Inbound marketing is essential for building brand awareness and authority. It casts a wide net, attracting many prospects that match your ideal customer profile. However, since the content is generalized, the customer journey takes a longer route.
Many businesses feel stuck in this cycle of spending on inbound marketing and lead nurturing, but not having enough leads in their sales pipelines to grow. That’s where outbound sales come in. You still cast a wide net, but everything is tailored to the individual now.
You need the right sales outreach tool to succeed in any outbound sales campaign. We’re here to help you find one that fits your budget, needs, and goals. Let’s get started.
How to Choose a Sales Outreach Tool: Must-Have Features
All great sales outreach tools have the same fundamental features, like email automation, bulk sending, deliverability, and analytics. When choosing one, make sure it has the fundamentals mentioned and the following must-have features:
Scalability Features
You’re investing both money and time when choosing a sales outreach tool. What you don’t want to happen is getting familiar with the tool and realizing that you can’t scale campaigns.
That leads to finding another tool that fits your current needs and repeating the learning process. Instead, choose a tool with all the features required to help you scale sustainably.
How many emails does the tool allow you to send per month? How many sending accounts can you add for each payment tier? How many leads can you add to your outbound campaigns?
Most sales outreach tools require paying extra for new sending accounts and leads, so this should be considered when looking at pricing.
Pricing
Your budget ultimately decides which tool you should use. Don’t let hidden costs surprise you. Pricing should clearly state any additional fees for email warmups, sending volume, new domains, and leads.
With Instantly, you don’t have to worry about hidden fees. Our Growth plan, perfect for small businesses, lets you add unlimited email accounts and run unlimited warmups, both essential for sustainably scaling cold email campaigns—all without additional costs.
Personalization Features
First and company name inserts are the bare minimum. You need personalization that brings value and aligns unique selling propositions (USPs) to prospect needs.
For example, let’s say that your lead list has a column for “company description.” Instantly can use that data to create “pain points” with AI trained on the best-performing sales emails.
This feature will then add another column for each lead's pain points. You can use this column as a custom variable for all emails you send.
When emails are personalized, you significantly reduce the risk of landing in spam and improve the chances of getting replies from high-value prospects.
Lead Management Features
Prospects want different things, depending on where they are in the sales pipeline. The best way to deliver content that meets these needs is through lead management.
Choose a tool with lead management features like a centralized inbox or built-in CRM. Instantly has both. Our Dealflow CRM centralizes all inboxes, letting you track all prospect engagement, whether email, calls, or SMS.
Dealflow also has an AI sales assistant that identifies key insights into prospect needs based on lead data to help you craft relevant and personalized emails. Our AI assistant can also automate replies to prospects based on context, ensuring timely, accurate, and valuable responses.
Automation Features
Lead generation, prospect research, and outreach campaign building take time. Prospecting alone takes hours daily, especially if you want in-depth personalization.
Choose a tool to automate the outreach process. Ensure the tool can automate email sequences, copywriting, and personalization without appearing robotic.
You get all these in just a few clicks with Instantly’s new AI Sequence Generator. It’s a feature that can create entire email sequences that are personalized and centered around your USPs.
It automates everything from the first cold email to the last opt-out email. The AI Sequence Generator even adds custom variables and spintax to improve deliverability and personalization.
7 Best Sales Outreach Tools To Try This 2024
The time it takes to research and test sales outreach tools isn’t a luxury all business owners have. To help you with the process, we’ve curated a list of the seven best sales outreach tools with all the features needed to help you scale and grow your business.
Instantly.ai
Instantly is a cold sales outreach tool that knows what it takes to succeed in cold email. We don’t just talk about it—we embed these fundamentals in our features, tools, and goals. Cold email fundamentals include technical setups, deliverability, personalization, and automation. You get all of these with Instantly.
