Are you aware of sales? Or Do you work in sales? Then you would surely be aware of the strong pipeline of sales prospects. In simple words, you can call prospecting the lifeblood of sales because it is crucial to keep bringing new users and higher revenue into the business. For all companies, especially the teams responsible for outbound sales, sales prospecting software is necessary to find new leads and prospective clients for the business and nurture them into regular customers. 

The primary benefit of using sales tools for prospecting is that it helps in doing business tasks without manual data entries. But when you know that sales prospecting is required for the growth of your business, then you might be getting various thoughts about the same, like, how can you start doing sales prospecting? Or how can you ensure that the prospecting tools or techniques that you are following will prove to be the best for the sales of your business? 

So let us move ahead in this article, where we will guide you about some fantastic b2b sales prospecting tools that can help you make more seal deals for your business like never before. 

‍What is Sales Prospecting?

Sales prospecting is the methodical pursuit of information regarding Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) in order to initiate communication with the objective of conversion. It involves sales professionals identifying companies and key decision makers aligned with an ICP, followed by efforts to initiate communication and build a relationship with them.

The ultimate goal of this whole process is to generate revenue by finding the correct buyers for your business. However, sales p[rospecting is not a single-step process, as it has a broad scope, so it involves various activities of sales and marketing techniques. And the most crucial area in this process is nurturing the leads. The seller has to understand the buyer's needs and offer them the products and services according to their needs or requirements. 

Sales prospecting also involves creating a sales prospecting list, which is nothing but a sheet filled with important information (name, contact details, and email address) of a potential customer. B2B sales reps use these lists to communicate (via cold emails and cold calls) with prospective customers to increase sales.

It’s worth noting that sales prospecting is the first step in a sales process and there are four key steps of creating a sales prospecting list:

• Lead identification
• Outbound communication with the leads
• Introducing your product/service as a solution
• Lead qualification as potential buyers move through the sales funnel

Prospecting lists contain pre-verified and intent-based leads, so the chances of conversions are way much higher, unlike cold calling to random prospects. Using a highly targeted list also helps maintain positive customer relationships and build a trustable brand image.

Speaking of sales prospecting, let’s end the confusion about leads and prospects.

‍Leads are unqualified contacts of potential customers who may have shown interest in your product by signing up for a free trial or registering on the website.

On the other hand, prospects are qualified leads who match with your Ideal Customer Profile and have already been moved to the sales funnel despite any prior communication with your business organization.

In order to make a sales prospect list to be successful, it needs to contain the following:

• GDPR-compliant B2B data
• Buyer persona details
• Verified email addresses
• Phone number
• Relevant ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) data

B2B prospecting lists save sales teams’ time, lower customer acquisition cost (CAC), reduce churn rates, and improves customer lifetime value. Manual prospecting is tedious and time-consuming; that's why most companies leverage prospecting tools to create sales prospecting lists to scale faster.

Read how to do prospecting in LinkedIn, here.

Here's an example of prospect list template -

6 Steps to Creating a Highly Targeted Sales Prospecting List

Apparently, buying leads seems like an easy option instead of making a prospecting list from scratch and many businesses fall for the trap. But BUYING LEADS IS ALWAYS A BAD IDEA.

Here’s how you can create an effective sales prospecting list (sales contact list):

1. Research and Learn Your Product

Once you know what you are selling (product) or providing (service), you can truly offer value to your ideal prospects. You must know your offering in detail to bypass a lengthy onboarding process.

An exceptional sales rep should know the following:

• Use cases
• Feature sets
• Success stories

According to Harvard Business Review data, the departmental store company Dillard's has seen 5% sales growth (increase in conversions) for each hour a sales rep spent on training.

So it proves that irrespective of the industry, sales reps with in-depth knowledge about their products generate more sales.

Before creating a list of prospects, ask yourself:

What solutions does your product offer to the customers? Are there any discrepancies in your product that leads to losing deals? Can you explain your product to your grandparents (or a child or person without prior experience)? And, what makes your product/service stand out from the competitors?

The answers to these above-mentioned questions will help you to identify the driving force for sales and will help to create an intent-based prospect list.

2. Research Your Prospects; Build Buyer Persona

The next obvious step is knowing your audience. If you don't know who you are selling your product/service to, it's impossible to generate qualified leads that drive sales. This process will also help you build the sales prospecting list format.

According to marketing and sales experts, looking at some of your current customers is best to create the structure of your buyer persona.

Industry

Research whether your best customers work in a particular industry or a set of industries.

Job Title

What job titles do your best customers hold? Are they in managerial positions, senior managers, policymakers, or any other vertical?

