You might be wondering what a sales prospecting tool is, or even what is sales prospecting in general.

Well, it’s a process to look for new markets and expand products or services to a wider audience.

This is an essential part of any sales process. And to help you with this process, there are web-based tools available in the market.

According to a Gartner report, 87% of the organizations who participated in the study are using sales engagement solutions, and 92% of them claim it is an important part of their team’s success!

LaGrowthMachine is one of the best examples of these tools. It is the most powerful, yet simple solution for lead generation designed to save 40% of your work time while building the most effective lead generation campaigns with hundreds of customizable templates.

But what exactly are these tools? Why do you need them? And what are some of the key features?

Don’t worry; we will answer all of your questions in this blog, and hopefully, we will figure out the one that works best for you!

What are sales prospecting tools?

A sales prospecting tool is a software or platform designed to help sales teams identify, nurture, and convert potential leads into paying customers.

The main goal of these tools is to streamline and automate various recurring sales tasks, freeing up time and resources that can be used for other priority activities

image of women with a quote What is a Sales Prospecting tool

It should provide an easy-to-use platform to efficiently:

  • Find and verify leads’ contact information
  • Segment and prioritize sales prospects based on their fit and interest
  • Track and analyze their behavior
  • Schedule meetings and follow-ups
  • Engage leads through different channels*
  • Integrate with other apps; including CRM solutions and other sales tools

You need to know that there are different types of prospecting: manual or automated.

Prospectors: Manual vs. Automated Prospecting?
We delve deep into the differences between manual and automated prospecting in our latest article. Discover the advantages and disadvantages of each method and how they can impact your sales strategy. Drawing from our experience in the field, we offer you practical advice to choose the most efficient option for your business. Read our article now and get ahead in prospecting!
Read our post and choose your prospecting strategy!

The goal here is to save as much of a salesperson’s time as possible so that they can focus on building actual relationships with prospects, closing deals, and growing the business.

But why do you need to automate these tasks? Let’s take a look at the benefits that sales prospecting tools offer.

Why do you need sales prospecting tools?

A sales prospecting tool is the most important part of the sales team’s toolbox. It can provide numerous advantages that could be the deciding factor in whether or not a sale is successful.

Simply put, if you aren’t able to fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads, your team won’t be able to reach their goals.

Other benefits include:

  • Sales efficiency: Automating mundane tasks will free up more time for your team to focus on more important things like connecting with prospects and closing deals.
  • Accuracy of information: Using a tool reduces human error and makes sure the information that you have is consistent and accurate.
  • Visibility: Sales prospecting tools can provide a clear picture of what’s happening in the sales pipeline, making it easy to see where any issues are and how they can be fixed quickly.
  • Targeted outreach: The tool will track your lead’s interactions and provide tailored, personalized messages that are more likely to result in successful conversions.
  • Scalability: Automation makes it easier to scale your team’s efforts, meaning you can reach more leads in a shorter amount of time.

These are but a few of the endless benefits that sales prospecting tools can offer your team!

Finding the perfect solution for prospecting can be a tricky task, especially when it is going to be a key part of your process and do most of the talking for you. This is why we created LaGrowthMachine!

Get 3.5X more leads!

Are you looking to improve your sales department’s efficiency? LaGrowthMachine allows you to generate an average of 3.5x more leads, while saving an incredible amount of time on all your processes. By signing up today, you get a free 14-day trial period to test our tool!

Try for free

But that’s further down the line. Right now, you need to know what you’re looking for in a tool so that you can be sure it will meet your needs.

Key features to consider when choosing a sales prospecting tool

The right tool can make all the difference, so let’s take a look at what you should consider when choosing one:

User-friendly interface:

This may very well be the most important feature to consider. If the interface is too complicated or difficult to use, it can be a major roadblock in your team’s workflow and success.

Even further, if you invest in a tool that has a complex interface, think of the time it will take you to onboard not only yourself but your team as well!

You need a tool that has an intuitive, easy-to-use interface so that everyone can quickly get the hang of it!

In sales prospecting, we often talk about automated sales sequences.

For instance, with LaGrowthMachine, you get to enjoy our simple drag-and-drop sequence builder. This allows you to easily create and customize sales sequences with just a few clicks!

Automated sales sequence on LaGrowthMachine

Integrations:

Ever heard the expression “The more, the merrier”? Well, it especially applies here.

You need to make sure that the sales prospecting tool you choose is compatible with the other tools you use throughout the sales funnel.

This way, you can move data between tools quickly and easily, allowing your team to work efficiently and stay on top of their tasks!

