The Ultimate List of Must-Have Sales Prospecting Tools
Are you planning to revamp your sales prospecting process? If so, you're in luck. This comprehensive blog outlines the must-have tools and tactics for effective sales prospecting. From essential tools and resources to tips and tricks, we've got you covered. You'll find everything you need to get started right away.
Sales prospecting is a critical part of every sales strategy. It's how we reach new customers and grow the business. But what are the best tools to use for sales prospecting? This list includes the top tools that will make your job easier and help you close more deals. So, whether you're just getting started in sales or looking for ways to improve your process, these tools are sure going to help. So what are you waiting for? Get started today and see the results for yourself.
What is sales prospecting?
Prospecting is the key to success in any business, and it's an essential part of any sales professional's job. It's an opportunity to find prospects and convert them into customers, which can help grow your bottom line. It's the first step we take when contacting and building relationships with potential customers before in-depth pitching or discussing products/services.
Maintaining high levels of professionalism while prospecting can be challenging, but it'll pay off by helping to establish trust between the seller and the recipient who receives your message. So don't fret if things aren't coming together quite like they should just yet. Depending on their calendar, there may still be time for interaction later down the line.
Why is sales prospecting important?
Sales prospecting is probably the most important element of a sales funnel. It's one of the most consistent predictors of long-term success. Investing in marketing gets you new leads, but investing in selling helps you keep those leads.
- Introducing yourself to prospective clients and identifying their needs is necessary for a business or company's the product/service offerings. It builds effective customer engagement and helps in setting the potential leads. The more information we get about the products they are interested in, the easier it will be when recommending what might work best for them, and this also ensures there isn't any confusion on your end of things.
- To improve the sales pipeline, we have to start prospecting a great list of qualified prospects. Most companies have a simple data list of prospective customers which aren't always updated, so it's best to start from scratch with a relevant CSV file at least once every quarter.
- Minority reports mean that no one will ever know if you don't ask. Prospecting is important because it allows your business to reach its full potential and grow with success by reaching out to potential prospects.
- Not just about reaching out as often as possible. It's about reaching out at an appropriate time with the most relevant message for a specific person on the lead list. Prospecting helps find the ideal customer profile and helps to learn the buyer personas. It helps us in the cold outreach process and improves our drip campaigns performance. For this reason, the sales team prefers cold emails, which are more effective than phone calls for sales prospecting purposes. It helps reach out to the right people with the right message with very little effort.
- It is an integral part of the sales process irrespective of company size. We cannot grow our qualified leads base and make more money without it.
- Prospecting is key to keeping the sales team busy and diversifying risk. The more customers, it'll be much easier for them to work with those who've already been.
- The best way for B2B companies to grow is by increasing revenue. When a sales rep finds new customers and converts them into paying clients, it will help the company increase in size over time because each customer brings more money and improves profit.
These are the hand-picked benefits of sales prospecting from the long list. Now let us learn where to find the quality leads and their sources.
Sources used for prospecting:
Prospecting for new business on social media platforms is an effective way to find prospects. The social media profiles give brief information about the prospective customers. And the most important thing for every sales rep is to understand the visitor's behavior and then start sales pitching. However, it knows how to leverage these channels to convert those interested people into customers and clients easily. For example
LinkedIn - LinkedIn has become the largest professional network in the world. More than 500 million users use LinkedIn to connect with colleagues, discover jobs, recruit talent, research businesses, and buy products and services online. It is a great sales prospecting platform to get the potential customer's contact details.
Facebook - Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. It is one popular website after Google, with many monthly active users. So, it is the best target market to reach the target audience.
Twitter - Twitter is another top site where people share short messages based on their interests. It will be a definite win task for the marketing teams to collect contact info and improve lead refinement quality.
Instagram: It is a great marketplace for people, which helps to showcase the product or services. And all the social profiles are an asset for the companies.
Tiktok: An excellent platform to use for prospecting. We can find people with similar interests, chat about their products, and get their contact information, so we have more ways of reaching out.
The list is big, so we have shared the top sites from our personal experience. Email campaigns and personal messages are the best way to communicate with buyers or clients than sales calls in the modern sales process.
