For outbound sales teams, prospecting software is essential to finding new leads and nurturing them into customers.
Sales prospecting tools for lead generation are critical for helping sales representatives find, qualify, and reach more prospects. These tools streamline the prospecting process and can help sales teams close more deals. But if you don’t know which prospecting tools to use or whether your sales prospecting tools are integrated with your CRM, you’re looking at hours of hunting down contact info across multiple platforms and doing manual data entry.
Fortunately, any SaaS platform worth its salt is going to come equipped with plenty of integrations that can be enabled with just a few clicks. Some CRMs, like Nutshell, also come equipped with built-in prospecting tools.
We’ve wrangled up a list of the best prospecting tools for sales that integrate with your CRM—either natively or through Zapier—and make finding and engaging with your most promising prospects a breeze.
Sales prospecting is the process of finding and connecting with potential customers with the goal of converting them into buyers. Sales teams use sales prospecting to fill their pipeline, establish relationships with prospects, and ultimately generate more revenue.
What are the benefits of sales prospecting tools?
Using the right sales prospecting software can bring many benefits to a company. That’s because these tools streamline and simplify the sales prospecting process, which can otherwise be time-consuming and inefficient.
Here are a few benefits of using sales prospecting tools:
1. Making prospecting more efficient
Sales prospecting isn’t just one action — it requires a strategy to discover prospects, determine whether they would be a likely customer or client, and then reach out to start a relationship. The success of each of these steps depends on whether a sales team has accurate information about prospects.
Sales prospecting tools make the process much easier and help teams accomplish more. The right tool can provide data like a prospect’s purchasing history, industry, budget, company size, and contact information.
This helps sales teams identify what services or products the prospect might be interested in and successfully make contact — without spending hours on manual research.
2. Generating higher-quality prospects
There’s little more frustrating for sales team members than spending time nurturing a relationship with a prospect only to find out that they’re not interested in the product, don’t have the budget, or aren’t the decision-maker for the purchase.
In these situations, having higher-quality prospects would have saved time and potentially led to more sales.
Sales prospecting tools provide crucial information about prospects so your team can filter their search and find the people and companies that are most likely to buy.
3. Finding a greater number of prospects
Sales prospecting tools also help salespeople find more new leads than they would be able to while searching manually.
By using filters in their search and other automation features that sales prospecting tools offer, your team can quickly find, qualify, and contact more potential buyers, filling your pipeline with more leads you can work toward a sale.
The top 25 sales prospecting tools
Sales prospecting tools vary greatly in their features and price. Selecting the best prospecting tools for your business requires considering all of your options and determining the best fit. Here are a few of the most popular prospecting software options in different categories to help start your search:
B2B sales prospecting tools
B2B prospecting tools offer advantages when your company sells its products or services to businesses. Finding these leads may look different from finding individual customers. Here are some of the best B2B prospecting tools for your sales team:
ProspectorIQ gives you access to over 200 million people and companies across the United States. Using powerful filters, your sales team can search for and identify more of your ideal customers, then add them as leads and contacts to Nutshell in just a few clicks. Pipeline = filled.
This tool gives you access to contact information such as company revenue, location, number of employees, and whether a person has an email, phone number, and LinkedIn account available, so you can determine if they fit your ideal customer profile. By unlocking and adding the new contact to Nutshell, you can leverage Nutshell’s sales automation feature to start sending emails, text messages, making phone calls, and more to nurture a relationship.
Along with ProspectorIQ, adding Nutshell IQ to your Nutshell plan also unlocks:
VisitorIQ: Want to target the companies that are already interested in your products and services? VisitorIQ identifies the companies visiting your website and uncovers important information about them, then lets you add the company to Nutshell to start reaching out.
PeopleIQ: PeopleIQ identifies and reveals contact data for the people working for the companies you already have in Nutshell, whether you identified them using VisitorIQ, ProspectorIQ, or just already have them in your CRM. This lets you get your message in front of the right person faster.
Find your ideal customer from your CRM
Connect with your future buyers and spend less time doing it!
Define your ideal customer and ProspectorIQ does the heavy lifting, so you can add new contacts to your CRM and start making more sales!
