11 Best Sales Prospecting Tools (To Help You Close Deals, Faster)

Hands up if any of you would opt for a handheld encyclopedia over searching Google these days?

That’s right, none of you.

Using the wrong sales prospecting tools for your business is kinda the same thing. It’s time-consuming, inefficient, and often pretty frustrating. The right sales prospecting tools, on the other hand? They can help your team add more leads to the sales pipeline and close bigger deals, quicker.

But with literally hundreds of sales prospecting tools out there, which ones should you choose?

We take a look at 11 of the best prospecting tools that support sales teams through the five main phases of sales prospecting. Let’s start with the basics first.

What are sales prospecting tools?

Top sales prospecting tools are software and apps that make your sales prospecting efforts a lot easier. They help you identify the right prospects, quickly gather relevant information about them, and open an engaging and meaningful dialogue to ultimately close more deals.

What do you use sales prospecting tools for?

Today, prospecting tools have become instrumental to running a successful sales organization.

If you want to add more leads to the sales pipeline and close bigger deals, they are crucial. Increase the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of prospecting so they can spend their time targeting the right leads and decision-makers.

Sales teams (mainly your SDR or BDRs) benefit from using prospecting tools for a number of reasons, including:

1. A clearer, more intimate understanding of your ideal customer
2. Data, systems, and processes which will enable them to identify the prospects that fit this definition
3. A method for contacting and nurturing prospects
4. Automations that help ensure speed and accuracy throughout the prospecting process

Here’s short and simple translation if you’re running low on time:

🏆 Adding more valuable lead to the sales pipeline

🏆 Adding more valuable leads to the sales pipeline faster

🏆 Adding more valuable leads to the sales pipeline faster, and winning bigger deals as a result

11 best sales prospecting tools to try

We know you want to get on with finding prospects and closing deals, and spend less time thinking about how exactly you’re going to do that. That’s why we put together our top 11 sales tools recommendations and the phases of the prospecting sales process they’ll help you with.

The all-in-one

1) Similarweb Sales Intelligence

Spoiler alert: When you are assessing your options, you’ll quickly realize how many tools there are that do different things. We recommend tools that will give you the most possible value – you know, like an all-in-one kind of software tool that covers all your needs.

Cough, cough.. Similarweb Sales Intelligence.

A holistic approach to prospecting, Similarweb Sales Intelligence is a great option for teams wanting an all-encompassing platform with all the tools you need for prospecting, and for anyone tired of onboarding with disparate software and apps. Having your tools all in one place (and working seamlessly together), will empower all you sales reps out there to maximize efficiency and achieve better results within each phase of prospecting.

Our database of over 100 million companies enables your sales team to:

• Generate *more* pipeline and identify new potential customers based on the criteria that matter most to you. For example, you can locate prospects by web traffic volumes, engagement metrics, revenue, site category, and site language.
• Gain unique insights into your prospect’s digital performance, as well as their competition, to help you craft the perfect pitch and increase your response rate.
• Adopt a consultative selling approach with your communication with prospects by leveraging web traffic analytics, competitor performance, and other metrics that matter to them.
• Save time by automatically qualifying your prospectsand enriching lead data with digital performance metrics directly in your CRM.

With all of these capabilities, your sales team will be positioned to work faster, focus their time on prospects that will actually convert, and close more deals. Similarweb is the end-all sales prospecting tool – book a demo and see for yourself:

For those of you that are looking to add to your stack of prospecting tools, here are the best options to help with bits and bobs in the process.

Building out your prospect list

2) Mattermark

In the early phases of sales prospecting, when you need to build out your list of potential customers, Mattermark is a great option. Providing a directory of businesses and investors, with over 80 filters, it helps you create a list of prospects that meets your criteria (eg. geography, industry, revenue, company size, business model, and employee growth).

With the ability to create saved searches, including relevant company news and alerts, you can save time while gaining helpful information about leads.