Company Size

Try to find a pattern of whether your customers come from companies of similar sizes. If not, you can divide them into a few categories — SMB (Small to Medium Business) with 1-50 employees, SME (Small to Medium sized Enterprise) with 51-200 employees, and large corporations/MNCs with more than 200 employees.

Yearly Revenue

What is your best customers' average estimated revenue in any year? Does it vary within a wide range or fall under a single category?

Pain Points/Reason to Choose Your Service (or Product)

What are the main reasons that drive them to your business? Are the problems somewhat the same for all your best customers or not?

Referral Potential

What kind of customers have the best referral potential? Which customers have brought new customers through referrals?

Brand Value

Does your customers' brand value impact your business? How much revenue and customer growth have you seen for that? It is helping you drive more sales for your business.

3. Start Building the Sales Contact List

There is no set-piece method for creating a sales prospect list. You can add or remove a few sections from the above-mentioned list to create your buyer persona.

Using .vcf or .CSV file is recommended to create your prospecting list in Google Spreadsheet or Excel Sheet. Although maintaining a spreadsheet is cost-effective, it takes a lot of time and leaves room for errors.

Using a sales automation tool or list-building tool is best to create error-free and targeted leads. Some of the best tools for sales prospecting list-building tools are Hunter, Voila Norbert, Lusha, FindThatLead, etc.

On that note, investing in CRM software to automate sales prospecting helps you generate maximum ROI from outreach campaigns. Zoho, HubSpot, and Pipedrive are some of the best CRMs today.

4. Update Sales Lead Lists: Enhance Data Accuracy

Once you've generated sales lead lists, it's time to enhance the data accuracy and remove dead email addresses and spam traps from the list.

Lead verification helps you improve your campaigns' deliverability, email open rates, and conversion rates. Remove dead phone numbers, irrelevant leads, and outdated emails to chip in fresh leads.

You can also opt for a sales intelligence tool such as Outreach, Apollo, Zoominfo SalesOS, etc., to introduce new leads and relevant data to your campaigns.

5. Launch Lead Generation Campaigns

Launch various modes of lead generation, such asB2B marketing campaigns, SEO practices, website forms, newsletters, and webinars. Sometimes businesses invest in paid advertisements on LinkedIn, Facebook, and ESPs to generate leads.

Make sure you add compelling CTAs to attract more audiences. Moreover, you can offer informative guides such as product walkthroughs, free eBooks, templates, webinars, etc., to generate contact details from prospects.

6. Execute Lead Scoring: Segment Prospecting List

This is the last and most important step to creating an effective sales prospect list. Once you have collected your prospects' data, categorize your audience based on their intention, sales journey, probability of buying, etc.

Segmentation of your list will help you create more personalized campaigns based on their intent.

Should You Buy or Build Your Prospecting Lists?

Although many B2B businesses prefer buying readymade sales lead lists from third-party platforms, it is advisable to always build your list from scratch.

Of course, buying a pre-made sales contact list is easier and time-saving, but it does more harm than good for the business.

• Email addresses in a bought list are being contacted several times.
• The list may contain dead email addresses and spam traps.
• The contacts might not be your target audience.
• Your IP may get penalized or blocklisted.

Moreover, you could be breaking the codes of the GDPR act. Using a readymade list can negatively impact your deliverability rates, conversions, and brand reputation.

Use a lead gen tool or sales tools for prospecting to acquire highly-targeted and industry-specific leads so you can reach your target audience to drive sales.

What are the Sales Prospecting Tools?

The sales tool for prospecting are just like some software platforms that can help your business's sales team to automate and simplify the tasks related to lead qualification and lead generation. With the help of this automation, the sales reps can skip manually finding and organizing the emails and meetings for the leads. 

However, these tools help increase the number of business leads by converting them into prospects and saving time, money, and sanity. 

What is the Importance or Need for B2B Sales Prospecting Tools?

These sales tools for prospecting ensure that you are making the most of the time of your sales reps team. Because with the help of these sales prospecting tools, they can quickly identify the users who are more interested in buying the products or services of our business. 

The process of prospecting involves qualifying the leads and then advancing them into the sales funnel. That, in return, increases the customer base and the company's revenue. This process is a challenging task if required to be done manually. Therefore, correctly using these tools has made our lives easier and sorted.

Below are some excellent reasons to understand the importance of these tools for our businesses:

• These tools help in finding and nurturing the leads
• Help in performing the in-depth research required for the projects
• Prioritizes the users based on their customer profiles on the database
• Monitors the activities of the prospects over the business
• Approach numerous prospects efficiently. 
• Maintain consistency while following up with the customers
• Streamlines the whole sales process

You can also refer to an ultimate guide to sales prospecting that can help you understand some https://www.gmass.co/blog/sales-prospecting/

Benefits of Using the Sales Prospecting Tools

Using best prospecting tools to automate the whole sales process even helps scale up your team's efforts to do the rest of their tasks. Finding the right user for your business is a challenging task that has been sorted out or simplified with these sales prospecting tools. So let us know about the three main benefits of using such right tools below:

1. Saves Time

The most common problem with these sales team is that they need more time to [erfoem these tasks that helps in closing up the business deals, like engaging or contacting the users and closing their deals. So for all these processes, they get stuck drafting emails, making sales email templates, creating users' email lists, or editing user contracts. So here comes a tip that you can get from the most known email software SmartLead AI, which can give you a few email examples or templates to increase your customer base. 