5 popular prospecting methods:
1. Calling prospects:
There are two ways to ask a potential lead if they'd be interested in your product or service. Cold calling involves calling people you don't know and telling them about your business for the first time. And warm calling refers to people you have a pre-existing relationship with, such as clients or customers who have been in touch before and asked for more information. Cold calling can be a great way of creating new leads sometimes but make sure you don't become too reliant on them because they can come at a cost due to the number of calls needed to generate new clients.
2 . Cold Email:
It is one of the most effective sales strategies for generating high-quality B2B leads. A cold email sales is a form of a sales prospecting technique. It is the initial contact with an individual or business that approaches directly rather than through referral or another route. It is written much more informally than a formal sales email would be, focusing on building rapport and gaining a potential customer's interest before attempting to sell the product or service.
3. Use Referrals Marketing:
One of the easiest prospecting methods you can implement is to use referrals. It used to be a very important part of how salespeople made most of their business, and it should still be today. No matter how much social media plays a role in prospecting, earning a referral from a currently satisfied customer will always have more weight and is easier than starting from scratch by cold calling. And make sure that the referral is for people searching for new solutions to improve their business and willing to invest in new services or products. However, besides being a great and cost-effective way of prospecting, word-of-mouth advertising gives you access to customers who are ready to hear, so we are doing something good for the target audience at the same time.
4. Content marketing
We can use content marketing to attract prospects for your content. The best way to attract the prospect's attention is by asking sales closing questions. This technique is referred to as social proof and is used by websites like Pinterest and Quora because it gets people to engage with their content and divulges information about themselves very quickly. We can use this tactic on a small scale by adding a question to your PPC or SEO landing pages or creating an infographic or other visual form to see what stickiness factors work best.
5. Networking
Networking Events is the best choice for B2B businesses. Attending networking events will allow us to get in touch with people from different backgrounds interested or familiar with your brand. Trade show booths also fall under this category. It will help us in gaining future sales opportunities. After the event or meeting, we can communicate with the buyer or client through networking emails and secure the opportunity to seal the deal.
How can we speed up the sales prospecting?
There are certain things every company must do to speed up the prospecting efforts. Naturally, it would improve the task and become part of a routine in the sales cycle.
- Once we start paying attention to customers, we should notice the patterns in the way the prospects react to the approach, whether they take the time to read what we've sent them or dismiss it completely. From this data, you'll be able to determine who may be likely to buy from or at least listen to what is selling. It helps eliminate some of the risks involved in prospecting and helps to acquire new leads.
- The marketing automation platform plays a key role in efficiently improvising the sales process in minimal time. Using the sales tools for prospecting can save time and improve productivity.
- Invest in high quality leads base to implement the email marketing process efficiently and far more.
The Must-Have Best Sales Prospecting Tools Lists:
Sales prospecting tools are essential for any business. Using the right tools can increase the chances of connecting with potential customers and closing more sales. Sharing the list of best prospecting tools for sales to double the revenue. We have segregated the tools list based on the prospecting stages for better understanding like identifying ideal prospects, finding insights to understand customers behaviors, sales engagements, and far more.
Tools for Lead Scraping:
Thinking about how we can find the email addresses of the customers? If so, consider using lead scraping tools. Lead scraping automation can help you collect information about potential customers from various sources online. With the collected information, we can contact and market to potential customers. These tools are available in the form of applications and chrome extensions. Looking to get more leads for business, then Check out the effective prospecting tools:
Smartwriter:
Smartwriter.AI is the best prospecting tool that helps in scrapping unlimited leads within the app. We can find verified emails OR verify a list of the bulk prospects within Smartwriter. By typing the prospect's First Name and Last Name with their domain, It'll search the internet and find the prospect's contact info within a few seconds.
It is the perfect tool for any business looking to scrap the leads and create more engaging personalized messages in one swoop.
Key Factors:
- We can scrape leads with the prospect's name or designation and verify their email address to avoid getting reverted.
- Linkedin is the best source for prospecting. Smartwriter, the best tool for LinkedIn prospecting, allows us to scrap unlimited LinkedIn leads via its Personalised LinkedIn Lead Gen chrome extension.
- Email Personalization: The exciting feature of Smartwriter is Hyper-personalized email creation with great subject lines in a fraction of seconds.
- Personalized Outreach and copywriting in bulk in a button click.
