Working in sales can be a tough gig sometimes. You have targets to hit, deadlines to meet, and managers to keep happy. That’s why sales prospecting tools have become really popular and should be an important part of any salesperson’s toolkit.
But what is a sales prospecting tool, why are they so useful, and how do you know which ones are right for you? Let’s tackle those questions one at a time, before getting to the list.
What is a sales prospecting tool?
Imagine a piece of software that helps to automate the process of identifying potential buyers, connecting with them, and converting them into customers. Sounds pretty great, right? This is exactly what a B2B sales prospecting tool does. It’s all about reducing time spent on tasks, streamlining systems, and maximizing results.
What are the most useful tools for prospecting?
While you might initially feel excited about having some extra support, a little digging into the tools out there can quickly make you feel overwhelmed instead. There are a lot of options available to you. (But who wants to comb through 40+ options?!)
That’s why we put together a handy, slimmed-down list, complete with guidance on the best features of each tool. Use it to find the one that’s right for you, so that you can find your prospects, engage with them the right way, and close more deals. (Hey, you might even scoop up that salesperson of the month award, while you’re at it.)
The best sales prospecting software
When evaluating sales prospecting tools, you’ll want to consider how easy they are to implement into your existing workflow, what kind of time savings they offer, and how much of an impact they’ll make on your monthly targets. With those things in mind, here are the top 10 any salesperson should consider.
1. Magical
Best for: Companies or individual salespeople who want to automate their processes and save buttloads of time. (Yes, that’s a scientific unit of measurement.)
Cost: Free.
Before we dive into more traditional sales prospecting tools, it’s worth mentioning why no sales prospecting toolkit is complete without Magical.
With Magical, you'll never have to type the same thing over and over again. Instead, you can refine your best messages, add variables for personalization, and save your templates as easy-to-access shortcuts. Simply type // and choose the message you want to send. Magical will automatically fill variables with key info like the recipient's name and company.
Beyond filling spreadsheets and sending personalized messages en masse, Magical can also painlessly update your databases and forms (like your ATS or CRM). Imagine you have a set of LinkedIn profiles open and want to add a new prospect to Salesforce (or any other CRM). Simply hit // in the first form field and Magical will auto-populate your fields. 🪄
Magical will save you hours of time. If you are still typing the entire message or even copying and pasting any information. Magical allows you to create a trigger that does the typing for you. I can't imagine how much time this valuable tool has saved me. If you're not using Magical, you really should take a moment learn the system and be on your way to having some extra time to do things other than typing.
-Kristina L.
2. Kaspr
Best for: Individual contributors like sales reps or recruiters and founders. Kaspr is used for lead generation by smaller businesses.
Cost: Free (with access to unlimited B2B email addresses).
If you’re looking for a prospecting tool that isn’t over-complicated, Kaspr provides a good all-in-one solution. The idea is simple, users get immediate access to enriched contact data of the prospects they’re looking for on LinkedIn. Kaspr comes with a web app and Chrome Extension for finding leads.
Once you’ve got your leads, you can save them in the Kaspr web app. With Kaspr, reps can create tags, tasks, add notes and complete outreach without changing apps. Kaspr also makes updating data straight to your CRM easy because it integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce and many more.
I appreciate Kaspr for its user-friendly experience, especially its seamless integration with LinkedIn which simplifies accessing and utilizing data. This convenience, combined with the efficiency of the tool, enhances my workflow. I also find the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data provided by Kaspr to be quite reliable. While I understand that no tool is perfect, in my experience, Kaspr consistently delivers precise and detailed information, which is crucial for my professional needs.
-Daria R.
3. Crunchbase
Best for: Companies looking for recommendations that match their ideal customers.
Cost: $49 / user / month on the Pro plan.
Crunchbase is all about simplifying your sales workflow. It does this primarily by suggesting companies to you based on your ideal customer profile. Using Crunchbase’s advanced search tool, you can use various filters—including industry, location, IPO status, funding amount, investment stage, and more—to find and secure new prospects.
