As a business owner, you’re probably always looking for new ways to generate sales. You may be considering adjusting your marketing strategies or improving the customer experience. Another method you can try is sales prospecting.
Sales prospecting is the process of identifying, classifying, and engaging your business’ potential clients. The goal of sales prospecting is to turn leads into actual sales. The method helps convince your clients to use your product or service because it meets their specific needs.
Sales prospecting tools are developed to help make the process as efficient and productive as possible. This article explores the different sales prospecting tools and techniques you can use for your business.
What is a sales prospecting tool?
Sales prospecting tools simplify the process of filtering leads and finding the right sales prospect for your business. These platforms can make lead tracking easier for your sales team.
This doesn’t mean that manual processes aren’t essential in lead qualification. Your sales reps can still contribute to the prospecting process with their knowledge of your target market. They can pre-filter any potential customers before adding them to the system.
Sales prospecting tools also help you and your sales reps avoid the confusion between prospecting vs judging. Sales reps may judge a prospect based on assumptions or opinions, which may result in wasted time and effort.
Meanwhile, prospecting involves using objective reasoning to identify individuals most likely to convert and become buyers. This is achieved by asking questions about prospects’ specific needs.
Benefits of Sales Prospecting Tools
Sales prospecting tools should be at the top of your list for lead generation. With these tools, you can enjoy the following advantages for your business:
1. Increased sales and revenue.
Sales prospecting tools help you identify leads and customers who are more likely to buy a product or service. By providing accurate information on a sales prospect, these tools can help your sales team focus on applying lead nurturing strategies to improve conversion. This can result in more revenue for your business over time.
2. Better understanding of the target audience.
With a tool to help you compile all the information about your qualified leads, you gain a deeper understanding of who your target market is. It helps in weeding out any unqualified leads. This also makes it easier for you to understand your ideal customer profile and how you can target them.
3. Improved customer relationship management.
The best prospecting tools can improve the customer service you provide. These tools, together with data from CRM platforms, can help you create customer-focused strategies. Once leads become paying customers, you can easily get them started with onboarding and marketing emails.
4. Saves time.
Sales prospecting tools save you from the repetitive and time-consuming process of lead qualification. Since the system automates many processes, your team can focus on more important tasks while it does its job.
6 Sales Prospecting Techniques
Sales prospecting techniques are ways your team can do outreach to your potential leads. Depending on your business, one method might work better than the other. Here are some techniques you can experiment with:
1. Cold Calling
Discovery calls allow your sales team to provide potential customers with more information about your products and services. This opens up direct communication with your target market, which builds their trust in your company.
To automatically make outbound calls to your clients, you can use dialing software. Call software can help you dial any phone number wherever your client may be.
2. Social Media
Social media is another powerful tool to use when sales prospecting. Social selling is the use of social networks to keep sales engagement high. This can foster connections with customers and help you create content relevant to their needs.
Using social media to help keep up with shifting user preferences and marketing trends is also effective for business expansion.
3. Videos
Another powerful sales prospecting technique is creating videos of your product or service. Many customers have a visually oriented learning style, so you can take advantage of that.
Creating videos about your product builds a more authentic connection between you and your customers. Seeing short demos of how the product or service works builds trust as well.
By uploading videos online, you can also map who engages in your content. From there, you can start creating outreach strategies that fit your audience.
4. Email Marketing
One of the most common sales prospecting methods is setting up email campaigns. Email marketing is a powerful tool that can automate your outreach. When doing so, create an eye-catching and personalized email subject. Keep your email brief with a call to action to engage your customers. You can also create email templates to help your marketing team save time and effort in composing these messages.
Once you’ve collected customers’ email addresses and their opt-in forms, you can start integrating email marketing tools into your workflow. These tools allow you to set up a schedule for sending email campaigns to customers.
5. Referrals
Word of mouth is a powerful advertising tool. Getting referrals is a good technique for prospecting as it helps you locate new leads to convert into sales. Their testimonials can also assist you in convincing any prospective clients from a similar background.
6. Website Monitoring
Adding visitor monitoring software or plugins to your website is another way to automate your sales prospecting process. By monitoring website visits, you gain more knowledge of your target market or potential markets you can tap into. This is a good way to find prospects for your cold email campaigns.
Website monitoring tools usually have built-in email finder features. From there, you can find out who visits your website along with useful details such as their place of employment and their job position. Through this, you know who to target with your drip campaigns.
7 Top Sales Prospecting Tools
Below are some of the best sales prospecting tools you can add to your workflow to get more qualified leads.
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn has many functions aside from social networking. This tool can help sales representatives compile a prospect list from millions of users. It has advanced search features that help you filter prospects according to location, industry, and more. LinkedIn can also alert you of any changes to your target market as it tracks its activity.