- Automated follow-up messages and far more.
Pricing: 7 days free trial and Plans start from $49/per Month to $299/Month.
Hunter:
With the help of Hunter.io, We can search for emails in any company's domain. To do so, type their web address and select what information is needed to find email addresses associated with that particular site or service provider. The program will pull up all contact info on your computer screen.
Key features:
It allows the users to verify any email address and last discovery dates to double-check the emails.
Pricing: Begin from $49/Month to $399/Month.
Octoparse:
Octoparse automates the extraction of web data for lead generation, enabling users to collect information from websites seamlessly without any need for coding, making it a powerful web scraping software. This tool is ideal for businesses looking to gather actionable insights and generate leads by collecting vast amounts of data efficiently. Octoparse's user-friendly interface makes it accessible to non-technical users, providing a powerful solution for data-driven marketing strategies.
Key Features:
- Pre-built no code templates: Streamlines the process of collecting data from web pages with pre-built scraping templates
- Point-and-click interface: Simplifies the setup of custom scraping tasks without the need for coding.
- Scheduled scraping: Automates data collection at predetermined intervals.
- Data export options: Allows users to export gathered data in various formats such as Google Sheet, Excel, JSON, CSV, HTML, XML, and all kinds of databases
- Cloud extraction: 24/7 extracting data in the cloud. Up to 40 or more concurrent cloud processes to scale your task.
- Avoid anti-scraping: IP rotation, proxies, CAPTCHAs solving, etc.
- Handle complex sites: includes techniques such as infinite scrolling, pagination, hover, AJAX, etc.
Pricing: Offers a free version with basic features; paid plans with a 14-day free trial; offers enhanced capabilities and support.
Lusha:
Lusha is an email-finding tool that allows users to search through their inboxes accurately. The app can find emails from any browser, even when they're not in plain sight. Add Lushta to your internet browsing session for instant access and gather the emails of the prospects.
Key Features:
With Lusha, we can allocate and limit credits with ease. The system is designed so that all team members can get the needed credits based on their tasks.
Pricing: Begin from $59/Month.
Apollo.io:
Apollo is a new and innovative tool that guides users through the process of lead scraping. It helps us quickly find prospects, extract data from each contact, including name, email address, or phone number.
Key Features:
- Linkedin extension for lead scrapping.
- Integration with many email providers.
- No email sequence limit for Outreach
Pricing: Begin from $49
Aeroleads:
Aeroleads is one of the popular tools that help you find email addresses, contact numbers of prospects, and more. You can export data in bulk or transfer it directly to your favorite CRM with just one click.
Key features:
It finds business emails from LinkedIn or by uploading a name and company. Also, it finds 15 data points like full name, job title, location of work (if applicable), generic email addresses, etc.
Pricing: Begin from $49/Month and upto $499/Month.
Voila Nobert:
With Voila, We can quickly and easily find what our prospects are up to and their email addresses. All it takes is entering their first name or last name into this tool and gathering all the information from emails to designations.
Key features:
The tool will send the signal to the host server to verify the emails. And the input includes their first name, last initial and domain name, etc.
Pricing: Begin from $49/Month to $499/Month.
FindThatLead:
FindThatLead is a user-friendly tool to find email addresses. Once We have entered the company's domain or name, it will pull everyone associated with that name, displaying their percentage of email accuracy as well.
Key Feature:
The Find That Leads Chrome Plugin comes with a recently searched tab which allows us to check out the details any time, day or night without leaving the site.
Pricing: Begins from $49/Month to $399/Month.
Tools for Linkedin Prospecting
The road to success is lined with good decisions. The first of these begins by finding the customers' contact information on Linkedin and ends when we land a meeting or conversation that turns into an opportunity for growth, which ultimately leads to promotions at work.
Linkedin Sales Navigator:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the best option for marketers actively using LinkedIn. It provides access to advanced features and might help you tap into Linkedin's network, increase your pipeline of potential prospects or close more deals. But we recommend this only if you're already in the habit of prospecting on LinkedIn with other tools like automation software.
Key feature:
It gives us the real-time, personalized experience to find the next great leads. With an advanced filtering system and integration with Salesforce, it becomes even better.
Pricing: Begins from $79.99/Month.