Crunchbase’s database and sales prospecting software also helps you to contact prospects at exactly the right time by alerting you when a company reaches a particular milestone, such as moving to a new investment stage or raising new funding.
Crunchbase owns lots of data, that you might and have to use when looking for business information for your sales activities. It's clear and easy to use and it gives you all you need without some limitations.
-Viktor K.
4. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Best for: Companies actively familiar with and using LinkedIn.
Cost: $99 / month / user on Professional account
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful B2B prospecting tool that helps you to find sales prospects on the largest professional and business social network, LinkedIn. LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you a wide variety of advanced search filters and lots of info about each prospect, which is useful for targeting your sales efforts and generating qualified leads. However, the cost can be prohibitive if you're not using LinkedIn heavily.
You can also use InMail credits to contact people directly through the platform, rather than using the limited “connect” features of the main social network.
LinkedIn Sales Nav is integrated with all of the software I use regularly (Salesforce, Salesloft, Zoominfo, etc.) and seamlessly updates information between these systems. SalesNav has added custom defined personas, which can be applied to your account lists and I find that immensely helpful in identifying a fruitful batch of prospects. I've used this software across two organizations now and both times it looks like Sales Nav did a flawless install for the company, and it is so easy to use. I use this daily for my prospecting skills.
-Cody L.
5. ZoomInfo
Best for: Companies looking for a large amount of data to explore.
Cost: Starting at $14,955 / year.
It’s always handy to get access to a lot of data and background info on a wide variety of businesses and people. ZoomInfo is a powerful sales prospecting tool because it offers an enormous database of potential prospects. You can dig really deep into company data, including granular details such as department lists and org charts.
The level of detail on ZoomInfo’s lead lists will help you to tailor your communication approach when you reach out to new prospects. And it’ll give you the info you need to identify companies that are well-suited to your product or service.
We lean heavily on account based marketing and this tool allows us to effectively identify the correct people in an organization. We have several different lines of business that benefit from our products. We have to have insights into our addressable market and the ZoomInfo team is always there to help us build lists based on our requirement.
I'm not of fan of having to purchase different packages for Europe and Asia. A hierarchy chart of an organization would be helpful was an area that was lacking but has been resolved with the new product release. The merger has really completed the solution.
-Todd Q.
6. Semrush
Best for: Companies wanting to boost their SEO performance.
Cost: $120 per month on Pro plan.
Semrush is more of an SEO solution than a sales prospecting tool, but it can also be used in combo with a tool like Crunchbase to reveal extra useful info about your prospects. Through Semrush, you can uncover data on your website’s number of monthly visits, number of page views, your homepage’s bounce rate, and other details.
You can use this information to gauge the potential success and growth of a prospect and to reference pain points that the prospect might be feeling. For example: “I saw that your traffic dropped with the latest Google algorithm update. Here are a few tips for you to figure out what’s gone wrong.”
Note: There are lots of similar SEO tools out there—Ahrefs, Moz, SimilarWeb, SpyFu, and more. Do some exploring to find one that suits you best.
The intuitive tools are quite simple to understand, and quite detailed instructions are provided. What I have been most impressed by has been their customer service. The staff have been terrific. The depth of tools is quite astounding and from my recent experience with resolving a matter with their customer service it was unconventionally satisfying. Something I have to admit is uncommon with online entities these days.
-Stuart R.
7. Clearbit Prospector
Best for: Companies looking for real-time updates.
Cost: $24K per year for Reveal Premium.
Clearbit Prospector is an online sales prospecting tool that helps you to build accounts and lead lists that are highly-targeted to your ideal market. The best thing about Clearbit is that the data is kept meticulously up to date, with real-time updates and the near-constant refreshing of data.
Clearbit is also very good at helping you identify the companies that visit your site anonymously, and alerting you when key accounts engage. This info helps you to drive engagement, and also to to build target lists based on custom criteria.