At the very least, get you something that integrates with Zapier, so that you can seamlessly connect it to the thousands of other applications available.

Personalization of messages:

The more personalized your messages are to each prospect, the better chance you have of success.

A good salesperson knows that automation doesn’t mean the loss of the human touch!

You need software that allows you to customize messages and includes personalization variables so that your team can easily create tailored messages for each prospect.

With customized messaging, you can create more meaningful and effective conversations that are sure to result in successful conversions! And we all know that’s what true sales is actually about!

However, in order to have good personalization, you need to have good data, which brings me to my next point.

Powerful lead enrichment capabilities:

Lead enrichment is an important feature to consider when choosing a sales prospecting tool. It allows you to complete your lead’s information with additional data, such as:

  • Job title
  • Company size
  • Industry
  • Personal email
  • etc.

And as I mentioned in the previous point, this data is key to creating personalized messages that make an impact on your prospects.

For instance, LaGrowthMachine helps you complete your lead’s information with its advanced lead enrichment, giving you 24 different variables so that you can easily tailor your messages and make a real impact on each prospect!

Reporting & Analytics:

Data is essential for understanding and improving the performance of any sales process. This is why it’s important to make sure that the tool you choose has reporting capabilities.

Having the right data available can help you identify where your team may be struggling and provide insights into what adjustments or changes should be made in order to improve effectiveness.

Every sales team has a need for different features and functionality when it comes to sales prospecting tools.

That said, these 5 features should make up the foundation of any prospecting tool.

Having a reliable and powerful sales prospecting tool is key to helping you increase your conversions and close more deals. And LaGrowthMachine can help you with all of the features I’ve mentioned above – and more!

Let’s check it out in detail as well as some other alternative tools

LaGrowthMachine: The right sales prospecting tool for you

Rating: 4.9 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan €60 (14 Days Free Trial)

Product Description:

LaGrowthMachine is a multichannel sales automation tool that helps you generate more conversations and deals with your ideal prospects. With LaGrowthMachine, you can:

  • Import leads from LinkedIn or your own CSV file and enrich them with their email, phone, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.
  • Create personalized and automated sequences that switch between email, LinkedIn, and Twitter based on your prospects’ actions and conditions.
  • Impress your prospects with LinkedIn voice messages, a unique feature that can double your reply rate.
  • Manage your leads efficiently with a multichannel inbox, duplicate detection, blacklist, and advanced tracking.
  • Analyze your performance with actionable reporting and data visualization.
  • Integrate with your CRM and other sales tools via Zapier, webhooks, or APIs.

LaGrowthMachine is the perfect solution for sales teams and recruiters who want to benefit from the most advanced growth techniques without any technical skills. Whether you want to find new leads, nurture existing ones, or retarget them with ads, LaGrowthMachine can help you do it faster and better. Try it for free today and see the difference!

You have multichannel automated campaigns with hundreds of customizable templates for prospecting.

If you don’t feel like taking one of our tried-and-true templates, you can easily set up your own sequences from scratch with our intuitive drag-and-drop system!

lagrowthmachine templates

LaGrowthMachine is simply the perfect solution for sales teams and recruiters who want to benefit from the most advanced growth techniques without many technical skills.

Whether you want to find new leads, nurture existing ones, or even retarget them with ads, LaGrowthMachine can help you do it faster and better.

Get 3.5X more leads!

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your sales department? With La Growth Machine you can generate on average 3.5x more leads while saving an incredible amount of time on all your processes.

By signing up today, you’ll get a free 14-day trial to test our tool!

Try now for free!

But wait! That’s not all! Of course, we are constantly working on improving our product and adding new features, such as:

  • AI-generated messages: A feature that allows you to create personalized and relevant messages for your prospects using natural language generation, saving you time and effort.
  • Lead qualification by tag: A feature that allows you to tag your leads based on their responses and actions, helping you identify the most promising ones and analyze your campaign success.
  • Unsub and resub triggers and actions: A feature that allows you to unsubscribe or resubscribe a lead directly from LaGrowthMachine, and sync this information with your external software via Zapier, webhooks, or APIs.
lgm magic message
LGM Magic Messages

Try it for free today and see the difference!

Get 3.5X more leads!

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your sales department? With La Growth Machine you can generate on average 3.5x more leads while saving an incredible amount of time on all your processes.

By signing up today, you’ll get a free 14-day trial to test our tool!

Try now for free!

But, in case LaGrowthMachine isn’t the right fit for you, I’ve also rounded up a few alternative tools below.