With Clearbit Prospector, sales reps can generate targeted lead lists with up-to-date contact information in seconds. Clearbit provides reps access to 200 million contacts at 20 million companies, and 85 different data points to filter through them all.
There are also several options through Zapier for connecting Clearbit to your CRM of choice, so that all your new contacts automatically flow into your company’s “source of truth.”Related:Nine must-have CRM integrations to optimize your business
3. Datanyze
Datanyze is a cheap and lightweight Chrome extension that allows salespeople to get highly accurate information about their prospects in a matter of seconds. One strong point in Datanyze’s favor is that they take privacy seriously and over-deliver on all the legal requirements associated with finding information about people online.
Datanyze’s Chrome extension-as-default interface makes performing prospect research a breeze, as there’s no cumbersome user interface serving as an obstacle between research and outreach. It’s definitely worth checking out (for free.) Paid plans start at $21 per month, with 960 credits per year, at an average cost of just over 25 cents per lead.
4. Vainu
Vainu’s real-time company data platform collects available information from open and public sources, transforms this raw data into meaningful company facts, and connects the data to our customers’ business systems.
Vainu connects with popular CRMs to help you find best-fit customers and engage with them the right way. The platform also connects with several marketing automation platforms to prioritize inbound leads and personalize your campaigns.
Thanks to these integrations, you can:
Fix data irregularities and update stale information lurking in your CRM
Fill in blanks in your data with their exhaustive firmographic, technographic, and signals information
Automate workflows based on data triggers
Get a holistic company overview in one glance
5. Albacross
Albacross collects valuable information about your website visitors. This lead generation service identifies companies that are interested in your business, their size, revenue, industry, location, and contact details of their decision-makers.
Additionally, the platform provides insights into the behavior of your website visitors, such as time spent on your website and buyer consideration stage. This functionality goes a long way toward optimizing your prospecting time.
Albacross’s seamless integration with Zapier easily connects it to a wide range of applications such as different CRM solutions and outreach tools.
6. InsideSales.com Playbooks
The biggest feature of InsideSales.com Playbooks is its ability to create and suggest automated outreach sequences based on a lead’s previous behavior. InsideSales.com can also update contact lists with up-to-date information so that your emails never bounce and your calls always go through.
InsideSales.com’s native integrations allow you to build pipelines faster within your CRM by suggesting contacts you should target and how you should engage with them.
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Crunchbase focuses on private and public companies and features filters based on company, investor, and funding data. As a B2B prospecting tool, Crunchbase can help teams find potential leads as well as investors and funding opportunities.
The platform also lets you contact prospects from inside to streamline prospecting. Many users also appreciate that Crunchbase collects news stories about the companies you track and provides tools for market monitoring so teams have access to industry trends.
With all of its resources for finding funding and investment opportunities, plus conducting market research, Crunchbase can be a valuable resource for growing companies and those looking to sell to customers based on information like buying power.
Free sales prospecting software
Many sales prospecting tools cost a monthly or annual fee per user. However, there are a few free options available that might suit your business needs:
8. Wiza
Wiza is a large database of professionals that sales teams, marketers, and recruiters can use to find new leads, employees, and more. Filters include industry, name, job title, and contact information.
One of Wiza’s biggest features is the ability to export leads and their contact data from LinkedIn. You can export up to 100,000 contacts from LinkedIn at a time. And with an integration, you can send the data to your CRM.
Wiza isn’t entirely free, but it offers up to 20 email and 5 phone number unlocks per month. The free version, however, doesn’t come with CRM integration.
9. Clutch
Clutch is a free platform that acts as a directory of all kinds of businesses worldwide. You can easily find companies in a range of industries and specialties, from app development and IT services to warehousing and distribution. Companies use Clutch to find service providers, but salespeople could also use the platform to find prospects.
While you search, you can filter your results by categories like location and industry, then search by budget, size, and more.
10. Capterra
Similar to Clutch, Capterra is a source for finding service and software providers. Users can compare pricing, features, and more for their search results. Capterra is especially useful for companies looking for verified reviews on different software and services.
Depending on your industry, your sales team can use Capterra to find businesses that might be interested in your software or services and generate new leads. You can save potential leads on the dashboard to pursue later.
11. TextMagic
TextMagic is a business text-messaging platform that sales teams can use to target prospects with SMS notifications, alerts, reminders, and confirmations. Using their API, you can integrate TextMagic with your business and text directly from your own app.