Expandi:
Expandi is a cloud-based platform that makes it easy for growth hackers and marketers to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts. It is used on the computer anytime, irrespective of time. The dashboard in Expandi provides an overview of each account's stats and gives insight into things like demographics and location data which are important factors when managing social media marketing campaigns.
Key Feature:
It enables businesses to automate their Outreach and improve sales by providing webhooks and smart inboxes to boost customer engagement.
Pricing: Begins from $99/Month with the free trial.
Dux-Soup:
Dux-Soup, making it easy to connect and engage with the prospects on LinkedIn. We can also schedule posts in advance or instantly publish anything while you are away from your computer - all without leaving this page.
Key Features:
It primarily focuses on the main lead generation process and Outreach like, Management Prospects - Leave notes and directly tag them onto your target profiles to reach out automatically.
Pricing: Begins from $11.25/Month.
Adapt.io:
Adapt.io is an Email Finder, we can access it through the browser's menu bar, and by clicking it, we can collect all those pesky leads that are cluttering up our inboxes every day.
Key features:
We can use the exported file, and it will allow users access through their choice CRMs such as Salesforce, Zoho, etc.
Pricing: Available only after inquiry.
Linkport:
LinkPort is a Prospecting tool for LinkedIn contacts that works with both the standard and custom fields. It saves us hours of manual work by connecting Linkedin to an unlimited number of CRM systems, like Pipedrive or Zoho! Linkport also lets users import all the information they need in just one click.
Key Feature: Linkport gives us 2+ hours of extra productivity per week by quitting the switched feature and doing tedious tasks such as importing contacts.
Leadjet:
Leadjet is a productivity tool that helps you connect your CRM with LinkedIn. Connections, messages, and other data are synched between the two platforms, ultimately eliminating manual entry errors while enriching contacts in an individualized fashion via messaging templates developed by itself.
Key Feature:
Simplify your CRM efforts by editing directly from LinkedIn. You'll be automatically notified when outdated or duplicated information, saving you time and effort.
Pricing: Begin from $20/Month.
Tools to Find Prospects behavior:
The first step in finding the prospects is by becoming an expert on their behavior through research - what they do already and why it matters for future business decisions in the future. Here are the tools to find the customer's behavior.
Builtwith:
BuiltWith provides a detailed profile of the company's technologies, including information about all the frameworks they use and the time spent on each one. It also helps you understand customer behavior by identifying any pain points or opportunities for improvement to help grow their business.
Key features:
Builtwith offers a breakdown of when each plugin was installed and ended, as well as what type it is. With data, we can personalize the pitch.
Pricing: Begin from $299/Month.
Mention:
Mention is a tool that notifies us of any mention or development in the prospects' companies on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It is available in desktop plugins for internet browsers, Apple iOS devices like iPhones/ iPads, AND Android smartphones & tablets tools.
Key features:
It allows businesses to monitor mentions with the color of an alert they choose, which is a helpful tool for monitoring any impending negative feedback.
Pricing: Begin from $29/Month.
Tools for customer relationship management:
It is a must to have the right tools for any business, and customer relationship management (CRM) software can be one of them. With such powerful features as outreach automation, contact tracking, marketing analytics, etc. Here are a few list tools for hassle-free prospecting.
Hubspot:
HubSpot is the best CRM platform for businesses to connect with customers and prospects. The Marketing Hub tool provides marketers with one-stop automated marketing solutions that include email automation, content, etc., in an easy-to-use interface.
Key Feature:
Hubspot offers several integration options with other applications like Gmail, Jira, and more. The software also offers bundles to help your business grow.
Pricing: Begin from $45/Month.
Pipedrive:
Pipedrive is a powerful CRM tool that can help you manage your sales process from start to finish. It has the must-have features for successful performance in any industry, whether sending emails or making calls.
Key Features:
The platform enables us to plan and monitor the activities surrounding each of these deals and improve them through a connection system in one click.
Pricing: Begin from $12.50/Month with a free trial.
Tools for sales engagement:
Sales engagement is a competitive chess game where we get a hold of prospects' attention. If used strategically correctly, we can also have the power to be an unbeatable tool in any company's arsenal. Check out the list of tools.
