The end goal of every tactic you employ is the same; growth. To grow, you need leads that convert into sales. Identifying your target audience and creating the correct buyer persona is your first step. But what’s the next step to getting customers for your business?
Generating prospects. These are target accounts that fall into the business’s target profile but have not yet become a customer. The process is commonly known as sales prospecting or customer prospecting in the industry.
Sales prospecting or customer prospecting is a collection of tips and techniques that you apply to manage these possible target accounts that can turn into customers. It involves researching accounts, identifying those that match your ideal customer persona, collecting data to contact them, sending cold emails, keeping track of conversations until one of them converts or drops out.
But before we dive into what tools you can use for sales prospecting, let’s go over the difference between a lead and a prospect for clarity.
Leads are identified on the basis of your buyer persona, while your prospects come after that in the form of leads who are interested in the product or service that you are offering. While leads are generated via one-way communication, prospects are created when communication is a two-way street. Further, lead generation is the first step of the funnel while prospecting is mostly the second last step towards the actualization of sales.
All in all, once you have generated leads, you have to indulge in the process of sales prospecting to convert your prospects into customers.
Now to manage it all can be very tricky. Especially if you have a wide target market and multiple campaigns running – unless you have a smart customer prospecting tool at hand.
Here’s a list of some of the best customer prospecting tools that’ll keep your sales pipeline healthy!
Top 10 customer prospecting tools
FindThatLead Prospector
With FindThatLead, you can find target customer contact details from a website or their social media profiles. This prospecting tool comes with advanced algorithms that even verify emails within seconds to ensure high deliverability of your campaigns. Not only this, but FindThatLead prospector also helps you build targeted campaigns that you can trigger to reach out to your target accounts. The tool also comes with a Chrome extension to make prospecting feel more natural and easy to you.
Leadfeeder
What if you could identify the businesses that are visiting your website and turn them into leads that are prospects for your products/ services? Leadfeeder helps you identify who your website visitors are, which company accounts they’re connected to, where they came from and what devices they’re making use of. It then lets you search for contact details from a robust database of companies.
Prospect.io
Another customer prospecting tool that makes it easy to identify and find the right contacts at your target accounts, is Prospect.io. The tool offers an Email Finder feature, wherein you can add the first name, last name and the website domain to search for a prospect. It also offers an email verifier so that you can be sure of your messages reaching out to your target accounts.
Scrab.in
If you wish to generate leads and prospects via LinkedIn, this is your best bet. Scrab.in automates LinkedIn lead generation in just one click. This process enables you to get noticed faster and reach more prospects by automation actions like sending invites, endorsing accounts, visiting profiles and more. This prospecting tool also helps you skip through a couple of connections and filter through those with no details so that you have a more accurate pool of prospects to look at.
Voila Norbert
Another tool that makes customer prospecting simple, is Voila Norbert. This is one of the simplest prospecting tools wherein you only enter the name of the person you wish to connect with, along with the organization they work for. The tool will then pull up the email address of the said person, saving you all the hustle. It also helps you schedule emails and send automatic follow-up messages.
Hunter
Hunter is a Chrome extension which not only gives you the email address of the prospect but will also tell you what are the chances of the prospect replying to your email. Furthermore, it also gives you the ability to download the email information in bulk, when coupled with Google sheets add-on.
Albacross
This is another customer prospecting tool which helps you identify the anonymous visitors to your website. It helps you figure who is visiting your website, what company accounts they belong to and what they’re interested in so that you can tailor your outreach accordingly. You can even create segments of your prospects to personalize your prospecting campaigns.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
This is an advanced prospecting tool created by LinkedIn and comes equipped with various search filters that help you find the perfect prospects. You can narrow down your search significantly using such filters which are created on the basis of demographics, industry, location, job titles and more. It’s also one of the most commonly used customer prospecting tools for B2B businesses.
Builtwith
What if there was a way to that are using your competitor’s products? That’s where Builtwith comes into play. It helps you find such prospects whom you can then convert into customers by offering better deals, superior services, and handy features. The best way to have an edge over your competitor is to educate your targeted audience about your product and Builtwith gives your conversation a starting point.
Skrapp
This is again a LinkedIn prospecting tool. With Skrapp, you can easily look for email addresses that are linked to LinkedIn accounts that you are targeting. So if you’re have identified your prospect profiles on LinkedIn, use this tool to get their contact details for your campaigns.
Get smart with customer profiling
If you have not yet started using tools for sales prospecting, it’s high time you did. These tools make your prospecting process super easy and highly-efficient. From where you’d spend tens of hours a week just trying to find the right target accounts and their contact details, these tools help you create a prospect list in just a few minutes.
It’s time to get smart with customer profiling before your competitor does!