If you have a Nutshell account, you can use TextMagic to reach hundreds of clients a day with bulk, templated text messages, or text individual contacts directly from Nutshell. Nutshell will automatically save a copy of those text conversations on your customer timelines, and you can receive replies from
12. LeadBoxer
Which leads are more likely to close? Who should sales reps extend a more personal touch to? LeadBoxer can answer these questions and more with its lead generation and scoring software. It does so by carefully tracking a lead’s actions across your site, emails, and social media, then assigning them a lead score that illustrates the likelihood that they’ll buy.
Integrating LeadBoxer to your CRM, whether through Zapier or otherwise, makes it easy to create new contacts within your CRM using the leads generated and scored by LeadBoxer.
13. Crystal
What kind of communication styles and outreach methods do leads best respond to? That’s the question Crystal answers. Get valuable info about a lead’s personality so that you can take your message personalization to the next level. Crystal also offers communication advice so that you can make the best first impression possible.
Crystal offers a Chrome extension to view personality insights while browsing social media sites. You can also integrate Crystal with your CRM, so you can receive communication insights for leads as you work
14. LeadIQ
On average, sales reps spend only 25% of their time selling. LeadIQ increases sales and marketing efficiency by allowing your sales team to focus on higher-value activities. The LeadIQ tool saves sales reps an average of six hours per week on manual data entry alone.
LeadIQ enables your sales team to reach the right prospects at the ideal companies. You can capture leads directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator or any website with one click and add them straight into your favorite sales tools. It takes 25 clicks, on average, to create an account in Salesforce; LeadIQ does it in three, which means your sales reps will reach the right prospects faster.
15. Hunter
Hunter is a prospecting and email outreach tool. The platform helps teams find relevant leads and unlock their email addresses, then send personalized cold outreach emails in bulk. And with an email verifier score, Hunter helps you protect your sender reputation and minimize bounces.
If all you know is a domain, you can still find verified emails. Hunter lets you search by domain and choose which person you’d like to contact based on the results.
With Hunter’s intent search, teams can also search for potential buyers based on company updates, those searching for funding, and companies that are recruiting.
Premium sales prospecting tools
While free sales prospecting tools may work fine for the needs of some sales teams, if your company is interested in more robust features, the options below may be for you. Read on for some of the best prospecting tools for sales that offer premium tools for sales teams:
16. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo tracks down your leads’ contact info, uses AI to suggest similar contacts to reach out to, and discovers intent signals such as projects that companies are beginning. With this information in hand, your reps can capitalize on and better communicate with prospects that have the strongest intent to buy.
Reply combines prospect discovery with email automation. The Chrome extension lets you add leads to a Reply account with a few clicks. From there, you can design a multichannel outreach sequence to connect with prospects over several days.
Reply’s AI features can sort leads by how interested they are and suggest email copy and length with the highest probability of converting.
Reply also offers several CRM integrations to help streamline prospecting. Sync contacts across platforms, add contacts from your CRM to a Reply campaign, and create new lead profiles in your CRM when you receive responses in Reply.
With Overloop, there are several ways to find leads and their contact information. Use the Chrome extension to find lead emails when browsing LinkedIn. Or, search a website domain for all associated emails. Once you have a lead list built, use Overloop to set up drip campaigns and automatic follow-ups.
Overloop natively integrates with several CRMs, so you can cut down on manual data entry by creating new leads in your CRM based on activity you capture in Overloop.
19. Outreach
Once you have a list of target accounts, Outreach can help you make a quality first impression. The platform can suggest different automated outreach sequences across email, phone, SMS, and LinkedIn mail. There are also personalization tools that allow you to tailor messages at scale, giving reps more time to focus on meetings or speaking directly with prospects and less time on composing emails.
Mailshake specializes in scaling up your cold email outreach efforts without sacrificing personalization. Build outreach sequences with touch points across multiple platforms, from Twitter to email, so that you’re always top of mind with prospects. The simple and intuitive dashboard lets you see where you stand in your outreach efforts.
Mailshake offers native integrations with HubSpot, Pipedrive, and a few other CRMs, as well as more through Zapier.