So these tools, when used in such situations, lighten up the load from the shoulders of the sales team of these numerous repetitive tasks. So with more free time, the sales team can get a chance to make healthy personal relationships with their customer and offer them some other high-quality deals.

2. Uncovers Various Qualified Leads

The sales team often sends cold calls to the bulk email list of the users to find the right buyer for the business, which is a waste of time and even annoys the customers. Fortunately, these sales prosecuting tools help the team I'm finding the perfect fit for their business. And they create their users' data at their fingertips for the team to quickly analyze and uncover the prospect's intent for engaging with the company. 

3. Improves customer service

The best sales prospecting tools can quickly get into the pipeline with other tools or platforms in the business. And by doing this, the leads quickly transition into paying customers. And then seamlessly, you can start getting them onboard by sending them welcome emails and later following up with those users with your marketing messages.

12 sales prospering tools to skyrocket your productivity and revenue

1. Smartlead

Smartlead is an email marketing software that offers a comprehensive solution, allowing users to utilize unlimited auto-rotating email accounts. With this platform, users can seamlessly connect multiple email accounts and automate message rotation with ease. Leveraging AI-driven technology, Smartlead enhances outreach efforts while safeguarding email reputation.

Features include:

• Access to a centralized master inbox for streamlined email management and lead tracking.
• Automation of sales processes to enhance efficiency.
• Ability to contact prospective clients across multiple platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and WhatsApp.
• Utilization of intelligent warm-up features to ensure personalized emails reach recipients effectively and avoid spam folders.

Pricing:

2. FindThatLead

FindThatLead is a cloud-based tool that is used for finding new leads and sending cold emails to them. With the help of this tool, you can create personalized email campaigns and automatically monitor the status of those cold outreach messages. It also helps locate new leads for the business in your respective area and verifies the correct email address to reduce the mail bounce rate. However, if you face mail bounce issues at any time, you can take tips from SmartLead AI email software because it briefs you on how to fix this email bounce problem. 

Features

• Bulk email verification
• Campaign management
• Domain checking
• Lead segmentation
• Demo meeting bookings

Pricing

3. Zendesk Sell Sales CRM

This is a modern category tool that is used for accelerating business revenue. It quickly sets up the interface so that it breeΩes the prospects into qualified leads and those leads into buyers or potential customers. 

Features

• Lead management
• Power dialer
• Lead prospecting
• Automated outreach with various sequences of emails
• Pipeline management
• Live chat support
• Sales tracker
• Contact management

Pricing

4. Vainu

Vainu is an intelligence platform that helps search for the best0fot prospects for your business. It has over 100+ filters. 

Features

• Integrations
• Real-time alerts
• Support services
• Regular data updates
• Workflow triggers

Pricing

5. HubSpot Sales Hub

This is a more extensive business sales app involving marketing, CMS, and the company's services. This prospecting tool offers the sales team some popular features like email tracking, email templates, call tracking, email tracking, and call recordings. The intelligence of this tool is that it captures all the relevant information from every call. 

Features

• Referral tracking
• Lead management
• Contact management
• Call management
• Performance metrics

Pricing

6. Voila Norbert

This is a powerful search engine where you enter the name and company of any individual, and it fetches the correct email address for them. With the help of Voila Norbert, you can easily schedule meetings and send follow-up or reminder emails to your users. 

Features

• Gmail plugins
• Chrome extension
• Email verification

Pricing

‍7. Clearbit Prospector

Clearbit Prospector helps identify the anonymous visitors on your company's website and tracks their activity so that you can analyze their interests. With this, you can get the visitor's info, and then after personalizing their interests, you can send them emails and convert them into your regular customers.

Features

• Lead segmentation
• Source tracking
• Lead management
• Opportunity management
• Performance metrics

Pricing

8. Mention

Mention is a monitoring tool that can allow you to track the mentioned keywords. Most companies have been using this sales prospecting tool mainly for marketing purposes. It is the easiest way to track the user's social media presence; therefore, the prospect can be tracked.

Features

• Social media content presence and creation
• Monitors the tracks
• Saved filters

Pricing

9. Yesware

This email prospecting tool, mainly used for Outlook and Gmail, can allow the sales teams to reach out to their leads, schedule meetings with them, and send them follow-up emails later. This tool enables tracking the improvement of the daily activity of the leads. 

