One of the most common complaints from sales teams is about the volume of administrative tasks they have to deal with everyday. In fact, salespeople spend only a third of their day selling. They spend most of the day on documenting notes, researching prospects, entering data into the CRM (or worse, spreadsheets), and email outreach. One of the best sales hacks to avoid mundane tasks and boost productivity is to deploy sales prospecting tools.
Tools for each stage of sales prospecting
Building your database
One of the first steps in sales prospecting is to build a strong database with accurate information about prospects. The following sales prospecting tools help you collect data about prospects.
1. DiscoverOrg – For sales teams looking for a GDPR compliant-contact finder, DiscoverOrg fits the bill. This sales prospecting tool helps your team populate the prospect database with targeted B2B sales lead lists.
2. Zoominfo – This sales prospecting tool helps estimate the size of the target market, keep track of a company’s possible investments, and provide the contact information of prospects. Zoominfo provides your salespeople a chance to write to the right people at the right time and hit revenue goals.
3. Hunter.io – This tool can help your salespeople find the email address of any prospect in a particular company. Hunter.io also pulls out social profile information to give you more context about the prospects.
4. Voila norbert – This sales prospecting tool, too, pulls out the email addresses of prospects based on the company they are working in. Voila helps your salespeople save the contact information of prospects in a bulk list that can be exported.
5. Lusha – A contact number finder like Lusha can be used by sales teams for getting personal contact details—email addresses and phone numbers—of prospects from their social media profiles. It also has a Chrome plug-in, so when a salesperson visits a prospect’s profile on Linkedin, the tool will try to find their phone number and email address.
6. i4b – This B2B sales prospecting tool can help your sales team put together contact names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of prospects. The tool is GDPR-compliant, so it makes the lives of your salespeople who are targeting the EU region easier.
Monitoring
It’s important to stay on track with industry developments when you are targeting a prospect. There are several sales prospecting tools that can help your salespeople expand their knowledge and know when to approach a prospect.
7. Mention: Mention is a social listening tool that tracks online news about a company or an account you are targeting. Your salespeople can keep track of brand mentions, industry news and influencers in a particular space.
8. Datanyze – This competition tracker monitors the internet to help your salespeople find and reach your prospects when they are looking to buy a particular technology or have a budget allocated for it.
9. Google alerts – Once you set a Google alert for a particular category, the latest news in that sector will be mailed to your team on a frequency you set. This will keep your team up-to-date with information about each industry.
Organizing and Collaborating
When salespeople are reaching out to multiple prospects, their notes and insights are written on multiple notepads and may get lost in transit. These sales prospecting tools can help you organize the notes scribbled during sales calls and make them more consumable.
10. Evernote – Keeping track of all the sales calls, emails and meeting reminders can get tedious. Evernote helps organize the various notes and action items salespeople jot down throughout the day.
11. Notion – Notion allows salespeople to take notes and collaborate on projects with other team members. While on a sales call, your team can keep track of pain points, prospect details, and action items.
Editing
While your sales team may be eager to reach out to prospects, sending the right message across matters more. These editing tools will help your sales team send error-free emails and get leads to move down the sales funnel.
12. Hemingway – Unless every one of your sales reps is a grammar nazi, it would be impossible to check if every email to be sent is error-free. Shabby emails dent the perception of your company/product. Hemingway corrects common grammatical mistakes and improves the readability of the sales prospecting emails.
13. Grammarly – One of the most widely used apps for ensuring error-free content, Grammarly can be used by sales reps to edit presentations, sales emails and other content.
CRM
A CRM software is the central hub to organize all the details of your prospects. Sales prospecting tools such as for data monitoring, managing phone numbers and email addresses, and document management are the spokes connected to that hub. This hub-and-spoke model makes it easy for your entire team to track the status of every customer relationship.
14. Freshsales – While your sales team uses multiple sales prospecting tools everyday to get more leads in the funnel, an all-encompassing CRM like Freshsales can help them assemble all pieces of the block. Freshsales provides a clear 360 degree view of your customers—conversations, deals (open, won or lost), touchpoints with your company, and the tasks and appointments scheduled with them.With an intuitive CRM, your sales team can also forecast sales with a deal pipeline, make calls from within the CRM, set up sales sequences, engage in contextual conversations, and integrate with other sales prospecting tools.
15. Insightly – Insightly is a comprehensive sales prospecting tool for multilevel organizations. It comes with a built-in project management and delivery software that can help you manage your projects and tasks better.
16. Hubspot – Hubspot CRM assigns and tracks deals, helps monitor the performance of your salespeople, and offers a single dashboard where all team members can keep track of the company’s activities. It can be integrated with supporting tools to make it more robust.
Outreach
Once sales teams get the contact details of prospects, and research and understand their requirements, they have to reach out to the prospects through various mediums. These are a few sales prospecting tools to engage with prospects:
17. Linkedin Sales Navigator – This tool allows you to seamlessly connect with prospects on LinkedIn, follow companies from different regions, and subscribe to updates from different companies and leads on your feed. This will ultimately help salespeople use it as conversation starter during outreach. For instance, if a lead you are following gets a promotion, then this presents an opportunity for your salespeople to get in touch with them.
18. Textmagic – This tool enables business text-messaging service for sending messages and planning SMS campaigns for your sales teams.
19. Mailshake – Mailshake is a simple email outreach tool. With it, your sales team can create email templates, send bulk emails, automate follow-ups, and track email metrics.
20. Lemlist – Emailing a prospect for the first time can be a challenge when you know very little about them, but your sales team needs to make a good impression and hit the ground running. Lemlist is one of the mailshake alternatives for cold email outreach and helps your sales teams break the ice in cold emails by allowing them to generate personalized images and videos.
21. Yesware – Replying to a prospect quickly is a priority for any sales team. Yesware is an inbox productivity platform that enables your sales team to work smarter with data-driven insights and tools such as email campaigns, email tracking and templates.
22. Outreach – This sales engagement tool can help efficiently engage prospects to drive more pipeline and close more deals.
Time management
Time is money in sales. Effective utilization of time is key in converting prospects and pushing out sales quotes. Here are some tools that can help your salespeople manage their time efficiently:
23. Discern – A chunk of a salesperson’s time is spent on deciding what product to sell to a prospect. Discern guides salespeople on the appropriate products and services to sell to each prospect and quickly identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
24. PandaDoc – Documentation can be a pain when you have to customize and push out sales quotes and presentations to various prospects. If you use a tool like Pandadoc that has ready templates and pulls data automatically from your CRM, your sales teams can save a lot of time. It automatically pulls in data from your CRM so you don’t have to tediously copy and paste key details.
25. Rescue Time – To become productive, you need to first understand how you are using your time. RescueTime helps you understand where your time goes each day so you can organize your activities better.
Sales prospecting can involve a lot of mundane administrative tasks that might ultimately bring down the spirit of your sales team and derail them from their ultimate goal of winning new customers.
The right sales prospecting tools can help save precious time by connecting salespeople to prospects faster, putting the spotlight back on selling.