21. SharpSpring
For those looking for an all-in-one sales and marketing platform, SharpSpring is a comprehensive solution. In addition to designing and automating email sequences, SharpSpring can identify anonymous website visitors, track their activity, and assign them a lead score to keep your prospecting efforts focused.
SharpSpring has over a dozen different CRM integrations to help you get the most out of the platform. These integrations will keep contact information synced across platforms, so there’s no need for constantly importing and exporting data files.
22. Salesloft
Want a little more information about a lead before initiating contact? SalesLoft is an email automation tool that also provides lead intelligence, such as activity history, personality traits, and relevant news updates. SalesLoft can then use that information to suggest the best outreach methods and times for engaging with that lead.
SalesLoft offers native integrations with a few CRMs so that you can automatically log SalesLoft activity within your CRM. These integrations can also sync data across platforms and negate the need for manual data entry.
23. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder takes a look at who is visiting your site, then monitors their activity to help qualify them as a lead. The platform can also enrich contact data so you’re never left searching for the right email or manually doing data entry. If you already have some target accounts in mind, Leadfeeder can send you updates about when they visit your site.
Leadfeeder integrates with several CRMs to automatically create and update lead profiles with information gathered by the platform. There are even more integrations through Zapier so you can connect the tool with your CRM of choice.
24. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to take advantage of the social network’s user base of over 600 million professionals. Find new leads with the advanced search options, then let the tool suggest new leads for you. Sales Navigator also gives you crucial updates about target accounts, such as job changes or press releases.
Sales Navigator integrates with several CRMs so that you can save lead and account searches with a single click. Check out LinkedIn’s partner directory to discover which CRMs the platform currently works with.
Last on our list is Cognism, a platform with prospecting, intent monitoring, and a Chrome extension. Cognism helps teams find potential buyers with verified contact information and companies that are actively searching for solutions.
Cognism also offers data enrichment to deliver fresh insights when you need them. And with buyer intent data, teams can identify companies in the market for their products and services and target them directly.
4 essential sales prospecting techniques
Despite the range of sales prospecting software available, your team might be wasting time using them if they aren’t using an effective sales prospecting technique. Understanding the sales prospecting techniques that work for your business and finding the best tools for accomplishing your goals can help you reach a higher volume of qualified prospects and drive greater sales success.
Sales teams use a variety of sales prospecting techniques to generate leads. Though prospecting doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution, your team can use tried and tested methods to make the most of your prospecting time.
So what are three prospecting techniques that can help you find leads? Here are some of the best:
1. Use LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social media platform specifically for business professionals, allowing you to share updates about your company and connect with others in the same industry. LinkedIn and similar networking sites can be great for network marketing, when you reach prospects already existing in your professional network.
It’s critical to be active on the platform and genuinely engage with ideal customers, other industry professionals, and their content. Genuine engagement and relationship building is more beneficial for your prospecting efforts than random interactions.
2. Engage in customer segmentation
An essential part of a successful sales prospecting strategy is customer segmentation. Chances are that your customers tend to think or behave similarly or have other commonalities like demographics or geographic location. When you understand how to identify key customer segments, you can develop a more targeted prospecting technique that reaches your ideal customers.
Create ideal customer profiles for the types of customers interested in your product or service, and perform market research to determine how your offerings might resonate with these people.
3. Take advantage of automation
Sales prospecting can be time-consuming and often feel fruitless. You can use automation through sales engagement software to streamline the process and reduce some of the busy work. Automation also lets your sales team focus on their most important work, helping them be more successful.
There are many ways your sales team can use automation in their sales prospecting techniques. For example, sending automated emails through your CRM allows you to target specific audiences with email drip sequences based on their actions within your pipeline. Another opportunity for automation is using prospecting tools in your network marketing to schedule posts.
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AI is another helpful feature you can find in many sales prospecting tools. Whether you’re growing a new business or expanding your enterprise, AI provides ways for your entire team to work more efficiently across a variety of sales tasks.
With AI for sales prospecting, you can:
More quickly identify people who meet your ideal customer profile
Tips for choosing the right sales prospecting tools
Selecting the right sales prospecting tools for your business may seem difficult, especially with all the options available for sales professionals. Remembering a few key tips will help ensure you pick a solution that meets your sales team’s needs.