Being able to view the companies that have visited our website has been fantastic from a sales and marketing perspective. Combining that data with what we get in Hubspot and Google Analytics has been a game-changer for optimizing our web experience. Our SDR team has an additional channel for analyzing their outbound campaigns and dialing in target prospects, and our AEs are able to see which companies that are currently in cycle are visiting the site and getting information about our company so they can reach out.
Clearbit has gone through a number of UX changes recently, and not all have been for the better. Their most recent visitor report, in particular, is much more difficult to read and use. Their credit-based system is fairly unintuitive, and our team has found that the names/titles they have from a data enrichment standpoint aren't terribly useful for our audience.
-Alice K.
8. Calendly
Best for: Companies wanting to manage their calendars better.
Cost: $12 per user per month on Professional plan.
Calendly isn’t a standalone sales prospecting tool, but it can be used to streamline and boost your sales processes when combined with one. It’s a scheduling tool that makes it simple and quick for potential prospects to book a call, demo, or meeting with you.
Calendly syncs directly with Google Calendar and automatically makes blocked-out time unavailable to prospects. You can also get a plugin that syncs with Gmail to make it even easier to schedule events with prospects. (Combine this with Magical and those emails will be out in seconds!)
Calendly has significantly streamlined my responsibilities as a sales & marketing person, making my job ten times easier! Its user-friendly interface and extensive resources, coupled with robust customer support, have made it exceptionally easy to comprehend all its features. The ability for people's to independently schedule their product demo meeting has been a game-changer, liberating a substantial amount of my time. It's an indispensable tool for me, utilized every single day.
-Sahana B.
9. Overloop (Formerly Prospect.io)
Best for: Companies looking for smooth CRM integration.
Cost: $19 per user per month.
Overloop is a sales prospecting tool that integrates smoothly with some of the biggest CRM platforms out there, such as Hubspot and Salesforce. It also includes a number of powerful features, including in-depth reporting, forecasting, and email automation to make your life easier and more productive.
Simply install a Chrome extension to search for the contact details of your key decision-makers in any domain.
Made my sales process 10x faster and increased deals on the pipelineOverloop allows me to create an automated sales outbound campaign using LinkedIn and email. Just had to set it up, sit back and watch the leads come in.
Also, the Google Chrome extension allows you add contacts from LinkedIn on the spot.
No other tool in the market matches the functionalities available!
-Assad A.
10. FollowerWonk
Best for: Companies interested in using Twitter as a sales tool.
Cost: $29 / month on Target plan.
With 330 million users, there’s no denying Twitter’s position as one of the world’s most powerful social networking platforms. This makes it a hugely valuable source of potential leads and prospects.
FollowerWonk gives you everything you need to deep-dive into Twitter. Search for specific keywords and FollowerWonk will create a list of all the handles that use that word in their bios, as well as info on where they’re based, what kind of topics they discuss on Twitter, and who they follow. This makes it easy to start engaging with them.
Followerwonk is extremely user-friendly and a must-have for any marketer; paid or organic. The ability to quickly acquire new targets is streamlined by the great bio presentation setup and robust filter options. Its similar-to comparison abilities make my manual, qualified strategy much more scalable.
Also, Followerwonk visualizations are easy to duplicate and present to higher-level management that may not want the granularity.
Sometimes the best analytics take the most time - I've found myself waiting a full work day for reports. But it's easy to export the raw data and do it myself, so I'm not really complaining.
I also couldn't imagine starting as a large company and making this work - if the product could be retroactive I could see it helping established companies more.
-Laura C.
11. Mention
Best for: Companies interested in monitoring what’s in the press.
Cost: $99 per month on Starter plan.
If you’re going to land a variety of leads and prospects, you need to cast your net far and wide. Mention is a media-monitoring tool that lets you know whenever a brand or keyword you stipulate is mentioned.
You can use it to monitor sentiment about your own brand or that of your competitors, or to see what kind of publicity prospects you’re interested in are getting. Mention monitors over 1 billion platforms across the internet every day, including press articles, review sites, forums, and blogs.
