In simple terms, sales prospecting means looking for potential clients in order to grow the business's customer base and generate revenue streams. Day in and day out, sales reps spend most of their work hours in sales prospecting. Sales automation tool uses social media to build lead lists that include email, phone number ,social profiles and much more.
The task of sales reps is ardent and time-consuming. Worse still, not all the clients who show an intent will buy, either because they are not completely ready and are still awaiting the right time to buy the product, or because they are looking for cheaper alternatives. Some of these people wouldn't even be genuine or could be cybercrime suspects. You would want your prospect list to be free of such elements, and be a reliable information pool.
If you've ever worked in a sales team, you would know that good quality lead generation is way more time consuming than reaching out with them. You would always be constantly struggling to find a process that saves you all that time and effort. That's where sales prospecting tools equipped with sales automation comes into the picture. In a way, it makes sales cadence more effective and impactful.
Automation in outbound sales prospecting not only helps find more leads in less time, but those leads are of good quality, i.e. have far better chances of becoming prospects. With automation taking over, sales team can relax. Sales automation software allow you to simply enter criteria that you wish your target prospects must satisfy, as dataentry points, and the tool will present you with a list of such target prospects along with all their verified information.
In this post, we shall discuss four sales prospecting automation software that businesses can use to refine their prospecting process to help sales team function with ease.
Must Use Sales Prospecting tools:
As their tagline suggests, is far more than a sales prospecting automation software. This sales automation tool also offer capabilities such as content creating and lead generation from social media etc. The good thing - you sales team can use this platform whether you are a small business or a large company.
Over 10000 businesses are using Anyleads as of now as their sales prospecting automation tool. What makes Anyleads special from other sales automation tool is the ease of use that it delivers. It is also one of the most sought after sales automation tools because it comes with a great tracking ability that allows sales team to engage with their customers efficiently.
Let's look at some of the features that this sales prospecting software offers under the ' sales prospecting ' umbrella. We will not be looking at capabilities such as content creating and lead generation because they are beyond this article's scope. However, you can read more about such functionalities on Anylead's website.
The main functionalities that Anyleads covers for automated outbound sales prospecting include Domain Enrichment, Emailing, Analyzing, Syncing, and Managing. There are sub-functionalities of each of these functions. Let's dive deeper into this sales prospecting tool:
Domain related functionalities
- The first 'essential' work that this sales automation tool does for you is mining important data entry and information from a pre-fed list of domains. You simply need to upload domain names ( in a list format) and upload it. Sales prospecting automation tool - Anyleads will generate all the information related to the company for sales team, and also about all the employees working at this company, covering more than 40 data points.
- Next, using first name, last name and company name of a person you can find his valid email address. No need for tools like emailhunter! You also have the option to upload a list of company names and Anyleads sales prospecting feature will generate a file of domain names pertaining to those company names.
- You can verify emails in a matter of minutes and get a list of those email address only that are valid.
Email related functionalities/capabilities
- Begin by creating simple or complex campaigns using Anylead's drag-and-drop editor.
- Create and edit templates for your email. Their sales prospecting template editor is neat and can be used by anyone!
- Send your email to any platform that you like, or even to multiple senders in just a click.
- Track and analyze your email campaign's performance as soon as you've sent the hit button. Track open rates, click rates, and conversions from one dashboard.
- Export your campaign performance statistics and maintain your documentation in Excel.
Analyzing capabilities
- You can easily install the tracker code on your website using this sales prospecting tool. Once you've done that, you will start fetching some conversion stats from the campaigns that you are running. The good thing is that you can set up rules and do event tracking using Anyleads. So, you get to know how you are performing at each stage of the funnel.
- Campaign insights are presented in an easy to understand and interpret format. You don't have to wrap your heads around numbers as there are visuals to explain everything in this sales prospecting software.
Synching and Managing capabilities
- The first and very important capability under 'synching' in a automation tool, is sentiment analysis. With this functionality in your toolkit, you can detect the replies on your sales prospectingemail campaign and sort them under relevant columns in your list as 'positive' or 'negative' sentiments/replies. You can create 'rules' and 'customize' for your sentiment analysis for better categorization.
- Sales team can move conversations to specific/predesignated folders based on the sentiment of reply. Sales automation removes manual effort for sorting responses and saving them in respective folders.
- The platform allows you to import and export contacts, manage lists and target contacts better.
- Apart from these functionalities in , as we've discussed before, also sales prospectingoffers content creating and B2B exchange functionalities. Their pricing bundles all features in one single plan, which allows unlimited access and usage of all features in the suite. But yes, they are a bit expensive.
