Prospecting tools are designed to help your team identify and reach out to their potential customers. They gather valuable information about who your audience is, what they like and dislike, and their contact details. This helps your team find the right people to sell to faster.
By finding better leads quicker, you’re going to take your conversion rates to a whole new level. But let’s start simple…
What are Prospecting Tools?
A sales prospecting tool is like a digital assistant for your sales team. It makes it easier for your reps to generate high-quality leads rather than manually hunt down emails, arrange meetings, and try to form some kind of mental hierarchy about who to approach first.
More than 40% of salespeople say that prospecting is the most challenging part of sales. Prospecting tools are designed to save your sales team time and energy by reducing the challenge and automating one of the most universally disliked tasks.
It’s worth noting that 9 out of 10 companies use more than two lead enrichment tools, indicating how popular prospecting tools are in 2024. And there’s a good reason for it. If you aren’t utilizing any prospecting tools yet, you may as well be in the stone age.
Different Types of Prospecting Tools
These tools can be split up into different sections, all with their own specific angle on lead generation.
Social media prospecting tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Hootsuite help your team to identify and connect with their prospects on platforms where they’re active. These are ideal if your brand has a big social following.
Email locators like Hunter.io will help you locate the email addresses of potential leads, so you won’t have to trawl through manually. These are great for saving time in the most boring part of scouring the web for emails.
Let’s not forget some of the best CRM systems include features to help you manage leads and track customers throughout the entire sales process too. Salesforce is one of the best. It’s something of a comprehensive suite of sales features, including great tools for prospecting.
If you need a better understanding of how prospecting works in 8 simple steps, check out the infographic below.
How Do Prospecting Tools Benefit Sales Teams?
Prospecting tools are invaluable assets to your sales team. They help you to find, engage with, and convert potential leads into customers, all while handling your repetitive day-to-day tasks like sending emails. Finally, they let your team concentrate on what they do best: making connections and closing deals.
Now let’s see exactly how these tools arm your team with the weapons to succeed whilst farming for prospects.
Better Efficiency
Wave goodbye to the old-school manual processes. Using the right prospecting tools helps your team find information such as contact details, purchasing history, email addresses, and more, without breaking a sweat. These tools simplify the prospecting process for your team, ensuring they reach more leads and are able to use their valuable time on more skill-based tasks.
Higher Quality Leads
By using prospecting tools, your team can get high-quality leads from the data and information that’s available to them. But what exactly are high-quality leads? Think of them as leads that have more potential to become customers from the interest they’ve previously shown in your brand.
The higher the quality of the lead, the less time you spend trying to rope them in.
Save Time and Energy
A study by Gartner shows that 61% of high-growth companies use AI-powered sales prospecting tools. These companies are high-growth for a reason. They know their sales reps’ time and energy is valuable and they don’t waste it on something AI can do in seconds.
Think of it this way: AI can create a high-quality list of leads tailored to your specific business and list them in order of likelihood to convert. AI can’t pick up the phone and make a compelling sales pitch. Why force your sales reps to suffer through both of these tasks when they can become a master of actually selling and streamline the lead-generation process?
Effective Follow-Ups
You will never drop the ball on follow-ups again. Prospecting tools schedule follow-ups, while also giving you a gentle reminder when it’s time to call your prospect. As well as giving you a nudge, prospecting tools keep track of your interactions so you can jump right back into where you left off on your follow-up and resume the conversation smoothly.
If you want to take your follow-ups to the next level, integrate your video conferencing tool with your sales platforms and/or CRM. You’ll get AI summaries, notes, timestamps, transcripts, and more synced instantly to your centralized data platform at the end of every sales call. This helps you remember exactly who each prospect is, what you both talked about, what their pain points are, etc. You just pick up like you remembered them all along and you’ll get an instant boost in trust and respect.
Authentic Interactions
Prospecting tools let you tailor your approach for each customer, making your interactions through different means of communication more purposeful and authentic. Personalized video in sales outreach can increase response rates by 80% so that alone is worth trying if you haven’t already. Most prospecting tools will facilitate this so that if it works, you can set it up automatically for future leads too.
By using prospecting tools and integrating them with other data sources, the information you have on the customer will be up-to-date, relevant, and really strike the core of who they are as a person. What are their ambitions? What do they want to achieve in life? How determined are they to get it? Knowing the answer to these questions is what’s going to help you engage with impact.
With this knowledge under your belt, you can start building authentic relationships that stand the test of time.
Identify Better Prospects
Prospects don’t always turn into customers. They may look legit until you dive deeper and find your plan pricing doesn’t fit into their budget. Maybe you’re not even talking to the decision-maker; there’s often five decision makers in any one sale.
The point is that these hurdles can seem to come out of nowhere. Leveraging AI-powered prospecting tools means you can identify these issues earlier and engage with leads that are more likely to make it through to the end.
Top 5 Prospecting Tools To Start With
There are plenty of good prospecting tools, but we’ve had to narrow it down to just five. If you want to check out what the sales leaders themselves have to say, you can check out SalesFeed’s video below.
1. Hubspot Sales Hub
G2 Rating : 4.4/5 from 11,197 reviews
Hubspot Sales Hub offers unique features that are perfect for boosting your pipeline. One standout feature is the “Sequences” tool which will automate all your sales outreach. Using the Sequences tool, you can create personalized and constant email sequences with automated follow-ups based on how your customer responds.
When you stay in touch with your leads more frequently, you’ll not only understand their situation better, but also increase your chances of closing deals. This improves the quality of your pipeline.
Another useful feature is “Sales Analytics”. Hubspot provides a suite of resources that help you customize data reports, forecasting, sales reports, and so on. The interface is powerful yet easy to use and easy to navigate, and you can maintain several customizable reports and dashboards. Using these customizable dashboards, you can make smarter decisions to improve your sales processes.