Klenty:
Klenty is a Sales Engagement Tool that helps your sales teams send personalized emails at scale to the prospects and generate more leads. Using Klenty, we can reach out with tailored one-on-one messages, automate follow-up efforts, sync back email engagement data for easier campaign management, and A/B testing is available, which improves success rates.
Key Features:
Klenty is a customized email marketing platform with advanced features like cadence throttling, reputation management, and user-friendly interfaces for novice marketers.
Pricing: Begin from $35/Month.
Outreach.io:
Outreach will help you send out cold emails, track their progress and other sales automation features. It also aims to improve your productivity as a team by enabling efficient management of prospects through integration with CRM's for automating updates on the contact information in the ledgers.
Key Features: Modifying a single email in Outreach is easy. We can make as many changes to that one message without affecting other emails or sequences.
Pricing: Available only on inquiries.
Leadfuze:
LeadFuze is a popular tool for lead generation. It enables the user to get verified contact information, including email addresses and phone numbers, from the database and discover leads based on their industry niche or position within the company.
Key Features:
It helps us in the workflow and saves time by downloading all of its data in CSV or Google file formats for easy access.
Pricing: Begin from $132.30/Month.
Tools for Managing Multiple Email Accounts and Apps:
Shift:
Managing multiple email accounts, apps, and sales tools during prospecting can become chaotic. Shift browser simplifies this by bringing all your email accounts, apps, and tools into one unified platform. Whether you're sending cold emails, tracking prospects on LinkedIn, or switching between CRM and productivity apps, Shift helps you stay organized and streamline your workflow—ensuring you can focus more on engaging with prospects and less on toggling between different tools.
Key feature:
Shift organizes all the tools you need in one place with customizable Workspaces and integrates 1,500+ apps for streamlined management and focused browsing.
Pricing: There is a Free plan and an Advanced plan for $149/Year
Tools to find insights for better prospecting:
These days, the best way to find new clients is by using data. Data can give us insights into our prospects that will help guide future approaches and strategy, so it's worth taking advantage of all available tools. Sharing the list of tools to get data.
Ahrefs:
Ahrefs is the best tool for finding insights into prospects. It allows us to see what they're interested in, competitor's metrics, and more. It lets us get backlinks insight reports showing where all those strong natural links are coming from, so it's easy to build content or do Outreach because we know who our audience wants to read about.
Key Features:
It gives the top-performing pages from competitors, backlinks, and content gap.
Pricing: Begin from $99/Month.
Datanyze:
Datanyze is a data provider tool for agencies, which helps customers with account qualification and lead generation. They provide real-time insights based on your company's technology choices and buying signals that they exhibit. One prominent feature allows us to get alert if a prospect's technological environment has changed so there will be no missed opportunities.
Key feature:
It allows direct export of profiles through Google Chrome.
Pricing: Begin from $39/Month.
Hope the prospecting tools sales list will help find the ideal prospects. Here are some benefits of using the tools for prospecting.
Twitter User Tweets Scraper
Lobstr’s Twitter User Tweets Scraper helps save time and extract tweets from any Twitter user. This lead scraping tool can give you diverse information like statistics and media information. Scrap nearly 1000 tweets and get 25 attributes for each tweet. Plan your data collection beforehand with Twitter User Tweets Scraper.
Key Features:
The first feature of Twitter User Tweets Scraper worth mentioning is its budget-friendliness. Next, very important, are real-time notifications. Finally, there are various data export options, from CSV to Google Sheets.
Pricing: An available free plan and a premium starting at €50 per month.
The benefits of using sales prospecting tools:
The right sales prospecting tools can do magic in prospecting. It will increase the customer base and improve quality lead generation by narrowing down what industry they work in to make it easier.
- Increase the customer base and help in list building.
- By using verified leads, finding the right person is more, which helps reach the target audience.
- Speed up the whole sales prospecting process.
- Reduce the workload of marketers and help in productivity.
- Cold Outreach is made easy with automation and far more.
Conclusion:
Sales prospecting is a crucial aspect of any business. It is used to find new leads, get feedback from current customers, or gauge an idea's marketability before investing in it. Prospecting tools are a great way to grow your business by identifying new customers. We've shared the list of the best prospecting tools, from CRM's and email marketing software to sales automation systems and lead generation strategies. These resources can help you generate more leads to close more deals with less effort. Try the tools and acquire more customers.