- Their monthly unlimited plan is priced at $489/month. Here's great news though - They have a time-bound offer on, which allows you to pay $99/month forever. So, if you sign up now, you can avail this amazing discounted offer! For those who aren't convinced yet, they offer a free trial so that you can try before you buy.
Update: The sales prospecting of Anyleads is all set to comply with the requirements of GDPR and CCPA. Their legal teams are analyzing their practices and have introduced new features such as a right to erasure, right to rectification, right of access, right of data entry & portability and right of restriction of processing.
This S ales Prospecting Automation platform is a comprehensive platform for modern sales team looking to automate their sales process. From email verification to drip campaigns to tracking campaign performance, Prospect.io is bundled with all good and intelligent features that an efficient sales team must have in its arsenal. All-in-all it is a lead generation tool better than most in the market. And, that is why it has made it to our list of top 4. Let's discuss some of the features that Prospect.io promises.
- Within 'sales prospecting' Prospect.io helps you find and verify emails with utmost ease. You can find out your prospect's information such as email id, phone number, job title, etc. in a matter of minutes, using Chrome extension on websites, or on social media profiles. You can either pick prospects on the list individually or in bulk, while hunting for their email ids and other information. Prospect.io also allows you to search website domains, and conduct web page search and person search, with just as much ease. With all these capabilities in place, your sales prospecting is sorted and streamlined!
Apart from these 'Sales Prospecting' specific functionalities and features, Prospect.io comes with sales automation emailing capabilities like campaign tracking, and synching. All these functionalities clubbed together make Prospect.io one of the most coveted lead generation and sales automation platform for online businesses. Because along with sales prospecting, it is also important to automate email and drip campaigns, Prospect.io has a plus point there! Also, it further simplifies your work by helping you keep track of email campaign performance.
- With their drip functionality of this sales prospecting software, you can create email sequences that are sent automatically. The campaign also stops automatically when a prospect replies or converts on the email. Scheduling emails with Prospect.io is also extremely easy.
- To measure the performance of your emails is a key requirement if you want to win in the optimization game. Only when you measure the click rates, impressions, and responses, will you be able to fill in the gaps and bottlenecks, and improve your efforts. You get complete reports that are easy to interpret if you are working on Prospect.io.
- Synching makes Prospect.io ever more competent sales automation tool to use. Some , CRM integrations that add to the charm of Prospect.io include Zapier, Hubspot, and Close.io. Salesforce, Slack,
Looking forward to know how Prospect.io is priced? Great! You are thinking in the right direction. Let's see if pricing is the final deciding factor for you to buy or say bye to this sales prospecting tool.
Is the term 'credits' on their pricing page getting you all confused? Well, initially it did confuse me as well. But it is basically 'usage' based pricing. So, the more you use Prospect.io, the more value you get out of the product; however, it also means the pricing gets higher. So, if you are using 1000 credits of Prospect.io, you will be paying around $99/month for the product. You can try and start with this '1000 credit' plan and then pay extra for more usage in case you like the product. Works for me!
GDPR and CCPA update:
Prospect.io has made itself clear that they are GDPR and CCPA ready. If you are using Prospect.io as sales prospecting tool then you can continue using it without any GDPR and CCPA related concerns. Here are some of the highlights that I came across on their website:
- Assigned a data protection officer.
- Updated terms and service policies.
- Audit of all the third parties to see if they are GDPR and CCPA compliant.
- Provided legal training to all the staff to understand the intricacies of GDPR and CCPA.
Once again I've listed a sales automation tool that is extremely easy to use. And why not? At the end of the day, a good sales automation tool is one that is simple to work with for sales rep. The two main capabilities that Findthatlead.com offers is 'verifier' and 'prospector'. Both these terms are quite self-explanatory, but just in case someone has simply scrolled without reading about the other two products on my list, and simply landed to this one, here's a simple explanation:
Verifier: Using an advanced algorithm in sales prospecting software, you can verify and validate an email id that you have on your prospect list.
Prospector: Look for email address, website domains, phone numbers, etc. of the sales prospect using certain information that you have such as first and last name. Findthatlead has a specific and unique prospecting technique, which comprises three steps:
Segment: Pick specific segments for your prospect hunt. Segments could include company, industry, job title, location, etc.
Add info: Add specific details about the selected segments. For example, if you've added segment 'location', type the name of the location from where you want your prospects from.
Get Prospects: Based on the segments and its specific details, Findthatlead will give a list of results that you can use for sales prospecting.
The best part about using Findthatlead is the neat dashboard. From one single dashboard itself, you can manage a number of tasks including lead management, domain search, lead search, prospecting, and CSV uploading.
Overall - I give 3.75 stars on 5 to Findthatlead!