Hubspot is known for its wide range of integrations, empowering you to link almost any external data source to your prospecting tool (which also doubles up as a CRM). This is great for centralizing your prospecting data so that teams across your entire organization can access and add to it at any time.
Drawbacks
If your business is small, Hubspot Sales Hub’s smaller plans are limited. A few reviews have claimed that they are a bit too forceful in trying to get you to pay more to unlock better features. There’s also a large learning curve for your team, although the benefits outweigh the negatives, especially for larger businesses.
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
G2 Rating: 4.3/5 from 1871 Reviews
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a handy tool when you’re looking to find and connect with potential customers on LinkedIn who match your specific criteria. LinkedIn itself is a business-oriented social media site containing tons of different potential buyers. On its own, LinkedIn is a solid choice for prospecting, but tools that branch off from the site go that step further. That’s where LinkedIn Sales Nav comes in.
The “Lead Builder” tool offers your team an advanced search engine with filters that’ll help you select the cream of the crop from the leads generated for your specific criteria. This means you can identify higher-quality prospects and increase the volume and quality of your pipeline.
LinkedIn Sales Nav uses algorithms to present potential leads that match your ideal customer profile. These will analyze your activities and interactions with leads and provide you with personalized suggestions that expand your network with relevant contacts, leading to better engagement and more volume in the pipeline!
Drawbacks
Sometimes the search function will give you dud results that do not correlate with your search topic at all. This could land you in a spot of bother if you put all that time into researching only to reach out to the wrong lead.
For more info on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, check out John Lincoln’s overview below.
3. Outreach.io
G2 Rating: 4.3/5 from 3,395 Reviews
Outreach is a tool that helps your team reach out to prospects more efficiently by automating your workflows. It schedules follow-ups with prospects on your behalf, for example This empowers you to have regular personalized conversations with prospects during every stage of the buying process.
You can create personalized communication touchpoints and templates on Outreach that are tailored to each of your prospects. This helps you find and nurture the right leads effectively, building relationships in the process, and increasing your chances of turning them into paying customers.
Another way to add more volume to your pipeline is by using Outreach’s analytics and AI-reporting capabilities. These take a deeper look into your metrics such as email open, conversion, and response rates. By doing this, you can see if your tailored emails or marketing ploys are working, and if not, where you have to shift your tactics to improve them.
Drawbacks
Outreach is a complex tool and can be pretty difficult to learn if you’re not already familiar with prospecting tools. There’s also a notable lack of transparency regarding costs and you must request pricing if you want specific figures.
“We want [sales teams] to work smarter, not harder, and Outreach really allows them to do that."
4. Dealfront
G2 Rating: 4.3/5 from 799 reviews
Dealfront, formerly known as Leadfeeder, can be a helpful tool for your team to use so they can track who’s visited your website and help you pinpoint potential leads. It stands out for its ability to track website visitors anonymously and gain better insight into their behaviors. By doing this, Dealfront assists you in identifying prospects based on their interactions with your website and then helps you tailor your outreach to make more of a personal impact.
Dealfront offers a lead-scoring feature that assigns points to each lead based on your chosen criteria. It will prioritize the highest-scoring prospects for you to channel your efforts. It’s a great way to evaluate potential prospects through website engagement and it increases the likelihood of converting your lead. This ultimately increases the quality of your sales pipeline as the prospects prioritized have been hand-picked by AI.
In addition to all these features, you can also set up email alerts based on specified criteria to let you know when a certain company visits your website. It’s extremely user-friendly and you don’t have to be a tech whizz to use it.
Drawbacks
Dealfront relies heavily on existing website traffic which may limit the overall effectiveness for sales teams with low traffic or those that rely on outbound prospecting. You may also feel that, compared to other tools, it lacks lead enrichment features that gather data such as contact details, job role, and industry, at a similar cost. If you want a quote for your business, you need to request the pricing as it’s not available on the website.
“My experience with Leadfeeder by Dealfront has been incredible. I trust the data, and I trust the people behind the data. I've told everyone I know about what it's done for my company, personally, and they've all stepped up to see if it can help them too!”
5. ZoomInfo Sales
G2 Rating: 4.4/5 from 8211 reviews
ZoomInfo is a prospecting database tool that will help you boost your pipeline volume and quality due to the massive database of accurate contacts and companies that you have access to. This ensures that you connect to the right people at the right time.
This tool offers advanced search filters that help you narrow down the criteria based on where the leads are from, the industry they’re in, their job title, and the size of their company. Being selective with leads will improve the quality of your pipeline and provide you with a richer source of potential customers.
Another great feature to leverage is the way Zoominfo sends you real-time alerts that let you know when a prospect you’ve been tracking has been involved in any significant activities that could affect your chances of converting them. Things such as budgeting announcements, or if the prospect is leaving the company, can all affect potential deals. Either way, you want to be kept in the loop.
Drawbacks
Zoominfo does have a few drawbacks, however. The free plan is limited to just ten contacts and they don’t exactly encourage you to purchase the premium packages when they hide the pricing. Additionally, the interface isn’t super clear and it can be clunky, which doesn’t help when you’re dealing with multiple leads at the same time.
Having said that, they seem to make a lot of their customers very happy. Just take a look at KeepTruckin’s Head of Sales Development talk about the success they’ve had with ZoomInfo.
Take Your Prospecting To The Next Level
Prospecting tools are essential for connecting you with the very best prospects. They’re the leading way to enrich the quality and volume of your pipeline, giving you complete access to massive customer databases. Identify the most promising leads without breaking a sweat, and automate your workflows so your sales reps can focus their energy on what counts: selling.
