Useful Tools to Help Build Your Prospecting Lists
Updated: Feb 26, 2022
Sales technology is a hot sector. Everyone wants to make more out of it and in turn, there are many, many tools out there that promise to help you get those sales.
But if you’re looking for a new tool, having more options doesn’t make choosing one any simpler, as anyone with a Netflix subscription can testify.
It helps to break things down, and you’ve already done the first part by identifying you need one of the most crucial first steps in an effective outreach process: building out a targeted list of prospects.
In this post we’ll break them out further to help you test and decide what is most useful for your business objectives, along with some key markers at the time of writing (pricing and G2 rating):
How to build account lists from web technologies companies use
Tools to build account lists from identifying your anonymous website visitors
Build account and contact lists from social data
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Yup, you’re a salesperson, of course, you’ve heard of it.
But depending on the size of your org, you may not have yet seen value in upgrading your LinkedIn outreach to a Sales Navigator paid plan as it can be relatively pricey.
As LinkedIn’s native tool, it’s the natural extension to enhancing and drilling more effectively into the searches, you’re likely doing already on the largest professional social network.
To make the most of its advanced search filters, we recommend you work through defining your ICP before checking out the free trial. Tag, segment, and work through your lists.
But there are other advantages too. All plans give full visibility on who might be checking out your profile as well as options to set up alerts, CRM integrations, and InMail credits. You also get access to a load of LinkedIn learning resources that offer added value to honing your learning towards becoming an effective salesperson.
Rating 4.3/5 from 1,500 reviews
Pricing
3 plans from $79.99 to Enterprise
FollowerWonk
When you’re building out lists for outreach, any information that will provide you extra insight on your prospects will give you the edge when it comes to speaking with them.
That’s why we’ve included FollowerWonk in this list, as although we don’t recommend it as your primary source for list building, if your audience is likely to be active on Twitter then you can deploy a silver bullet in discovering new prospects based on their associated Twitter activity and interests.
All juicy stuff to reference for prospecting follow-up.
Lists are created in the platform from searching keywords, bios, and connections. You can then understand these list segments with social analytics.
Rating 4.3 from 30 reviews
Pricing
Search and export credits
2 plans from $29 to $79
Useful online directories to build account lists from
Crunchbase
With its origins tracking startups and their funding rounds, Crunchbase now represents a fantastic database for getting a full spectrum of insight into virtually any company out there, private and public alike.
Individual searches can be performed for free, useful for reference in your real-time outreach messaging research, but paid plans unlock bulk searches where you can filter companies at scale based on all sorts of verified sources of data.
As with Sales Navigator, we strongly recommend ensuring you have a well-defined ICP to reap Crunchbase’s full benefits, which include an account recommendation engine and contact data.
Rating 4.5 / 5 from 80+ reviews
Pricing
Per User
Starter: $29 | Pro: $49 | Enterprise: Custom
Sales Intelligence platforms dedicated to list building
Uplead
Uplead bills itself as a sales intelligence platform focused on data accuracy, using its own proprietary database sourced, verified, and vetted through a range of independent sources.
The platform itself is relatively straightforward and offers all the filters you might expect to help narrow down targeting, which lends the experience to high ease of use ratings.
With its global database at its core, Uplead represents a solid alternative to consider versus ZoomInfo, if your focus is on generating lead lists across a team at scale but perhaps are more budget-conscious. However, at the time of writing, they have yet to offer any CRM integrations.
Additional features include a Chrome extension, API, and bulk list uploads for enrichment and email verification.
Rating 5/5 from 400+ reviews
Pricing
Credits based
3 plans from $74 to $299
Zoominfo
The Enterprise-grade sales intelligence tool of the market, Zoominfo offers one of the most comprehensive databases out there, backed by numerous acquisitions along the way, including Discover.org.
This also means it’s also one of the more expensive and offers a full stack of additional capabilities that can be deployed end-to-end across both your sales and marketing efforts.