Coming to the pricing, here's my take guys - FindThatLead is an extremely promising sales prospecting tool with the type of pricing it offers. Their basic plan starts at $0/mo, and the most expensive one is priced at $1500/month. Just like Prospect.io, you pay for credits or usage. So, the maximum credits that you can use for $1500/month equals 18000. And, the minimum credits that you can use for $0 is 50/month.
Update:FindthatLead is compliant with the new GDPR and CCPA protection laws, and they have explained all the latest updates on their website. GDPR and CCPA compliance is necessary for all the customers who deal with the data entry of EU citizens.
Enter on Google, and it takes to a very refreshing website set in Orange hues. The layout is neat, and the information about the product is crisp. A cherry on the cake - they introduce you to their sales assistant - a bot that is all prepped up to help you like your sales assistant. Named Fuzebot, this virtual assistant will build your list, verify emails, and make your entire prospecting process more efficient.
Let's discuss all of the features that offers so as to stack this sales prospecting tool up against the three other options that I've mentioned in this post.
- Search: Make tedious, manual search work simpler and faster. Target specific leads based on criteria or segments such as those with specific roles and industries, those who use certain software, or those who are hiring, etc. Once that is done, you can unlock more data entry based on your searched leads such as their verified emails, phone numbers, social media profiles and more!
- Using Account Based Selling:Leadfuze, you can upload or input domain or company name. Then, select roles from their list, which you want to target. Based on these criteria, you will get a list of contacts closest to your requirement for sales prospecting.
- I've already talked about Fuzebox right in the beginning while introducing Leadfuze. The bot is their unique touch and makes it really interesting for clients to work with Bot Assistant:Leadfuze. But let's read a bit more about how it functions:
- The bot explores all over the web as well as your data sources looking for leads based on the criteria that you've used as an input. Once he finds relevant matches, he adds them to your sales prospecting list. The most important task that he is responsible for is ensuring that the data it hunts for you is accurate, verified, and updated. Fuzebot makes sure you can sit back and relax while it tracks and serves you leads on a plate.
- In order to make sure that the emails on your list are good to go, he does all the hard work to verify and validate them.
- It checks all your existing customers, subscribers, and competitors, etc. that already exist in your list. He sees to it that it is not duplicating the mention of these contacts repeatedly. Then, it adds fresh new leads.
A bit about integrations - Leadfuze integrates seamlessly with popular tools such as Close.io, Pipedrive, Zapier, Salesforce, Bidsketch, and more.
What's absolutely, refreshingly awesome about Leadfuze is that their pricing is on point and clear. They have two plans - Starter, scaling, and custom.
- Starter: For those who want to start with their sales prospecting
- Scaling: For those who want to scale their lead generation and recruiting efforts.
- Custom: For those who need more lead credits than offered in the other two plans.
All of these plans are intelligently prices, and affordable enough to not make you feel that they have burnt a hole in your pocket. If you have simple needs, of course, you can opt for their starter plan, which is a great option based on the capabilities it provides. Check out all these pricing details here, and also take a look at the following screenshot.
Another point to keep in mind is that though Leadfuze doesn't offer a 'free trial', it does give you 25 lead credits to use for free. So, you can try out those 25 lead credits before signing up for their product just in case you aren't sure whether you want to opt for Leadfuze or some other sales prospecting tool.
GDPR and CCPA update: LeadFuze has introduced new features to make sure that their product is GDPR and CCPA compliant. It includes right to be forgotten, right to access, identifying EU users to filter them out, data processing agreement and several more.
An overview of all the sales prospecting tools discussed in this post:
On the basis of features, I believe that as far as sales prospecting goes, Leadfuze is the best option. The second best on my list is FindThatLead, the reason being that it has a very simple dashboard to use. That sort of 'ease' is appealing. Anyleads and Prospect.io fall in the same slot for me. And, to choose one from these I'll probably go for the one that fits my budget.
Here's a one-a-one comparison that further makes me rank Leadfuze higher than most other alternatives. I've used both . Both of these tools are Chrome extensions that allow you to fetch sales leads from the web. While Prospect.io and Leadfuze Prospect.io does integrate with Linkedin profiles, it does not offer you the ability to automatically save prospects that you might want to target from this social media. On the other hand, if you are using Leadfuze you can filter these prospects, segment them, and also save them automatically!
All-in-all, while looking for a sales prospecting automation tool, I would suggest that you pick something that offers most of the capabilities beyond just prospecting so that you do not separately have to invest in other tools. You could maybe pick a sales prospecting plan initially that offers only sales prospecting and later when your requirements grow, sign-up for a higher priced-more functionality plan of the same tool. This is usually how I go about.
I hope I've given a complete and comprehensive view of the tools I've discussed above. Hope you are able to make a sound investment based on my research and review. Have more questions, just write it in comments, and I'll make sure to get in touch.
