Essential Prospecting Sales Tools Your Business Should Have

Businesses need to continually acquire new customers to remain profitable and strong players in their specific industries. Due to competition from new entrants and old competitors, companies may lose some of their customers, which means shrinking sales, revenue, and profits. For this and other reasons, the business needs to initiate and develop new commercial relationships by looking for potential buyers for their products or services. And the goal of searching for the prospective customers is to take them through all the processes until they make them revenue-generating clients.

The Need to Use Prospecting Sales Tools

During the sales prospecting process, sales professionals encounter various questions such as the following:

•   How many companies in a given geographic area are in a given industry?
•   How many of those businesses have the cash allocation to buy my offerings?
•   Who is the best person to contact in each of those entities to sell my goods or services?

These questions are crucial because they help in initiating the prospecting process. However, finding the answers to them is no easy task and involves lots of manual research, developing several lists, and verifying the information. The good news is that sales personnel can avoid all of the manual work by leveraging sales prospecting tools. They will automate the research process, set notifications for various data, and validate the contacts such as email addresses, saving several hours a day.

However, the tools may cost your company some money that you need to budget for. But with a limited budget that cannot allow you to use the paid-for prospecting sales tools, you could consider the free tools. Fortunately, they can also do a good part of the work, helping you avoid so much hassle.

Free Prospecting Sales Tools

Here are some of the free tools that a business could use in its prospecting process:

FindThatLead

If you are looking for a lead generation tool that brings together prospecting, hunting for leads, and a feature for validating emails, then FindthatLead could be your ideal tool. Besides those functions, the searcher also comes with a Google Chrome extension to link up with the browser and look for email addresses on LinkedIn profiles or websites. Some of the critical features of this tool are:

•   Social search function to search the email addresses connected to social media handles or profiles
•   Lead search feature to look for email addresses associated with specific companies or domains
•   Email verifier, which checks if each of the email address obtained is correct and functional

With the free version, the salesperson enjoys restricted usage of a maximum of 50 monthly searches, 250 emails per day, Google Chrome extension, and one user. But with a paid version, which starts at around $49 per month, the business can have multiple users, a maximum of 18,000 searches monthly, and bulk data processing and export. Moreover, companies may work with a leader in providing B2B prospecting sales tools to enable their salespeople to cut the time spent preparing for the sales prospecting. The sales professionals can then use that time in the selling to get more clients, grow sales, and increase profits.

Hunter

This email address search and validation tool comes in handy for salespeople to get and verify the prospective customers’ email addresses. The main functionalities of these tools include:

•   Search tool to look up email addresses on the entire web using filters like domain and company name. If the prospect’s email address is missing on the web, it uses the employer’s company email address format to predict the prospect’s email address.
•   Email verification tool for ensuring that the email addresses generated are operational.
•   Google Chrome extension that finds email addresses associated with any site you are browsing.

Hunter’s free version allows a business to do 50 searches per month and use the Google Chrome extension. On subscribing, which starts from about $49 per month, the users get access to features like domain search export, priority support, and linking to a maximum of 20 Gmail accounts from which they can send emails.

Appolo.io

Appolo.io is a search tool that enables salespeople to find prospects from companies from all over the globe. While using this tool, you could use filters such as industry, number of employees, geographical location, and designation. The searcher looks web including social platforms and digital databases for people who match the description. The tool confirms their email addresses and facilitates sending a predesigned email to the prospects after listing them. Some of the notable features of this tool include:

•   A worldwide database of 200 million contacts and 10 million companies
•   Job change alert which sends a notification any time a prospect moves to another job
•   Third-party applications integration, for instance, with email clients like Gmail, CRM tools, and social platforms such as LinkedIn.

For no charge, the users can access the database, email validation, and basic filters. On the other hand, starting from about $32 per month for each user, the features available include automated email workflows, advanced filters, and reporting.

Skrapp

Skrapp is a prospect hunting and email verification tool that comes in handy for sales professionals to compile a prospects’ directory and check their email addresses, especially for outreach drives. Some of the most crucial features of the tool include:

•   Search feature which looks up domains to obtain verified email addresses of the prospects associated with a specific company or web domain.
•   Google Chrome extension for integrating the tool with the Chrome browser making it possible to search email addresses related to the web pages you are browsing.

The free version of the tool allows up to 150 searches per month for only one user. And for the paid version that starts from around $49 for two users, there is access to features like data export, list cleaning, and LinkedIn search archiving.

Conclusion

The above list of sales prospecting tools is not exhaustive because there are other tools like Google Alerts, which is entirely free to use, and Mention, which has both a free and paid version. The critical thing is to use the prospecting sales tools to get leads’ contact information, confirm their correctness, and if they are functional for easy sending of emails to them to initiate the sales process. The professionals need to know how to optimize the tools, and where necessary, work with leading companies in marketing to help set up the tools for them, customize them to their needs, and train them on how to use them.