Table of contents:
- What Tools Do I Need for B2B Sales Prospecting and Why?
- The Best Sales Prospecting Tools to Build a Prospect List
- Conclusion
Sales prospecting is one of the most challenging tasks — say 44% of sales reps who give up on new prospects after one follow-up call. Sales prospecting demands a lot of research about the ideal prospect and follow-up. After all, it’s not common to have your prospects knocking on your door to buy your product. Instead, sales reps spend countless hours looking for potential customers and convincing them that they should.
How do they achieve this without being overwhelmed by the tasks at hand? One way is through automation; 72.4% of businesses have already shown interest in purchasing a sales development technology. Sales prospecting apps enable you to search for your ideal prospects, manage your leads, schedule meetings, send email campaigns, and more.
But thanks to the thriving sales software market, there are so many different sales prospecting apps available that it can be difficult to choose the right one for your business.
That brings us back to the difficulty of sales prospecting. But don’t worry! This article highlights the top 10 must-have sales prospecting apps for 2022.
What Tools Do I Need for B2B Sales Prospecting and Why?
The sales rep’s job is to find potential customers. There’s limited time to sift through messy databases or hunt down individual contact information. Unfortunately, many sales reps still look for the closest piece of paper and start jotting down notes whenever an opportunity presents itself.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that difficult. There are plenty of sales prospecting software programs out there. These tools can help streamline your prospecting efforts, help you find the hidden leads, and even organize your entire pipeline so that every interaction with a prospect is more productive.
Reporting and Lead Scoring Tools
Reporting and lead scoring can help you see where you’re losing opportunities and where you could be closing deals but aren’t. If you want to start to understand what your sales process looks like, you can use reporting and lead scoring tools to get a better picture of:
- Where your sales cycle is taking the most time
- Where your sales reps are finding the most resistance
- Where you’re leaving leads on the table by not following up.
In addition, lead scoring can provide deeper insights into the value of each individual lead, so that you’re sure about how much time to invest in each one. Many B2B sales prospecting software platforms will allow you to score leads based on their demographics, online behaviour, and other essential metrics. Track these metrics to understand the value of each lead better.
For example, if there’s a prospect who pushes you away every time you try to engage with them, your sales reporting and lead scoring tool can help you understand that this is not a good fit for your business. You should move on and focus on other leads that are more likely to buy (have a higher score).
A CRM That Syncs With Your Email and Calendar
Your CRM is the hub of your outreach and sales efforts. So, it makes sense that you should use one that connects with your email and calendar. That way, whenever you set up a new meeting or outreach opportunity, you can plug it directly into your CRM and have everything organized for you.
Pipedrive, for example, is one of the most popular CRMs out there, and it also integrates with your email tools and calendar. The point is, whatever CRM you choose, be sure to find one that works well with your existing sales tools and that can integrate with your calendar and email so that you don’t have to switch back and forth between tools.
Lead Tracking/Management Tool
You don’t want to track your leads manually – that’s too time-consuming and inefficient. Instead, you can use a lead tracking/management tool like Hubspot’s lead tracking software to keep track of and manage your leads. Such tools will help you monitor your freshly acquired prospects and assign them to better-qualified team members.
They’ll also help you track the status of each lead so you know which ones are moving along quickly and which ones need a bit more attention. Your lead tracking system can also take your sales efforts to the next level with automated emails. Send automated emails to your prospects whenever they move on to the next stage of the sales process.
For example, you can craft an automated welcome email that goes out whenever a new prospect enters your pipeline.
The Best Sales Prospecting Tools to Build a Prospect List
With so many tools available to help streamline the sales process, staying on top of what works best can be a challenge. Each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses, which is why you need to have a little knowledge about which ones are right for you, your team, and your company at large.
Sales Prospecting Tools to Find Contact Details
When it comes to sales prospecting, you have a lot of options. You can meet people in person, call them on the phone, or even send them an email. In today’s digital age, however, the best way to find sales prospects is by using a variety of tools that make searching for their contact details as easy as possible.
There are many different ways to get someone’s contact details and other information about them without ever having to meet them in person or call them directly. And that’s where sales prospecting tools to find contact details excel.
1. Clearbit
Clearbit is a sales prospecting tool that makes finding potential customers faster and more accurate than ever before. It’s the perfect solution for marketers and salespeople who want to generate lists of prospects from frequent visitors to their websites.
What’s more, Clearbit automatically notifies your team when the target prospect engages with key pages on your website. You can also boost engagement rates with personalized emails, provided you have a clear picture of contacts that match your buyer persona (which you’ll get from the fresh company and contact data supplied by Clearbit).
2. Vainu
Vainu is a simple, easy-to-use sales prospecting platform. You can find your customers wherever they are, whether that’s on the web, on social media, or in your target company. Vainu offers detailed business information from vast public and private sources so that you’ll always have fresh updates about the company’s news and changes.
Vainu also monitors your target account, with over 100 company filters to keep you informed on what’s happening and also keep your CRM updated and free from errors. Lastly, this sales prospecting tool allows your sales team to automate tasks such as adding or updating data fields on your workflows.
Sales Prospecting Tools for Qualified Prospects
Outbound calls and sending tons of cold emails in hopes that some will stick in the prospect’s mind is nowadays inefficient. While these were all helpful tactics in the past, they’re not enough on their own to result in a high number of closed deals today.
That’s partly because targeting unqualified leads with cold emails and calls can eat up valuable time and resources while providing little return on investment. Here are two sales prospecting tools for qualified leads:
3. Mention
Mention is a complete social monitoring and analytics platform that helps you easily track, manage, and measure all of your online conversations. It scans for important conversations about your brand on the web and locates trends on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Mention also monitors over 1 billion sources of information, and filters the results by source, country, or language. This way, you can build your audience by connecting with customers across social platforms and other web resources.