The best sales prospecting tools save you time and effort when it comes to finding relevant prospects for your business. We use prospecting tools to identify new leads, dig for valuable prospect information, and keep our database up-to-date.
There are many resources that promise to simplify these processes. Luckily, we narrowed down some of our favorite prospecting tools below.
Our list of best sales prospecting tools will help your team start 2020 off strong.
8. Siftery: Explore your prospect’s technology stack
The original purpose of Siftery was to help companies understand how their technology stacks compared to competitors in their industry and to offer recommendations based on the results. It has now evolved to offer data services that are particularly helpful if you’re selling B2B software or services that rely on specific software solutions.
7. BuiltWith: Know which web apps prospects are using
BuiltWith, similar to Siftery, is a tool for finding out which companies are using which technologies. The key difference is BuiltWith relies exclusively on data skimmed from websites. So it has niche uses, but you can download extensive lists of companies who use specific platforms and generate an exhaustive list of target accounts.
In one of our recent campaigns, we used BuiltWith to export a complete list of companies and websites that use the software we were targeting. Our marketing team was then able to import the list as a LinkedIn audience and deliver advertisements that created a significant number of MQLs for our SDRs to call.
6. Datanyze: Get notified when prospects are looking to buy
Datanyze is a powerful prospecting tool that lets you gather data on over 35 million companies. It’s another tool that’s useful for finding out which software your prospects use, but it also lets you compare prospects’ technology stacks against each other to figure out which companies are the best fit for your offering.
The tool offers real-time technographic data that notifies you when changes are made to a prospect’s technology stack, which can provide useful insight into a lead’s buying intent. And it offers a Chrome extension that makes finding prospect information easy to do on any page.
5. Owler: Find companies that match your ideal customer profile
Owler is a free tool that gives you a host of company information that you’d usually only find through more expensive and established platforms like Dun & Bradstreet. Owler is different from other platforms because it doesn’t aggregate data but instead calculates it based on data and user input.
It makes assumptions then asks users if those numbers are correct, and over time, their numbers become more and more accurate. It’s an excellent tool for evaluating, at a bird’s-eye view, whether a company is a good fit for your target customer segment and who their competitors are.
4. Detective (formerly Charlie App): Find your talking points with prospect intel
3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Find your most relevant B2B leads
2. Hunter: Find and verify email contacts
1. People as a Prospecting Tool:Get sales meetings with qualified leads
Your single best sales prospecting tool will always be your people.
Knowledgeable and experienced SDRs are hard to come by, require continuous training, and are a challenge to retain. But when empowered by a substantial framework and effective daily process, they will excel at driving leads to your business.
Sales development reps do your salespeople’s prospecting for them, reaching out to relevant leads from your cold database or marketing funnel and qualifying them for a sales appointment. Skilled SDRs are able to extract important prospect information that sales can leverage during nurturing and ensure your closers don’t waste their valuable time on unqualified leads.
Our SDRs use a methodical process to gain a deeper understanding of how and why prospects resonate with your messaging and whether the lead is sales-qualified. We wrote about the proven processes that make our SDR team so effective for building meaningful connections with prospects in our Ultimate Guide to B2B Appointment Setting.
Conclusion
The tools on this list, whether sophisticated automation software or an expert SDR, can drive pipeline growth and revenue for your B2B organization. Explore these resources to see how they can improve your prospecting workflow and give your team better business intelligence for tackling new prospects.
Many of these tools have proven successful for our business and we believe each one on this list can help transform your team from just dialing down a list into a strategic outreach. And while all these tools can add value to your outreach, you can always bypass the costs and effort of implementing them by trusting EBQ with all your prospecting needs.
