I’ve previously outlined how sales prospecting tools work at the top of the sales stack, and now I’ll go into detail for the sales prospecting tools portion. These sales tools are essential for prospecting & outbound lead generation. Sales intelligence and lead prospecting should be a top priority for B2B and enterprise sales development teams. For the purposes of this article, I’ll cover sales prospecting tools designed for Account-based marketing (ABM), which means that the process is focused on targeting companies (accounts) and specific job titles at those companies, which is part of B2B marketing.
As far as tools & software for lead generation, the most common format is in web apps, or SaaS, along with Chrome extensions. At times, even the best technology can produce errors, or perhaps the data source was faulty to begin with.
The biggest challenges to starting outbound campaigns involve creating the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and having accurate data.
- Determining the qualifying criteria for accounts and titles within companies.
- Building a list of contacts based on said criteria
- Ensuring a quality database of email addresses and phone numbers.
Instantly finding anyone’s email on the internet was once a dream of the past, but is now possible through multiple methods, all thanks to innovative sales prospecting software.
Note: Some of the below products are part of a suite of products; I’ll list those that include sales prospecting tools below, otherwise you can find others in the list of the best cold email tools here.
Table of Contents
Wufasta
Wufasta is a platform of B2B sales prospecting tools & lead generation software that helps with data enrichment, finding contact emails based on domain, company name, first & last name, and other prospecting methods:
- Extract emails, phone numbers and social media profiles from domains
- Find emails from first name, last name, & company name
- Extract emails from social media profiles
For the sales prospecting component, users can upload a list of domains and then receive a CSV (Excel) file with contact data. This is otherwise known as domain enrichment. You can also input other data points (first name, last name, company name) in order to get emails. Wufasta also includes outbound drip email automation capabilities.
Proof
Proof allows for website & landing page personalization; which is something that normally falls under the umbrella of inbound marketing. However, one inevitable step in most outbound process involves a prospect visiting a website or landing page, which is why we’re including Proof in this list of sales prospecting tools. Personalization helps to increase conversions, whether it’s in outbound or inbound marketing.
Hubsell
Hubsell is a sales automation platform that combines human-powered prospecting with data-powered lead scoring and enrichment in order to provide users with highly targeted prospect data. There’s also an outbound lead generation component to the product that includes multi-channel campaigns via email and LinkedIn messages, making Hubsell a dual-layer solution. It integrates with major CRMs like SalesForce & HubSpot, as well as Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange email accounts. Hubsell was founded by Karan Sharma in Berlin, Germany.
FindThatLead
FindThatLead fills in the void left after Hunter’s LinkedIn integration was discontinued. It provides corporate emails along with verification. FindThatLead has a chrome extension and a Google Sheets integration. Founded by Gerard Compte in Spain, FTL helps open the market up to other growth hacking and outbound marketing enthusiasts.
Ocean.io
Ocean.io is a growth intelligence platform that integrates with your CRM to enrich data and create lookalike audiences in order to discover which segments your company could target.
UpLead
UpLead is a B2B contact database for lead generation. Founded by Will Cannon in Los Angeles, California, they are committed to helping sales teams build lists that have high data quality.
Prospect.io
Prospect.io is a another dual-layer solution, which combines a Google Chrome extension, which can harvest prospect information from LinkedIn profiles, and a cold email outreach platform into one. It’s a useful lead generation software if you utilize LinkedIn as a foundation of your research and sales intelligence activities. Fortunately, the marketplace has plenty of prospect.io alternatives.
LeadCandy
LeadCandy provides highly targeted sales leads by analyzing the customers of competitors & complementary products and by leveraging the network of teams to find referral paths to potential leads.
LeadIQ
LeadIQ allows users to prospect smarter. They provide verified work and personal emails, cell phone numbers, and other account data. As of September 2020, here is the pricing info for LeadIQ:
Their “Starter” plan is $75 per user, per month, with a maximum team size of 3 Uses. Each user gets only 250 emails and 25 mobile numbers.
LeadIQ’s “Pro” plan isn’t much better, as it starts at $7,200 per year. That includes 5 users; where each user gets merely 500 emails and 50 mobile numbers. Be sure to do your due diligence for LeadIQ alternatives.
Clearbit
Clearbit is a lead prospector’s dream come true. Clearbit has several products:
- Enrichment (to complete missing company info)
- Prospector (to find individual emails at a certain domain)
- Discovery (to find business similar to selected domains OR to set a search parameter)
- Reveal, which turns anonymous web traffic into company profiles based on their IP Address.