3) LinkedIn Sales Navigator

An absolute go-to for sales teams to gather information on prospects for a while now = LinkedIn. And the LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes using the platform even easier – not to mention writing those cold sales emails or making those cold calls.

The Sales Navigator tool is dedicated to sales teams to help them find leads and accounts in their target market, get real-time insights for warm outreach and build trusted relationships with customers and prospects.

Finding contact information

4) Lusha

Lusha is a database that enables sales teams to locate B2B contact and company details. It includes 100 million business profiles, 36 million C-level executive profiles, and 15 million company profiles, so sales teams can locate the contact information for almost anyone they want. Lusha allows you to save contact lists within the platform and export them to your CRM for easy follow-up.

5) Prospect.io

Prospect.io is a sales prospecting tool that promises to find and verify anyone’s email address in seconds (Gmail and beyond). The platform allows you to locate email addresses for individual prospects or groups of prospects at once. Users can access its Email Finder feature within the app or while browsing the web using its Chrome Extension, which is integrated with business-oriented social networks. This makes it easy to find relevant names, emails, and job titles.

Prospect.io enables two-way integration with a number of platforms, including Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, Pipedrive, and Slack.

Qualifying your prospects

6) Detective by Charlie

This prospecting tool helps sales teams speed up the research phase of prospecting by monitoring the internet and aggregating all of the news and mentions about them. This will help you determine if a prospect does indeed match their ICP. It also spoon-feeds you information that will help you personalize your cold outreach to qualified leads.

7) Owler

Owler helps sales teams qualify prospects by delivering company data and other relevant information about your prospects. The database provides a range of information on more than 14 million public and private businesses, including industry, sector, geography, revenue, employee count. You can create a real-time feed about news and track the companies you care about by creating custom alerts.

Hosting a great meeting

8) Calendly

When it’s time to schedule a meeting with your prospect, Calendly can make the process smooth and easy for you. After syncing with your Google Calendar, your prospect can choose a time that works for them within the window of time you provide. So many sales teams love Calendly because it helps them eliminate long chains of emails when you are trying to schedule calls, meetings, and demos.

9) Demodesk

Demodesk is known for automating key parts of the sales process. It’s a web-based meeting platform that helps sales reps schedule and lead meetings in real-time. Integrating with Google Calendar and Office 365, the tool creates automated calendar invites and email reminders to help decrease those pesky no-show rates. It can even help reduce meeting prep time, with dynamic team playbooks that are easy to automate to load the right slides, websites, or apps.

During meetings, Demodesk enables interactive screen sharing and video conferencing. All users can preload content, create meeting templates, and add notes.

Keeping your prospects engaged

10) Crystal Knows

To keep your prospects engaged means you have to say the right things at the right time. Crystal Knows is an on-demand personality insights platform that tells sales reps about a prospect’s behavioral tendencies. This won’t only help enrich your understanding of each of your accounts (beyond the standard information other companies can get hold of), but also let you tailor your communication style and pitch to make it really stand out.

11) Bloobirds

This prospecting tool is designed to help you keep prospects engaged by providing real-time messaging assistance so you can craft personalized messages according to the B2B buyer persona, target market, and the prospect’s unique situation. Bloobirds also provides reminders and prompts to guide reps through different tasks and help them follow your sales playbook.

Beware of the Frankenstack 🧟

A technology Frankenstack is a group of systems and tools that have been ‘patched together’ by a company, resulting in no single source of truth and a far more complicated, uncontrolled way of working. This can quickly happen when adding tools with single capabilities into your stack in isolation, because these kinds of tools add up and can create a bit of a monster.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one, holistic approach to sales prospecting, lead generation, lead enrichment, and lead qualification, book a demo for Similarweb Sales Intelligence today.

FAQs

What are the most useful tools for prospecting?

Two very useful tools for prospecting are Similarweb Sales Intelligence and Mattermark.

What is a sales prospecting tool?

A sales prospecting tool is any software that helps you automate repetitive tasks, helping you to identify the right prospects for your business and create engaging outreach for them.