LinkedIn has an InMail feature where you can send out messages. But since not everyone has access to it, it’s best to partner your Sales Nav with a different tool for email campaigns.
Pricing starts at $79.99/month.
2. HubSpot Sales Hub
Considered one of the best sales prospecting tools, HubSpot Sales Hub automates a lot of your sales prospecting techniques, such as email alerts and notifications of real-time prospect tracking. It also has features specifically designed to filter information from cold calls as well as AI-generated sales insight.
Paid plans with HubSpot start at $50/month.
3. Voila Norbert
One of the biggest areas for improvement with email outreach is verifying email addresses. This is where Voila Norbert comes in. This powerful search tool can go help you locate contact data using the individual’s name and company. It also displays the accuracy (in percentage) of each email it finds. This lets you know when the email addresses are no longer being used.
If you want to try it out for cold email campaigns, they give your first 50 leads for free. Succeeding searches will cost you $39 per month as a starting price.
4. ZoomInfo
If you need sales tools that let you dig deeper into company data to analyze the market, ZoomInfo is for you. This tool can check company organizational charts and even upcoming projects, which can help you refine your sales strategy.
Aside from the functions mentioned, ZoomInfo also suggests other potential leads based on the ones you already have. It can also build a tailored lead list from all the information of your prospects.
Like other sales prospecting tools, ZoomInfo can also be integrated into your existing CRM for better results.
5. Overloop
Another effective email search tool, Overloop integrates with other sales prospecting and CRM tools like Salesforce and Hubspot Sales. It can help send email sequences and follow-ups and build lead lists for your sales team. It also has a function to search email addresses using the web domains of companies.
To use Overloop, all you have to do is install the Google Chrome extension and you’re ready to go. Their paid plans start at $99/month per user.
6. Hunter
Another email finder tool, Hunter is a Google Chrome extension that can help make email outreach easier. Its user-friendly interface helps you find millions of email addresses under different company domains. Hunter allows you to build your new leads list and verify their contact information through the platform.
Hunter offers their paid plans starting at $49/month.
7. LeadFeeder
If you’re looking for B2B sales prospecting tools, LeadFeeder might be for you. This is a SaaS prospecting tool that allows you to know who viewed your website, even without filling out a contact form.
LeadFeeder helps you spot if one of your prospective companies is viewing your website. It also has a feature where you can gather information about the company like employee email addresses for outreach.
With its features, LeadFeeder can help users create a more effective sales strategy. With the information you gather about your leads, you can develop outreach campaigns that hit their target.
How to Choose the Right Sales Prospecting Tool
Not every sales prospecting tool will fit your needs. Here’s what you should consider when finding the best prospecting tools to help you:
1. Integration with Tools and Other Platforms
Many sales prospecting tools also offer ready integrations with business apps like dialer automation tools, communication software, and calendar apps. These integrations help prevent data silos and ensure that everyone has access to updated customer data.
If your CRM is compatible with your sales prospecting tool, you can streamline your team’s workflow and help marketing and sales reps become more productive.
2. User-Friendliness and Ease of Use
Let’s face it: no one wants to deal with complicated systems. Choose a sales prospecting tool that is easy to adopt into your current workflow so your teams can cut down on time spent learning how the tool works. This will make it easier for sales agents to contribute to lead generation and nurturing efforts.
3. Features and Functionality
Different sales prospecting tools vary in features and functionality. When choosing a sales prospecting tool for your business, always consider your specific needs. Do you need a tool that specializes in email outreach? Maybe you need a tool that can help you collect prospect information.
By knowing the specific functionalities that you need in a sales prospecting platform, you can also make the most of your investment.
4. Pricing and Budget
Sales prospecting does not produce revenue on its own. It’s the result of sales prospecting that helps you make more revenue. With that said, always consider if the price of your chosen automation tools fits your current budget. If the free version works for your business, then there’s no need for a paid plan.
Maximize Your Lead Generation Potential with Podium
Finding the right sales prospecting software is a great way to increase your business’ sales and revenue. To help generate more leads, adding a tool that will help you engage with clients better is necessary. This will ensure no prospecting efforts will go to waste.
Podium has features to help you drive more traffic to your website. Think of it as a one-stop shop for all your business needs. From chatting with your clients to getting their reviews, Podium has all the products you need for better sales engagement.
Contacting your clients has never been easier with Podium. You can send emails, text messages, and even make phone calls to turn your prospects into qualified leads. Podium has revolutionized the way businesses engage with customers and manage their reputations.
From startups to established companies, Podium has helped numerous businesses grow in sales and revenue. See for yourself how Podium can help improve your workflow and get high-quality leads today.
