The Best Prospecting Tools to Feed Pipeline-Hungry Sales Teams
Updated: Jan 26, 2022
Outbound sales can be frustrating for SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) if they don’t have the right prospects, to begin with. The wide gap between your ideal customer and the so-called prospects that reps chase makes conversion nearly impossible.
This is why it’s important to use the right prospecting tools. They help SDRs target better and convert faster, making your sales process more efficient and disciplined.
In no particular order, here’s our list of the nine best prospecting tools.
1. Lusha
How Lusha works:
If you’re targeting a particular organization, you may choose to include additional filters like location and role within that organization. Otherwise, you may filter by company location, size, industry, job title, and so on to get a list of prospects you can reach out to.
Results will reveal available contact details including work email, phone number, and so on. You can save the results in one of the popular CRMs or create your own lists within Lusha.
Lusha features:
Allows multiple profile scraping to save you time
A huge database of 100M business profiles, 60M emails, 50M direct dials
Available integrations depend on the plan you choose
Lusha reviews:
4.3 out of 5 on G2 (1,000+ reviews)
Lusha pricing:
Free plan for up to 5 contacts a month
Paid plan starts at $99/mo
2. Apollo
How Apollo works:
Just like you’d expect any of the best sales prospecting tools to let you apply filters, Apollo too lets you search for prospects based on various criteria. Here, you can also use filters like tech stack and funding received by your target prospects.
In addition to the prospecting database and search, Apollo allows you to set email sequences. This makes it a major name even among the list of the best B2B prospecting tools.
Apollo features:
Learn which prospects you’ve worked with earlier, at which organization
Gmail extension, in addition to a Chrome extension
Call recording facility available
Apollo reviews:
4.7 out of 5 on G2 (500+ reviews)
Apollo pricing:
Free plan for up to 150 emails a month
Paid plan starts at $49/mo after a 14-day free trial
3. Snov.io
How Snov.io works
Snov.io ranks among the top prospecting tools because it offers a wide array of services, such as email list cleaning. Using Snov, you can grab email addresses from social profiles, by name and domain, location, or from any website you wish to target.
You may find email addresses individually or in bulk, based on domains and other criteria.
Snov.io features
Campaign building also includes A/B testing
Chrome extension that allows you to tracks Gmail email opens
Share credits as well as information like do-not-email within teams
Snov.io reviews
4.5 out of 5 on G2 (100+ reviews)
Snov.io pricing
Plans begin at $33/mo
You get 2 months free on annual plans
4. Cognism
How Cognism works
While meeting your sales prospecting requirements, Cognism lays a great deal of stress on compliance. Its AI-driven platform will match the right prospects with the criteria you select. That makes it one of the best sales prospecting tools when it comes to the reliability of data.
You can also learn which companies are hiring. Or use the intent data feature to track your ideal buyer persona’s movement to learn about their interest in your product or solution.
Cognism features
Over 400M B2B profiles and up to 16 data points on each individual
Claim to be leaders in European data for B2B leads
Information on funding and changes in positions of people you target
Cognism reviews
4.7 out of 5 on G2 (150+ reviews)
Cognism pricing
Pricing not disclosed
Demo account available on request
5. LeadIQ
How LeadIQ works
You’ll find LeadIQ in almost any list of the best B2B sales prospecting tools not only because of its features but also because of the controls it lets you exercise. For example, you can control the quality of email addresses or data types your teams can capture.
That means you can always be sure your teams are in full compliance with your own engagement policies.
LeadIQ features
Can capture email addresses from LinkedIn or other websites
Runs webinars and carries resources on how you can improve prospecting
Verifies and enriches prospect data, then checks and updates the existing records in your CRM
LeadIQ reviews
4.1 out of 5 on G2 (250+ reviews)
LeadIQ pricing
Plans start at $60/mo; free trial available
Access to the LeadIQ database is available only for Pro and Enterprise plans
6. ZoomInfo
How ZoomInfo works
ZoomInfo’s contact accuracy score is 90 to 100, which is really good even among the best sales prospecting tools. You just specify the company or the industry and you’ll get all the contact details that your sales or marketing teams need.
You can also get further data like personal emails, organizational charts, in addition to the regular contact details.
ZoomInfo features
Conversation intelligence service for a consistent strategy
Intent data that lets you track people searching for solutions similar to yours
Over 300 attributes that help you define prospects better
ZoomInfo reviews
4.4 out of 5 on G2 (5,000+ reviews)
ZoomInfo pricing
Undisclosed pricing
Free trial available
7. BuiltWith
How BuiltWith works
You can create your prospecting list by specifying the technology used or by a keyword. You can apply filters in a way that will reveal contacts of companies based in a certain location and investing a certain amount in a certain technology.
BuiltWith also lets you conduct cyber risk auditing, which tells you what steps an organization has taken (or not taken) to keep its website safe and secure.
BuiltWith features
Categorized list of over 2 million eCommerce websites and 53,260 technologies
Competition comparison tells what other tech your prospects are using as trials
One of the best tools to search for contacts by technologies used
BuiltWith reviews
4.3 out of 5 on G2 (50+ reviews)
BuiltWith pricing
Plans start at $295/mo
The highest plan lets you access an unlimited number of technologies and keywords
8. Hunter
How Hunter works
Just like with most other prospecting tools, you can find leads by domain or other details. With over 107M professional emails indexed, Hunter.io is easily one of the best prospecting tools out there.
Hunter is also special because they are very transparent about how they collect data and how they remove data that are no longer publicly available.
Hunter features
Compose and schedule campaigns from your Gmail account
Find and verify email addresses right in your spreadsheet with Google sheets add-on
Find blog authors’ contact details in bulk with the Author finder feature
Hunter reviews
4.3 out of 5 on G2 (350+ reviews)
Hunter pricing
Free trials give you 25 searches and 50 verifications every month
Paid plans start at $49/mo, and each paid plan gets priority support
9. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
How LinkedIn Sales Navigator works
Being the world’s largest professional online network, LinkedIn naturally enjoys some advantages even when you compare it with some of the top prospecting tools. Not surprisingly, it offers features for both sales prospecting as well as job search and career advancement.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator can give you direct access to the LinkedIn direct message inbox of prospects through a feature called InMail. The number of InMails you may use vary with the plan you’ve opted for. Read more on LinkedIn Prospecting.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator features
The Professional plan has features useful for career growth
All plans let you see who’s viewed your profile in the past 90 days
LinkedIn Sales Insight product is available as an add-on
LinkedIn Sales Navigator reviews
4.2 out of 5 on G2 (1,300+ reviews)
LinkedIn Sales Navigator pricing
Paid plans begin at $79.99/mo
Closing remarks
The best B2B sales prospecting tools shorten your sales cycles and help your team spend more time selling instead of searching or entering data. Because of the gigantic amount of data that’s now available, it’s only sensible that you leverage every shortcut that you can.
It’s also important to note that all these tools have a Chrome extension that works with LinkedIn. Once you land on the LinkedIn page of a prospect, the tool will reveal the contact details of the person.
One half of the Prospecting equation
Don't forget, finding the right prospects is only one part of the equation, it's how you go about engaging them that drives results.
There are a plethora of other tools out there focussing on this engagement portion of the SDR workflow, we'll cover those in another post, but be certain you'll be leaving leads on the table if you attempt to talk to prospects in the same generic terms as you found them in your filters.
The only way to avoid this disconnect is to show relevancy in your outreach. If you're already using LinkedIn or Sales Navigator to identify prospects let us show you the fastest way to achieve this with instant personalization - download our Chrome Add-On below, it's free to start 👇.