Clearbit has a self-serve model for anyone to use, in addition to a direct integration with Salesforce, along with Zapier connectivity.
A free version, Clearbit Connect, is a plugin for Gmail and G suite email that grants a certain amount of search credits (usually 100 or so) per month. It stopped working for me a few months ago, which is a shame. There are quite a few clearbit alternatives.
Leadworx
Leadworx can help identify anonymous website visitors, as well as help you configure automation rules & workflows, so that new leads can be acted on with their real-time API. This allows for the creation of custom audiences for Facebook and LinkedIn ads.
Albacross
Albacross is a powerful suite of B2B Lead Generation Tools; one of which takes care of collecting valuable information on your website visitors. It helps identify the unknown companies that are interested in your business, and shows you their size, revenue, industry, location, and their leaders’ contact details. Albacross is one of the primary alternatives to LeadFeeder.
What’s more is that Albacross integrates with Zapier, which means a wide range of applications are at your disposal, such as different CRM systems, email marketing tools, etc. Thus, you can effortlessly export your targeted leads to your CRM system, email outreach tool, etc.
Apart from this, Albacross comes with an account-based marketing solution, where you can buy and display advertisements targeted only to the peculiar companies you’re interested in. With Albacross, you’ll be able to boost your B2B sales pipeline by turning your website visitors into leads, and then eventually into paying customers.
Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is a sales intelligence tool that identifies the company of unknown website visitors. By integrating with Google Analytics, Leadfeeder can tell you what companies are browsing your website, and what their behaviour looks like. This represents a fusion of inbound and outbound marketing working in tandem. After qualifying visitors (based on which pages they viewed and/or for how long), you can then search for the right individuals in that account and send them to your CRM or marketing campaign via Zapier and various direct integrations.
Upon further review of their web analytics software, I am quite pleased with the data. Of course, there will be situations where you are merely told the name of the office space, cafe, hotel, university, or internet hosting service provider responsible for the WiFi network that users accessed your site from. When LeadFeeder does detect a valid company office, however, it can be useful for analyzing the efficacy of your demand generation efforts. Here is a bit of sample data:
Hunter
Hunter is a lower cost alternative to other enterprise sales prospecting tools. It previously had a Chrome extension for turning LinkedIn profiles into emails, but that feature has since been discontinued. The extension still works for domains, and it integrates with Google Sheets. There are many hunter alternatives because they use a credit system.
improver
Another Chrome extension tool for sales prospecting is improver. It’s an email finding tool to aid in B2B lead generation. Designed to be used with LinkedIn and other social media platforms, it makes lead list building much easier by showing contact information when visiting social media profiles.
Snov.io
Snov.io also has an email sending interface built-in to its product suite. Most interesting is its technology checker, where you can search for companies using various technologies, such as CMS, Analytics, eCommerce, and other categories.
Their platform is credits-based, however, which means that you are limited to set amount of prospects per month. Wufasta is one of the better Snov alternatives, as it allows for unlimited prospects each month.
Hexa.ai (now apart of Outbound Works)
Hexa.ai (formerly ProLeads.io) is a sales prospecting platform that aids in personalization and efficiency. Hexa provides data-driven prospecting by automating lead enrichment. It directly integrates with a plethora of data providers (Clearbit), emails tools, and CRM’s (Salesforce).
Update: This personalisation technology has been acquired by OutBoundWorks.
Oxyleads
Oxyleads was an outbound sales development software suite that included both prospecting and messaging components. Their services were terminate on September 25th, 2019. It’s quite common to see such technology including two or more layers in the sales stack under one roof.
Stirista Scout
Stirista Scout is a B2B Sales Prospecting Tool that aids in prospect segmentation and enrichment. It was created as an internal tool originally, since the company specializes in data enhancement for digital marketers.
AeroLeads
AeroLeads can provide you with phone numbers of prospects, which isn’t something as common as one might expect. There aren’t many Aeroleads alternatives.
Conclusion:
Leadfwd.io, Albatross, and Leadworx are good sales prospecting tools to use for identifying anonymous web traffic. Like Leadfeeder, Albatross also relies on data from Google Analytics, while LeadFWD and Leadworx use their own systems. Clearbit’s Reveal also has some similar functionality.