If you don’t know how to set up domains for cold email, Instantly offers a done-for-you (DFY) service that includes all technical setups, such as DMARC, DKIM, SPF, and Forwarding. After setting up all the domains, you can’t use them for cold emails just yet. They have to be warmed up to improve deliverability. Instantly automates this for you for no additional cost.
After two to three weeks of warmups, you’ll be ready to launch your first cold email campaign with Instantly. Create a new campaign and add leads. Remember to validate leads first. Instantly offers bulk email validation, no more switching apps. To streamline the process, use B2B Lead Finder to find pre-validated leads that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Key features:
- AI Sequence Generator
- Automated and customized personalization
- Built-in CRM and AI inbox manager
- Unlimited warmups and sending accounts
- In-depth analytics and automated A/B testing
Pricing (paid annually):
- Growth: $30/mo. 1,000 contacts and 5,000 emails.
- Hypergrowth: $77.6/mo. 25,000 contacts and 125,000 emails. Unibox and A/Z testing.
- Lightspeed: $286.3/mo. 100,000 contacts and 500,000 emails.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing. Includes private deliverability network.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot is one of the best tools for nurturing warm leads, customers, and newsletter subscribers. It can use lead data from its Smart CRM to gather insights and trends to help you engage the right leads at the right time.
Think of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub as an outreach automation tool built on top of a CRM. You can automate personalization, pull lead data from several sources, and track key campaign metrics through in-depth analytics.
HubSpot has a free plan with one email marketing automation, standard tools, and basic features. Their Starter plan has advanced outreach automation but features like A/B testing, product recommendations, and dynamic personalization are locked in the Professional plan.
Key Features:
- Automated workflows, chatbots, and email triggers.
- Marketing automation for social media and email.
- AI-powered CRM
- Facebook Messenger Integrations
- Dynamic personalization
Pricing:
- Free: Includes 2,000 emails monthly and basic features
- Starter: $20/mo. 5x contact tier email sending limit. Email automation
- Professional: $890/mo. 10x contact tier email sending limit. Advanced automation.
- Enterprise: $3,600/mo. 20x contact tier email sending limit. Unlimited automation.
Cirrus Insight
Cirrus Insight is a must-try if you’re already using Salesforce as a CRM and want to be more productive with outreach. It’s a Gmail and Outlook plugin that integrates with Salesforce.
Cirrus transforms your Gmail or Outlook into an outreach platform that can sync emails to Salesforce, track email metrics, schedule calls, and automate the sales outreach process.
Some key automation features of Cirrus include bulk segmented list sending, personalization, and calendar schedule reminders. If you’re not an expert in email copywriting, Cirrus has dozens of pre-written email templates you can personalize.
Key Features:
- Smart Follow-up (Prioritizes follow-ups based on buyer signals)
- Email analytics
- Website visitor tracking
- Automated invites
- Salesforce integrations
Pricing:
- Salesforce Sync: $14/mo. Includes personalized meeting pages and thread-based links.
- Pro: $21/mo. Includes web conferencing integrations and custom meeting types.
- Expert: $49/mo. Includes email automation, personalized templates, and buyer signals.
Skylead
If you’re prospecting and doing outreach on LinkedIn and email marketing, Skylead is the tool for you. It can pull lead info from LinkedIn Premium, Sales Nav, and Recruiter accounts.
What’s great about Skylead is that it combines LinkedIn and email for multichannel outreach. You can even create smart sequences that trigger based on if/else conditions.
That means you can create sales cadences that leverage InMail and email. Each email can then be personalized using native images and GIFs. Just keep in mind the effects of Plain Text vs HTML emails.
Skylead can integrate with dozens of CRMs via webhooks or API. Sales reps can also run A/B testing, randomized email schedules, and assign dedicated domain IP addresses.
Key Features:
- Email automation
- LinkedIn and email multichannel outreach
- A/B testing email elements
- 800 Free InMails
- Image and GIF personalization
Pricing:
- All-in-one: $100/mo. Email and LinkedIn automation. 100,000 emails monthly.