Features

• Audience targeting
• Performance metrics
• Location tracking
• Event-triggered actions

Pricing

10. Sendoso

Sendoso is a platform designed to track and send the ROI of any products used by your sales team to engage and attract prospects. This includes sending gifts, company swags, gift cards, and handwritten notes to the leads to increase personal engagement with them. 

Features

• Delivery Tracking
• Mailer templates
• Progressive tracking
• Engagement tracking
• Event-triggered actions

Pricing

11. Overloop (formerly Prospect.io)

This is a tool that helps in building email lists, tracking the results, and creating some impactful campaigns for users. It uses a Powerful segmentation technique by sending personalized messages to the customers. 

Features

• Performance metrics
• Opportunity management
• Lead management
• Contact management
• Proposal management

Pricing

12. MailTester.com

This cloud-based tool also helps strip off your spam or abandoned email lists. It uses a specific algorithm in six segments: invalid, deliverable, unknown, disposable, accept-all, and spam traps.

Features

• Single email verification
• Customizable API
• Dashboard
• Bulk email verification

Pricing

Things to consider when selecting a B2BSales Prospecting Tool

When choosing a b2b Sales Prospecting Tool, several factors warrant consideration to ensure optimal functionality and alignment with your business needs:

Data Accuracy and Quality: Assess the tool's ability to provide accurate and up-to-date information about potential leads and companies. Reliable data enhances the effectiveness of prospecting efforts.

Search Capabilities: Evaluate the tool's search functionalities, including filters and criteria, to efficiently identify leads that match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Customizable search parameters streamline the prospecting process.

Integration Compatibility: Consider whether the tool seamlessly integrates with your existing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or other sales software. Integration facilitates smooth data transfer and enhances workflow efficiency.

Automation Features: Look for automation features such as lead enrichment, email sequencing, and task reminders. Automation streamlines repetitive tasks, saving time and improving productivity.

Scalability and Flexibility: Ensure that the tool can scale alongside your business growth and adapt to evolving prospecting needs. Flexibility in terms of user licenses and customizable features accommodates varying business requirements.

User Interface and Ease of Use: A user-friendly interface and intuitive navigation enhance adoption and minimize the learning curve for sales teams. An intuitive design fosters productivity and reduces training time.

Analytics and Reporting: Assess the tool's analytics capabilities to track prospecting performance and measure key metrics such as conversion rates, engagement levels, and pipeline velocity. Robust reporting features provide insights for continuous improvement.

Security and Compliance: Prioritize tools that adhere to data security standards and regulations, especially if handling sensitive customer information. Compliance with GDPR, CCPA, or industry-specific regulations is essential to safeguard customer data.

Customer Support and Training: Evaluate the provider's customer support services, including training resources and technical assistance. Responsive support ensures smooth implementation and ongoing usability of the prospecting tool.

Cost and ROI: Consider the pricing structure of the tool in relation to its features and benefits. Calculate the potential return on investment (ROI) based on improved prospecting efficiency, higher conversion rates, and increased revenue opportunities.

Conclusion

The sales prospecting tools make your life a lot simpler and more accessible for precept list building, research, outreach efforts, and lead generation. So the best prospecting tools mentioned above can help you in multiple aspects of your prospecting strategy so that you can select from these per your business requirement. With the help of these tools, you can get more and more leads for your company and obtain higher revenue at the end of the year. The main goal of all these tools is to qualify leads for the business and convert them into paying customers. 

FAQs

How Can Sales Prospecting Tools Improve Lead Generation Process?

Sales prospecting tools enhance lead generation by providing access to extensive databases, automating lead qualification, enabling personalized outreach at scale, and facilitating efficient follow-ups. They streamline the process, saving time and improving the quality of leads generated.

How Do I Choose the Right Sales Prospecting Tool for My Business?

Choose a sales prospecting tool based on factors such as your business size, industry needs, budget, and required features. Evaluate options based on criteria like integration capabilities, advanced search filters, lead scoring, email tracking, workflow automation, and analytics.

What Is the Best Way to Track Sales Leads?

The best way to track sales leads is through a CRM system integrated with your sales prospecting tool. Utilize CRM features to capture lead information, track interactions, monitor progress through the sales pipeline, set reminders for follow-ups, and analyze lead performance.

How Do You Create a Sales Prospecting Plan?

To create a sales prospecting plan, start by defining your target audience, setting specific goals, identifying prospecting channels, and allocating resources. Develop a systematic approach for prospecting activities, including research, outreach methods, follow-up strategies, and metrics for tracking progress. Continuously refine your plan based on feedback and performance data.