer, Steady, Compliant) and OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neurotic) prospecting models.
- Tailored outreach: Know if your prospect would prefer a direct approach or relationship sell, hence helping you nail the message.
- Closing Advantage: Change your pitch according to their decision-making style, and you will win more deals.
The Future of B2B Sales in 2025: A Shift in Mindset
The prohibition of Apollo and other platforms highlights a transformation in the world of B2B sales.
Everything is currently focused on compliance, data protection, and personal engagement.
As the industry pivots from robotic, high-volume strategies, there is an increasing demand for well-researched and strategically relevant value-driven outreach. These changes put the burden on sales teams to rework their strategies to establish authentic rapport with prospects instead of engaging them through blanket outreach campaigns.
Zintlr, and similar contending platforms, present a sneak peek of the future of B2B sales where intelligence and relevance take the forefront.
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Conclusion: Why You Need to Adapt to Change
To summarize, LinkedIn can be viewed as a proactive force rather than simply responding to other social selling platforms, and its actions serve as a call to arms for the entire B2B sales ecosystem.
The evolution of sales prospecting suggests that organizations adopt a more careful and respectful posture toward searching for potential business clients and contacting them. This transformation is made possible by Zintlr and other platforms that combine sophisticated business intelligence tools and provide sales teams with customized insights in order to help them make strategic decisions.
As such, companies need to revisit their approaches to sales enablement in order to adapt to the new normal. Data privacy-centric platforms should be sought out, but they need to be as practical and efficiency-driven as targeted campaign implementations.
Engagement must be geared toward facilitating relevance, value, and authenticity during every interaction instead of generic outreach.
Sales teams are empowered to enhance prospect engagement using these tools while remaining compliant with regulatory changes.
At the end of the day, social-focused tools will be effective with a focus on aiding increases in strong relationships, as success will not only be about prospecting but also making and nurturing relationships and empowering clients to feel important and valued. As industries progress, a shift in sales will be more cantered around providing focused, strategic, customized, and ethical dealings with personalized outreach.
