Even if you have the perfect product, the perfect sales pitch, and the perfect closing technique, you can’t win ‘em all.
That’s because at its core, sales is a numbers game. So, all other things considered equal, the only way to increase your odds of success is to increase the number of leads you generate and the number of prospects you contact.
In other words, you need to get serious about prospecting – and that means taking advantage of the best tools and resources available to help you succeed.
How Prospecting Tools Help You Grow Your Business
Sales prospecting involves finding potential customers for your business. Whatever the specifics of your sales cycle might be, prospecting is always the starting point. Prospects enter the top of your sales funnel as leads and the right ones come out the other side as customers.
Using the right prospecting tools is critical to success in sales, because in order to close your next deal, you need someone to sell to. You need prospects.
That means you need a steady stream of new leads. This is something technology can help you accomplish.
That’s why we put together this list of prospecting tools that will keep your pipeline full of high-quality leads. We’ve included tools to help with everything from generating your list, verifying contact details, and uncovering insights about your prospects to generating outreach messages, navigating phone trees, and tracking prospect interactions.
Related reading: 19 Startup Sales Tools That Will Help You Hack Your Growth
11 Prospecting Tools for Building a Never-Ending Pipeline
1. Propeller CRM
A powerful CRM platform like Propeller allows you to take control of your entire sales pipeline – including the critical prospecting stage. The Propeller CRM email integration with Gmail allows you to streamline your communication with prospects, including outreach and follow-ups, so you can build momentum, rapport, and relationships with future customers.
Here’s the real magic, though: Propeller’s email prospecting software lets you run automated, multi-step email campaigns for prospecting at scale. You can simply load in a list of potential customers and send them a custom sequence of messages to help you convert them into prospects.
2. Apollo.io
This prospecting tool allows you to always make a great first impression, and great second impression, and third, and so on. Apollo analyzes your prospects and then generates custom emails and replies based on the data. You’ll receive recommendations for messages based on factors like the target’s persona, use case, and industry – which you can then split test and optimize to find the most effective sequence.
3. ConnectAndSell
With ConnectAndSell, you have access to your own personal army of virtual assistants who make cold calling a breeze. Their agents work as a team to navigate phone trees, IVRs, and gate keepers to get you a direct line to decision-makers. That means you can focus on selling and talking to actual prospects, instead of interacting with gatekeepers and voicemail systems.
4. Datanyze
Datanyze makes it easy to learn more about your potential leads before you contact them. It pulls data from a variety of sources, including social media and Alexa, to help you find out which tools and technology your leads are currently using. This gives you the advantage of knowing in advance if they’re already using a competitor, so you can tailor your approach accordingly.
5. Emissary
This isn’t your typical sales intelligence network. Created by a product leader at Google, David Hammer, Emissary is designed to get you insider information about your B2B prospects, leads, and customers. Emissary connects you with people who know the ins and outs of the companies you’re targeting. How? By putting you in touch with someone who actually worked there and can help you identify decision makers and your best path for entry.
6. Growbots
We like Growbots because it creates targeted lists for you. Growbots has access to a massive database of business contacts (over 200 million and counting!) and uses AI to pinpoint and contact specific decision makers who fit your ideal customer profile.
7. Hunter
If you need to get in touch with someone but don’t know how to reach them, there’s a good chance Hunter can help you out. That’s because Hunter makes it easy to find (almost) anyone’s email address. Simply enter the website of a business you want to connect with and Hunter will surface every email address linked to that domain. Signing up for free account gets you 100 no-strings-attached searches per month.
8. InsideSales.com
InsideSales provides technology for, you guessed it, inside sales reps. This automated dialing service makes it possible for your sales reps to contact more prospects, have more conversations, and ultimately, close more deals. It works to put you in touch with relevant leads and increases productivity by allowing each sales rep to dial 200-300 numbers per day.
9. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn might seem like an obvious choice to include in a list of sales tools, but it’s a serious player in the prospecting game. In fact, experts believe that LinkedIn helps generate the majority of all B2B leads online. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is particularly useful for uncovering data about your prospects, as it uses a prospecting algorithm designed to identify ideal targets and pinpoint decision makers.
10. LinkedIn Company Pages
Even if you don’t want to pay for a premium service like Sales Navigator, you can still use LinkedIn to follow company pages to stay up-to-date on any news, announcements, and content shared by your prospects. This provides a solid, reliable base of information you can use to quickly qualify potential leads and build rapport when you choose to reach out.
11. Prospect.io
This sales automation platform helps you overcome various prospecting challenges, from finding accurate contact details to researching your prospects to optimizing your outreach campaigns. Prospect.io starts by helping you build a list and verify that it’s rock solid. Not only does it help you find verified email addresses, but it also provides you with up-to-date details about your prospects, and even integrates with your CRM to automate drip campaigns and track results.
Using Prospecting Tools to Turn Sales Leads Into a Sales Pipeline
At the end of the day, prospecting is critical for your business.
Whether you’re trying to get your first 100 customers or you’re an established company just looking to get to the next level. You need to focus on the mechanics of how you turn leads or possible customers into actual prospects, opportunities, and--ultimately--customers!
Check out some of the other articles we’ve put together on sales prospecting to help you get the most out of your prospecting technology:
- Sales Prospecting: A Comprehensive Guide to Generating New Sales Opportunities
- 39 Battle-Tested Cold Email Subject Lines That Will Help You Get Anyone’s Attention
- Cold Email Sales Campaigns: The Complete Guide to Running & Scaling Cold Outreach Emails
Put Your Sales Prospecting on Autopilot
Propeller makes it super simple to transform a list of leads into a pipeline of sales opportunities. WIth multi-step email campaigns, you can create and customize email sequences and automate your entire sales prospecting strategy in just a few minutes.
