Sales prospecting tools are the right-hand man of the salesperson. They’re designed to make life easier. Through features such as automation, they make the sales prospecting process more streamlined, and optimized.
The tools don’t come in a one-size-fits-all package. Some aim to service the entire sales prospecting process, while others focus on a more nuanced, niche aspect of it. Only you and your team know what tool best suits your needs. It starts by asking yourself some probing questions. What problem do you want to solve? Where are there gaps in your sales prospecting process?
Familiarize yourself with the following list, and you’ll no doubt find one or two that serve the perfect purpose. By the end of your reading, you might even have a few options to consider. In this article you'll learn:
- Different forms of leads
- Turning a lead into a prospect
- Nurturing a prospect into a sale
Why Use a Sales Prospecting Tool?
You could do a great deal of the sales prospecting process manually, but we live in 2024. Why make your life difficult and admin work heavy when you could automate a great deal of it?
Your Lead Quality Will Improve
Some of the tools on this list will use advanced filtering techniques to ensure you receive only the most likely leads for qualification. Some of the tools may even complete some qualifications for you. That means when a collection of leads lands on the sales team’s desk, they stand a high chance of making contact and building an engaged conversation.
Your Team’s Efficiency Increases
Wasting time on low-quality leads is one of the driving factors that reduces sales team efficiency. By filtering and delivering only the best leads, the sales prospecting process is far more efficient. There are also tools that automate part of the search process and even the outreach.
Your Activities Can Scale
Manual sales prospecting has a ceiling. There are only so many hours in the day. Sales prospecting tools help you to work at scale. They remove administrative tasks and allow the team to focus on nurturing and closing. There are also many tools that facilitate lead finding, meaning you’re never wanting for a lead to engage with.
Our Choice of Sales Prospecting Tools
Instantly
Instantly delivers sales prospecting tools in two core ways. Lead finding and email marketing.
Starting with the B2B lead finder. The intuitive system holds an enormous database of over 160 million potential contacts. One of the best features is that it has a seamless connection to the email marketing platform. That removes the need to take new leads and add them to a separate email platform.
The searching itself is made considerably easier thanks to the integration of AI. Not only is searching more efficient but once you find a lead that you know suits your purposes, then you can use the lookalike feature to find more.
Now that your list is full of potential prospects add them to your automated email campaign and wait for their responses.
The email marketing side of Instantly is incredibly powerful. It starts with ensuring your deliverability is as good as it possibly can be. The account warmup, powered by AI, ensures your emails hit the inbox time and time again.
Once the campaign is underway, let Instantly manage your follow-up for you through an automated email follow-up strategy. Set up an intuitive set of sequences, and you can be sure your leads are carefully nurtured on your behalf. Then, when responses begin to roll in, your sales team can take over.
Pricing Tiers:
Growth: $37/month
Hypergrowth: $97/month
Leads
Growth leads: $47/month
Hypergrowth: $197/month
Light Speed: $492/month
Free Trial: Available for both tiers.
G2 Rating: 4.9 Stars from 1,918 reviews.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn has arguably the biggest network of B2B contacts available on the planet. Given a vast database, it’s no surprise that they’ve built a lead platform.
The tool is meant to connect you with leads so your sales team can reach out and convert them to prospects. You can filter the database using advanced search tools. These include filters for company size, organizational position, and recent movers.
Within the dashboard, you can create lists, but there are limited integrations out of the box. Many salespeople get around this by using third-party software such as Zapier. That said, it does provide useful access to LinkedIn features such as LinkedIn Mail.
Pricing Tiers:
Pricing is not openly available for LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can start a free trial at any of their levels: Core, Advanced, and Advanced Plus.
G2 Rating: 4.3 Stars from 1,871 reviews.
Apollo
Apollo touts itself as an all-in-one sales platform that covers a lot of ground. Starting with the lead search function, you’re able to advanced search functions to find a vast number of leads. A nice feature is the option to send personalized emails directly from the search results.
Once you find potential leads, users are able to access a significant amount of information on individual contacts. That includes lead scores and signals based on customer fit and behavioral fit linked to your account.
Beyond the lead-finding side of the tool, you can also book meetings, follow the progress in a pipeline, and even receive conversation intelligence based on AI-generated transcripts.
Pricing Tiers:
Leads
Free: $0
Basic: $59/month
Professional: $99/month
Organization: $149/month
Free Trial: While the entry tier is completely free, free trials are also available for 14 days at the basic and professional tiers.
G2 Rating: 4.8 Stars from 6,898 reviews.
Crunchbase
Crunchbase aims to make lead finding and sales prospecting efficient. It also helps with outreach. Using their filtering system, you can search under options such as the last type of funding a company received. This allows you to match your buyer persona as closely as possible, increasing the chance you’ll convert them.
Once you’ve selected leads and are ready to connect, you can reach out through the platform, or you can use the integrations to push them to your CRM. Popular integrations include software such as Salesforce.
Pricing Tiers:
Leads
Starter: $29/month paid annually.
Pro: $49/month paid annually.
Enterprise: Pricing available on request
Free Trial: Free trials are available for both starter and pro tiers.
G2 Rating: 4.5 Stars from 340 reviews.
Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is a different take on sales prospecting tools than we’ve covered here before. This is a script that is embedded into your website so that you can both identify visitors and also monitor the actions that they take while on it.
Not only do you know when someone visits your website, but you even get to know what business they’re from. This level of information allows for a previously unthought-of level of personalization detail.
The tool also keeps information in an intuitive database that can then be segmented, allowing you to score and qualify visitors. Then, using the Leadfeeder Contacts section of the tool, you can compare the activity with a database of contacts at those companies.
Rather than facilitating outreach within the platform, Leadfeeder then (as the name suggests) feeds leads into your connected CRM. Primary integrations include HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Zoho.
Pricing Tiers:
Leads
Free: $0/month
Paid: $165/month
It’s worth noting that the free tier allows for up to 100 identified companies each month. Beyond that, the paid tier is the only option.
Free Trial: Users can either use the free tier or select a free trial of the paid version.
G2 Rating: 4.3 Stars from 799 reviews.
Key Takeaways
Embedding any of these sales prospecting tools into your business will have a dramatic impact. You’ll quickly find that your sales prospecting process is more efficient, delivers higher-quality prospects, and allows your business to work at scale. These may be our favourite tools, but there are many more out there.
- Ensure that you take time to understand the specific requirements of your business. Every tool offers a solution in a slightly different way.
- Consider your current tech stack when selecting a tool. Integration needs to be straightforward.
- Be sure that you have a robust CRM in place to track your sales prospecting efforts.
You’ve successfully found a whole host of leads that can be fed into a sales prospecting process. What next? It’s time for you to reach out to them and turn them into prospects. Instantly makes outreach a breeze. It’ll even automate your follow-up, making the process even more efficient. Interested? Get started today.
