Top Prospecting Tools

Great prospecting tools are critical to building your pipeline.

Prospecting is the earliest stage of the sales pipeline process, where you must find and contact the right people who are most likely to purchase your product or service. 

There’s plenty of risk at the prospecting stage…

You may connect with a prospect who ends up being unqualified (read this to learn what to do with an unqualified sales lead).

Or you might waste an afternoon building a list of hundreds of contacts, only for half of them to be invalid.

If you make these crucial mistakes during prospecting, you’ll eventually run out of opportunities and waste tons of time chasing people who aren’t interested.

Without the right prospecting tools, you could waste twice as much time as your competitors building your pipeline (and we all know that no matter what industry you’re in, time is money).

Why waste precious time making mistakes or repeating the same monotonous tasks (i.e., list-building, data entry, etc.) when there are fantastic prospecting tools out there that will fill your pipeline for you automatically?

So if you don’t want to run out of leads and you want to increase ROI, you need the right prospecting tools to help you out. These tools help you reduce the time and effort it takes to make a sale by streamlining the lead generation and outreach process.

There are several categories of prospecting tools that you can use. And they all support you in defining your audience, finding potential customers, gathering contact info, establishing communication, managing data, and reviewing your results. 

The Best Prospecting Tools

Some essential prospecting tools you’ll need include: 

Sales Engagement Platform

A sales engagement platform helps your team interact with prospects across multiple channels (cold call, email, social media, etc.), track progress, and optimize for the best results. 

Example(s): Salesloft

CRM

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system helps you keep track of your leads and customers. When you come across a new lead, log as much helpful information as possible in your CRM (name, number, email, company name, number of employees, work number, etc.). You'll also want to track your interactions with the lead (what was discussed and when). That way, your communications are strategic, and you’ll know where each lead is in the sales funnel. 

Example(s): monday sales CRM, Zendesk 

Lead Generation Platform

A lead generation platform helps you define your ideal customer and find look-alike prospects that will most likely buy your product. 

Example(s): Seamless.AI

Contact Data Provider

A contact data provider (Seamless does this too!) helps you get the emails, cell phones, and direct dials you need to plan your outreach strategy properly.

Example(s): LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Email Sequencing Platform

An email sequencing platform can connect directly to your lead gen tool, CRM, or both. That way, you can email potential customers as soon as you find them and add them to your database automatically instead of manually entering them all one by one. 

Example(s): Woodpecker, SmartLead

Extra Tip

In addition to these essential prospecting tools, make sure that you’re constantly tracking your success. 

Track all the KPIs that will help you improve your prospecting in the future (check out this article on how to create realistic and measurable KPIs). These will include metrics like open rates on emails, A/B test results, demos booked, and conversion rates. 

Without critical insights like this, you won’t know how to identify weak points in your pipeline. You need prospecting tools to guide you, or you’re in the dark. 

The Leader of the Pack 

It might seem overwhelming to add all these different tools to your tech stack. But the great news is that Seamless.AI can help you with several prospecting tasks we outlined in this article, from lead generation to collecting accurate contact data! 

That’s right! Seamless uses artificial intelligence to research, validate, and very cell phones, emails, and direct dials. In fact, our AI has researched over 3 billion contact and company profiles, so you can consistently replenish your pipeline with real-time verified contact data.

Are you curious to see how you can build lists of hundreds of leads in minutes? Check out a free demo today and see the prospecting power of Seamless for yourself.