Additional features include buyer intent, process workflows, and CRM integrations such as pushing your lists to Salesforce.
And of course, you can filter account and contact lists from any combination of filters imaginable.
Rating 4.5/5 from 5,500 reviews
Pricing
Available on request, across 3 plans with increasing levels of platform access
Cognism
Cognism’s USP is its quality control for ensuring contact data is up-to-date and meets compliance standards. This may meet a particular objective of your list building criteria if your audience is in Europe but should be top of mind anyway other regions, following GDPR with its own privacy regulations such CCPA.
Its database can be queried for company, contact, technographic, intent data, and more, and pushes out to all the major CRMs.
There’s also a handy Chrome extension for real-time tagging and bagging LinkedIn contacted details into your lists.
Rating 4.7/5 from 230+ reviews
Pricing
Available on request
Lead411
Lead411 is a global database of potential leads that is verified through their proprietary process of “ESP Activity Confirmation”, which in other words means they check if a contact’s email is not gonna bounce before you do.
It also double verifies direct dials with location matching and checks with human dials.
Both of which promise to give you more accurate lists.
Rating 4.5/5 from 350 reviews
Pricing
3 plans from $900 to Enterprise
Build account lists from web technologies companies use
BuiltWith
If Sales Navigator is the go-to tool for building lists around personal and company profiles, BuiltWith represents the go-to tool if you want to target companies based on the technologies they are using.
Why is this useful?
Well, it depends on your offering. If you're selling something that integrates well with a specific technology or provides benefits to websites using a specific technology, or if you're scoping out competitors to try and get them to switch, it’s as useful as it gets.
Some obvious examples are targeting usage of specific eCommerce tools such as Shopify, payment providers, or if maybe you have a value prop for users using chatbots.
If you signup for the paid version, ensure sure you make the most of its price tag by using extra parameters such as traffic volume and tech stack spend.
BuiltWith also offers a free Google Chrome extension that is useful if you want to validate on a website manually.
Rating 4.3/5 from 48 reviews
Pricing
Free Chrome extension + 3 plans from $295 to $995
Build account lists through identifying your anonymous website visitors
Whilst you're busy building out cold lead lists and making sure they are as targeted as possible, don’t forget the ready-made opportunity for building out pre-targeted account lists right on your doorstep…
Most visitors who come to your website don’t end up signing up, but by them visiting in the first place means they still represent a pre-qualified opportunity waiting for you to follow up with.
The obvious challenge is that without that website form-fill, you can’t see who they are. However, the following tools allow you to match otherwise-anonymous visitors via their company IP address that you can use to build an account list out from there.
You will need your marketing or sales ops guy/gal to help set one of these up on your website, but it’s relatively straightforward. And if they haven’t thought of it before, then take the extra credit for pushing a new initiative!
All of the following do pretty much the same thing so we’ll just list the main features and urge you to make the most of their free trials before deciding on the solution that works best for you.
LeadFeeder
Website visitor IP matching, along with a range of 3rd party data connectors such as google analytics.
Also allows you to push data to CRM as well as use it for personalization of landing pages and live chat widgets.
Rating 4.3 /5 from 575+ reviews
Pricing
Free version with 7-day lookback, or paid version from € 79pm
Lead Forensics
Website visitor IP matching, with a range of 3rd party data connectors such as google analytics.
Also allows you to push data to CRM as well as use it for personalization of landing pages and live chat widgets.
Lead Forensics also has abilities for lead scoring and a mobile app that can be handy for setting up alerts.
Rating 3.8 / 5 from 200+ reviews
Pricing
Two plans, pricing available on request
Clearbit Reveal
Clearbit Reveal is part of a wider product range that Clearbit offers if you're interested in combining functions of your tech stack together with CRM enrichment and ad personalization ability, among other things.
The Reveal product itself operates off of the website visitor IP matching we have described and comes with all the 3rd party data connectors you need.
Rating 4.5/5 from 9 reviews
Pricing
Free, Business, and Startup plans with pricing available on request