Wufasta arguably offers the best value for their software. It has several ways to find email addresses, and allows for unlimited lead exports, while other prospecting tools use an expensive credit system. Wufasta can be used for a monthly fee, while other software companies require purchasing an annual plan in advance, which is disadvantageous for newer businesses.
No, Leadfeeder can’t do this because they depend on Google Analytics for their data. So it won’t be able to help you with website personalization.
Account-based marketing, often abbreviated as ABM, is merely a subset of B2B marketing that focuses on the company/organisation you are targeting, rather than specific individuals.
Whether you fundamentally need help creating the right targeting profile, or merely need someone’s email address or contact info, sales prospecting tools are essential for enterprise sales teams.
The next part of the sales technology stack would be the messaging. Before you start running outbound campaigns, however, you’ll need to add your prospect data to your B2B Sales CRM Software. How you structure cold prospects, warm leads, and active customers will always vary, but if you plan ahead, it will make the sales cycle move along much smoother. One of the market leaders, DiscoverOrg recently acquired Zoominfo (which also owns Datanyze) in early 2019.
Disclosure: In some cases, I may have a relationship with the company listed, or receive some sort of benefit by listing them in here. Often enough, that’s in the form of a free account; although most of them have trial or demo versions available for anyone to test out.
sales automation
We at SalezShark are an adaptable stage to accumulate over a sales automation database from 28 Indian states. This affiliation gives an aggregate, wise, and formed a database for advertising computerization apparatuses India business directory and corporate authorities to execute their evaluation and access noteworthy data in a veritable way that is helpful to them.
Nolan Clemmons
It’s quite impressive that your firm was able to accumulate so much business data. Congratulations!
Karan Sharma
Hi Nolan, thank you for the mention. Very much appreciated.
James
In this day and age, these tools are necessary for generating leads and speeding up workflow. It made my much easier saving me lots of time. By the way, there is an Oxyleads extension I highly recommend giving it a try
Manju
Nice article with Nolan. When compare to others Snov.io is best.
Jackson
Hi Nolan,
Love the article! Definitely agree that prospecting and intelligence should be a top priority for B2B and enterprise teams.
I think a 4th big challenge when starting outbound campaigns is maximising your contact database by crafting well-written cold emails that your prospects will reply to at scale.
That’s the challenge we’re trying to solve at actionable.me. We’re an automated cold email outreach platform with a focus on making personalisation really fast (since personalisation increases response rates) and building tools that make responding to cold emails simple for your prospects.
If you’ve got a minute, we’d love your feedback on our tool! Here’s our website:
https://www.actionable.me
(Disclaimer: I’m a Co-Founder at actionable.me)
Agnes
Hi Nolan, thanks for including Oxyleads! We’re honored to be on the list.
Kate
Useful article, thanks! I want to suggest one more tool:
improver ✨ free chrome extension to find business and personal contacts as email address & phone number from social networks. Enjoy: https://improver.io/
Jordan
Well done! Very helpful tips. I have used a few lead generation tools in the past for my small business which allow me to get email addresses from twitter accounts or any website. That’s the greatest way that was ever invented for finding prospects for your business and then nurturing them into your clients, employees or promoters of your service. This is the main approach in building a sales cycle. Through trial and error I’ve settled my decision on Snovio and Hunter.
Joseph Klenke
Scout is another great prospecting tool! Give it a try!
https://scout.stirista.com/
SHUBHAM BANGADE
Nice Article! Finding prospects for your business and then nurturing them into leads are the building blocks of a sales cycle. Without prospects, there would be no leads, and without leads coming in at the top of your sales pipeline, you can’t expect sales at the bottom. I have use a tool called AeroLeads and it’s really helped a lot for my business growth.
Nolan Clemmons
You are quite right, Shubham. A steady flow of prospects and leads are essential for any B2B sales pipeline. I’ll check out AeroLeads.
Cheers,
-Nolan
Nick
Hey Nolan,
I think you could also include a lead generation automation service – Leadworx.
Leadworx automates inbound lead generation for B2B companies. It tracks the website visitors and finds out which company the visitor is from and how much time they spent and some insights on the company.
Once you know who’s visiting your website, you get contact information of decision makers working with those companies.
This process is automated and has been doing a decent job for companies like NapoleanCat, Curious Jane, Brainly, and thousands more.
(Disclaimer: I work with Leadworx) 🙂
Nolan Clemmons
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the note. I will check out Leadworx.
Cheers,
-Nolan