1. Assess your business needs
The sales prospecting tools your sales team implements should specifically meet your business needs. After all, a prospecting tool is only useful as far as it helps you achieve your sales goals. Tools that don’t provide enough features or are difficult to use will only make your sales team’s job harder and may end up not being used at all.
Consider what sales strategy you hope to accomplish with a sales prospecting tool, such as generating new sales leads or nurturing existing professional relationships. Think about factors like the size of your sales team, your ideal customer’s behavior, and how your prospects prefer to be contacted.
2. Consider your budget
Budget is another important consideration for your team as you select the best sales prospecting software for your company size. A free option may suit your needs just fine, but you may have special considerations that require a paid plan. Weigh your budget against your business needs and the features you need from a sales prospecting tool.
3. Evaluate tool features and integrations
Take a look at the features of each sales prospecting tool your team is considering. Do you need to find prospects’ email addresses, keep in touch after your first engagement, or contact people with specific job titles within a company? Sales prospecting tools may help you accomplish these goals differently.
It’s also important to consider whether the prospecting tool integrates with your CRM. Integrating your sales prospecting tool with your CRM is extremely valuable, as it allows you to automate lead management tasks like email marketing and keep track of where your leads are along your pipeline.
Looking for an easy-to-use CRM with powerful features and lots of integrations?
A free trial of any platform is incredibly valuable, as it allows you to determine whether the solution will meet your needs.
Sign up for multiple free trials of different sales prospecting tools if you can. Use your own data or try working on a couple of new leads generated through the platform. Then you’ll be able to tell whether the user interface, data quality, analytics, and other features meet your expectations.
5. Measure the effectiveness of your sales prospecting tools
Finally, it’s critical to continue measuring your sales prospecting tool’s ROI. You should be keeping track of multiple metrics that can tell you how effective your solution is, including:
Number of new prospects per month
Percentage of these new leads who actually convert
Quality of data sources, like the accuracy of phone numbers and email addresses
Frequently asked questions
Want to know more about finding the right tool for your sales prospecting process? Here are answers to a few more questions you may have about the topic:
1. What is a sales prospecting tool?
A prospecting tool is a platform companies use to find leads, qualify them, and generate sales. These tools often use integrations and automation to streamline certain tasks in the prospecting process, such as finding emails and setting up meetings.
2. How do you do sales prospecting?
Prospecting can be done in several different ways besides using a sales prospecting tool, including cold calling, networking at events, emailing, using social media, and getting referrals.
3. What are the most useful tools for prospecting?
The most useful tools for prospecting are the ones that provide the features your sales team needs and are intuitive. A sales prospecting tool is only valuable if it is easy enough for your team to use to actually generate leads.
4. What are the five P’s of prospecting?
The five P’s of prospecting are five key points to remember when prospecting. The five P’s are:
Preparation
Purpose
Personalization
Practice
Perseverance
5. What are the best prospecting techniques?
Sales teams use many different sales prospecting techniques. Here are nine of the most effective for your representatives to consider:
Make warm calls instead of cold calls by interacting with them in some way before you make your first call or email.
Become a trusted resource, whether through sharing content on your LinkedIn or company website or speaking at conferences and trade shows.
Reference a basic script when reaching out to people who fit your ideal customer profiles, but remember to keep the conversation natural.
Build relationships before you start selling.
Send engaging emails that are personalized to your prospects. Use an email marketing tool to automate communication.
Ask customers if there is anyone in their professional network you could connect with.
Network at events in your industry. Focus on building brand awareness and increasing your company’s presence in the space.
Spend time networking online, whether on social media or discussion boards. This is another way to build influence and make relationships with potential prospects.
Remember to follow up after the initial contact with a prospect.
Supercharge your CRM
Sales prospecting tools are incredibly helpful for reaching your sales goals, if you know how to use them right. Integrating your platforms allows you and the other sales reps on your team to get back to doing what you do best, which is offering a personal touch to your most promising leads.
With ProspectorIQ, you can easily add your new prospects right into your CRM to start working the leads—no integrations with other sales prospecting tools required! Use ProspectorIQ to identify new prospects, VisitorIQ to pinpoint qualified website visitors, and PeopleIQ to zero in on decision-makers.