- White Label: Custom pricing and features.
Yesware
Yesware is a sales outreach tool that integrates with Gmail and Outlook. You can also integrate Sales Navigator into your Yesware account for multichannel outreach campaigns.
This allows you to send connection requests and InMails. These won’t be done automatically. Instead, you get reminded when to connect based on where leads are in your pipelines.
Yesware can do automated email marketing and personalization. Like Instantly, Yesware uses dynamic fields for personalization like {{firstname}}. However, it doesn’t have customizable variables.
Key Features:
- LinkedIn and Salesforce integrations
- Email tracking
- Sales activity reporting and analytics
- Email and phone support
- Meeting scheduler
Pricing:
- Free: Basic features and only single-channel outreach
- Pro: $15/mo. Unlimited email tracking, engagement reports, and sales activity analytics
- Premium $35/mo. Unlimited campaigns and removed Yesware branding
- Enterprise $65/mo. Salesforce integrations and bulk contact imports
- Custom: Customized plan with advanced features
LeadConnect
LinkedIn is among the best platforms for prospecting active leads that fit your ideal customer profiles. LeadConnect makes prospecting and outreach on LinkedIn so much easier.
It’s a Chrome extension that integrates with LinkedIn Basic and Sales Navigator accounts. You can pull leads from LinkedIn’s search tool or upload your own lead list for outreach.
LeadConnect can send up to 6 automated follow-up messages. However, it’s limited to only connection requests and LinkedIn messages, not InMail.
Key Features:
- LinkedIn Sales Nav and LinkedIn Premium integrations
- LinkedIn personalized follow-up automation
- Response and acceptance tracking
- Integrations with Hubspot, Hunter, and FindthatLead
Pricing:
- Free Forever: Includes 5 invites and 15 message credits daily.
- Professional: $25.95/mo. 30 invites and 90 message credits daily.
- Grow: $45.95/mo. 60 invites and 180 message credits daily.
- Ultimate: $ 85.95/mo. 100 invites and 300 message credits daily.
Expandi.io
Expandi is what you get when you combine fundamentals from cold email outreach and apply them to LinkedIn prospecting and outreach. You can hyper-personalize messages, add sequence automation, and include multiple touchpoints before the first cold message.
Expandi lets you go past LinkedIn’s connection limits while avoiding restrictions by humanizing the automated aspects of LinkedIn outreach. You can scrape data from LinkedIn groups, webinars, events, and posts and use that data for personalization.
What’s most impressive about Expandi are its LinkedIn deliverability features. It humanizes the outreach schedule, provides a dedicated IP address based on your country, and warms up your LinkedIn account before reaching out to prospects.
Key Features:
- Integrations with email service providers like Gmail and Outlook
- Advanced LinkedIn scraping
- CRM integrations via webhooks
- Multi-touchpoint engagement on LinkedIn
- Omnichannel outreach with LinkedIn messaging + email follow-ups
Pricing:
- Business: $99/mo. Advanced sequence builder and dynamic personalization.
- Custom: Tailored pricing. Enterprise features.
Key Takeaways
Sales outreach tools connect you to prospects who get the most value from your products or services. But before choosing a tool, consider pricing and scalability, personalization, lead management, and automation features. Here are the seven tools we recommend:
- Instantly.ai is the best tool for cold email outreach, AI-powered lead management, and dynamic personalization.
- Yesware and Cirrus Insights leverage Salesforce integrations to transform ESPs like Gmail and Outlook into a sales automation platform.
- LeadConnect and Expandi automate LinkedIn prospecting and outreach and break sending limits within the platform.
- Skylead combines LinkedIn outreach with email follow-ups for multichannel sales outreach.
- HubSpot Marketing Hub is an outreach tool built on top of a CRM that’s best for reaching out and nurturing warm leads.
If you’re focusing on sustainable and scalable cold sales outreach, Instantly is the best tool on the market. Try it out today and start automating sales outreach at scale.
