You're probably familiar with the concept of sales prospecting and are now looking for the best sales prospecting tools. If you're not yet planning to use these tools as part of your customer acquisition strategy, you can be sure your competition is—so now is the time.
Sales prospecting tools have grown sharply in popularity recently, with 91% of prospects reporting they're willing to engage with a Sales team early in their purchasing process. But before we go any further, let's define exactly what sales prospecting is and how it can help fill up your sales pipeline.
What is sales prospecting?
Knowing where to focus your sales efforts is key to both reducing time commitments while increasing success rates.
Sales prospecting is not a single action, but rather a series of steps that can help identify revenue generating opportunities.
It starts right from the moment you contact your sales leads and continues through to sales conversions. One of the major components of sales prospecting is lead nurturing, a process that can be automated using our Lead Nurturing Wrkflow. It eliminates the need for manual follow-ups with potential customers.
The ultimate goal of sales prospecting is to identify the most suitable audience for your products—buyers you know need the solutions you offer. This is your biggest revenue-generating step, as this builds your sales pipeline and populates your database with leads that are ready to make a purchase.
The many benefits of sales prospecting tools
Like all automated solutions, sales prospecting tools can help cut down on time commitments—in this case, wasted resources finding and qualifying leads. It avoids calling through a list of contacts to figure out who is a good fit for your products with the required budget.
Using this revenue-generating approach can help you narrow down your best leads using valuable metrics like sales volume and intent data.
These essential tools help your Sales team perform important tasks such as creating a buyer persona, so you can better personalize marketing messages.
Once you have narrowed down your search to the most promising leads, your Sales team will have more time to craft custom outreach. That will add the personal touch that customers appreciate and respond to. In fact, 52% of customers expect sales offers to be customized to them.
Sales prospecting platforms can also help streamline your customer's experience from the start. They can be integrated with customer service automation such as our Customer Success Wrkflows.
What’s the difference between sales leads and prospects?
Your Sales team has likely already identified sales leads and filled in any missing data (perhaps by using our Lead Enrichment Wrkflow). However, contrary to some beliefs, a lead and a prospect is not the same thing.
A lead can be anyone that has an interest in buying what you sell. However, while this seems like a positive, a lead is not necessarily a good fit for your products or services. This could be someone who doesn't have the budget for your solutions or will quickly discover it's not right for them.
A prospect is a qualified lead. In other words, they are a good fit and won't waste your time by kicking tires. They have the spending power and will benefit from the particular features of your offerings.
Just like leads, not all sales prospecting tools are the same. Some of them will help you more than others, depending on your particular needs.
10 of the most useful tools to boost your sales strategy
1. Zendesk
Let's take a look at the first one. Zendesk is a Cloud-based solution, that allows your business to build a customized front-end customer service portal (as well as live chat). There's also a Wrk Action to add tags to existing customer service tickets in Zendesk.
However, the platform also offers valuable sales prospecting tools through Zendesk Sell to help take your sales leads to the next level. Zendesk Sell can help simplify lead generation, creating a list of targeted prospects using customized templates to focus your sales efforts on.
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn is a professional networking site that boasts more than 875 million members around the world. Like its name suggests, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a sales prospecting tool run through LinkedIn, designed to enhance your revenue-generating approach.
The Sales Navigator offers prospecting tools for individual sales representatives as well as Sales teams. This will help your team reach beyond your network and manage your sales pipeline.
3. Vidyard
Vidyard has been around since 2010 and is one of the more popular sales prospecting tools. It lets your business make personalized videos that can increase your sales leads and help you make more money. Sales reps can reach potential customers with content that's hard to ignore in their inboxes.
Video has been shown as a highly effective way to get attention, with HubSpot noting that 87% of video marketers report positive ROI.
4. Crunchbase
This is a data resource that helps fill in missing gaps for private and public business entities. It shows a company's key players as well as funding and investment information.
Crunchbase Pro also offers sales prospecting tools to help streamline your customer acquisition process. You can set alerts to target newly funded companies, new leadership, and more.
5. Clearbit
Referred to as a 'go-to-market platform', Clearbit was designed to help your business identify and reach target markets. It then helps you to focus all efforts on the best prospects to move them successfully through the sales pipeline.
It gives you a complete view of your intended market and what prospects and customers look like. You can reach any of your target audiences, build personalized buyer journeys, and stay constantly on top of your customer lifecycle, all from one platform.
6. Quora
You might be familiar with Quora, a platform for people to ask questions/share experiences, and get responses from other users. With more than 200 million users per month, it has a wide audience.
However, Quora can also be tapped as a useful tool to generate quality sales leads. By following your areas of interest on the platform and giving authoritative answers to questions relating to your industry, you can connect directly with potential customers.
7. Close.io
This CRM revenue-generating tool is designed for small businesses to grow. It allows you to reach out to your hot sales leads using calls, emails, texts, and even video. It also allows you to link to your Zoom account.
8. Clutch
Like its name suggests, this strategy platform can really come in handy as it lets you narrow down searches of digital/marketing agencies that do mobile app development to video production, within your chosen location. You can quickly build sales leads using custom criteria. It is essentially a directory with more than 98,000 client reviews to help drive your decisions.
9. Hunter
Email contacts of people in decision-making roles aren't always easy to find. Hunter "hunts" down this information for you with more than 100 million indexed email addresses. You can then let the program automatically score leads and import them into a CRM.
10. Demodesk
Once you've found or qualified sales leads, you want to get in touch with them in a meaningful way to get as many customers as possible. Demodesk is a solution designed for hosting meetings with leads through automatic scheduling.
The platform also helps you with personalizing sales pitches and accessing relevant info that would be of interest to potential clients.
How to successfully find the best prospects for your product
You can easily waste resources trying to qualify sales leads that aren't a good fit for your niche offerings. That's why it's important to work with an Automation Platform that knows your market and can help you identify the most suitable Wrkflows for your needs.
It also helps to do some prep using our Market Research Wrkflow to identify your target customers, and then narrow it down using our Email Marketing Wrkflow—which can boost your open rates by up to 50%. Save your Sales team the trouble of manually qualifying leads, while using the power of automation to populate your sales pipeline!
Contact us today for a quick 10-minute check-in with the Wrk team.