The software's user interface is clean and easy to use, something very particular is that you can configure the color of an alert if you want to have a more specific reference, it also allows us to see every time someone mentions us, it has an accurate tracking and never publications are lost, it is the best solution for small businesses, summaries are also very useful, the support is very responsive and works very well, also the native web application makes it easy to track mentions, also the large amount of data collected is you can view from a panel.
-Anne T.
12. HubSpot Sales Hub
Best for: Companies that want an all in one sales and CRM integration tool.
Cost: Starting at $450 a month and up.
HubSpot Sales Hub is among the best sales prospecting tools for a reason: they deliver and they offer EVERYTHING you need for sales success. Among other features, they offer email tracking and notifications, meeting scheduling, live chat, deal pipeline management, sales automation, performance analytics, CRM integration.
13. ZoomInfo
Best for: Companies who want ultra targeted data for sales outreach.
Cost: Contact sales for an accurate, customized quote.
ZoomInfo provides an extensive database for B2B contacts and companies, advanced search filters, buyer intent data, seamless integration with CRM and marketing automation platforms, real-time alerts.
14. Cognism
Best for: Sales teams who do a lot of cold calling.
Cost: Contact sales for an accurate quote.
Cognism is a comprehensive sales prospecting tool that offers a range of features designed to help sales teams improve their lead generation, outreach, and overall sales processes. It provides access to a vast global database of B2B contacts and companies. This database includes detailed information such as contact details, company size, location, industry, and technology stacks.
15. Lead Forensics
Best for: Sales teams that want to capture website visitors.
Cost: They offer a free trial, but you have to contact sales for an accurate quote.
Lead Forensics is a sales and marketing tool designed to assist businesses in identifying website visitors and turning them into sales leads. This tool is particularly useful for B2B companies looking to enhance their lead generation and sales prospecting strategies.
16. LeadIQ
Best for: Sales teams looking to build strong databases quickly and efficiently.
Cost: They have a free level with minumim functions. Then it's $39 per month for Essential and $79 per month for Pro.
LeadIQ is a sales prospecting tool that streamlines the process of finding and capturing leads, particularly useful for sales teams looking to build and manage their lead databases efficiently. It excels in capturing leads directly from web sources, including LinkedIn, online directories, and company websites. It allows sales reps to quickly gather contact information and other relevant details without manual data entry.
17. Lusha
Best for: Reaching the right company contacts
Cost: Free plan, $29 a month for Pro, $51 a month for Premium.
Lusha is designed to help sales professionals, recruiters, and marketers identify and connect with their ideal prospects more effectively. This tool primarily provides accurate contact details of business professionals and company information. This includes phone numbers, email addresses, and company details like size, revenue, and industry.
One of Lusha's most popular features is its browser extension, compatible with Chrome and Firefox. This extension allows users to easily access contact information directly from LinkedIn profiles or company websites, significantly streamlining the prospecting process.
18. Clutch
Best for: Finding company information, particularly for B2B companies.
Cost: Contact sales for an accurate quote.
One of the standout features of Clutch is its collection of detailed client reviews and ratings. These reviews provide insights into a company's performance, reliability, and quality of service, which can be valuable in evaluating potential business collaborations.
19. TextMagic
Best for: Sales teams that want to use SMS messaging to reach leads.
Cost: Starts at $0.49 per text
TextMagic is a powerful tool for sales teams, marketers, and business owners who seek to leverage SMS as a direct and effective channel for reaching out to prospects, communicating with customers, and enhancing their overall marketing and sales strategies. The simplicity of SMS combined with these advanced features makes TextMagic a valuable asset in modern business communication.
Integrating Magical with B2B prospecting tools
Equipping yourself with the right software is vital to the success of your sales activities. But as this list shows, the definition of “sales prospecting tools” is more varied than it first seems. This means it’s important you pick a platform that suits your needs best.
Whatever you decide, each and every one of the tools we’ve featured here integrates brilliantly with Magical. No matter which sales tool, CRM platform, or sales prospecting software you’re using—Magical just works. Download it for free today and watch the magic happen.
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