Top alternative sales prospecting tools in the market

Linkedin Sales Navigator

Ratings: 4.3 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $79.99 (Free trial available)

Product Description:

Did you know that connecting on LinkedIn is 27x more effective than connecting on other social networks for lead generation? (Source: LinkedIn) Sales Navigator is a powerful solution that enables you to find the right prospects, engage with them on LinkedIn, and manage them all in one place.

You can get to the right people and companies through advanced search, target accounts by industry, job types, and more. You can also keep track of relevant account details, leads, and opportunities at each stage of the sales cycle.

In addition to finding people, Sales Navigator also lets you build relationships through lead generation features like:

  • Lead Builder: Expand your network by using search filters, including job title and function, seniority, geography, industry, and more.
  • TeamLink: See who among your first-degree connections knows someone in your target accounts.
  • TeamLink Plus: See who among non-first-degree connections knows someone in your target accounts.
  • Advanced Filters: Refine Lead Builder and People Search results by the number of employees or years of experience with a company, or use Boolean logic (AND/OR/NOT) to filter results.
  • InMail: Send personalized messages via email to up to 50 prospects per month.
Image of Linkedin Sales Navigator

PersistIQ

Ratings: 4.7 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $29 (Free plan available)

Product Description:

PersistIQ is an innovative, easy-to-use, and powerful communication app. PersistIQ enables you to send automated follow-up messages according to your client’s actions.

With PersistIQ, you can find, reach and organize your clientele all in one place. Integrated with Salesforce.com, PersistIQ offers a powerful list of features and a high ROI for your team.

PersistIQ also allows you to:

  • Create your own templates and sequence steps on both a team and individual level
  • Schedule calls and emails from the same interface
  • See when your prospects are viewing your emails- including links clicked, attachments downloaded, and more!
  • Get notified of prospect activity as it happens
  • View detailed analytics for each sequence step, so you know exactly where to focus your efforts
  • Drip campaigns can be created for outbound campaigns or existing clients for upsells etc.
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Interseller

Ratings: 4.8 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $100

Product Description:

Interseller helps recruiters and hiring managers manage their time effectively and deliver top talent to the employers they work with. Use our Chrome extension to look up top-notch candidates from LinkedIn, filter potential candidates on social media, and get updates from companies you like.

With Interseller most sources produce data on any system, making your sourcing more efficient. Have candidates automatically added to a pipeline or email sequence and track the candidate’s engagement level with an online campaign around your jobs.

Interseller also offers you features like:

  • Contacts: It allows you to organize, tag, and bulk edit your contacts. You can also export all of your contacts in CSV format for easy upload into other applications.
  • Prospects: It allows you to organize, tag, and bulk edit the prospects from your records. You can also export all of your prospects in CSV format for easy upload into other applications, or you can delete them from Interseller altogether.
  • Records: It allows you to view all of the emails and notes sent by yourself and/or your colleagues at a given company. You can also archive records when you no longer wish to track them in Interseller.
  • Email Templates: It allows you to save messages that you’ve sent in the past so that they can be used again when reaching out to other contacts. The templates are available to select when sending a new email so that you don’t have to spend time re-writing similar messages.
Image of Interseller

Pipedrive

Ratings: 4.3 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $12.50 (Free trial available)

Product Description:

Pipedrive is a web-based solution that turns leads into a client. It recognizes your pipeline, keeps track of activity, and schedules meetings quickly.

Pipedrive is a full customer relationship management system that was designed to be used by small businesses. It provides companies with a simple and easy way to manage their customer relationships in one place.

Pipedrive offers several features for streamlining your tasks, including:

  • Activity types: These are pre-defined templates for activities, so you can quickly add calls, meetings, emails, and more.
  • Email templates: You can come up with your own email templates to use within Pipedrive. The templates can include merge fields (like the first name), so the content can be customized for each person you send it to.
  • Email tracking: This feature sends a unique URL in your email (not a tracking pixel), which means that you can see who opened it.
  • Task automation: You can create an automation rule to take action when certain events happen. For example, if a deal reaches a certain stage, a contact is updated or a task is marked complete.
Image of Pipedrive

Hubspot

Ratings: 4.4 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $50.00 (Free plan available)

Product Description:

HubSpot is an inbound marketing & CRM software that helps companies attract visitors and improve conversions. With HubSpot, businesses can get found by more prospects, generate more inbound leads, close more sales, and more effectively engage their clientele.

HubSpot brings all of your digital marketing needs together in one place. They offer several features to help you create, manage and measure a successful inbound strategy.

HubSpot can also help you manage your:

  • Blog: write content and schedule it to be published in the future.
  • Website content: add, edit, and publish blog posts, landing pages, website pages, and more.
  • Social media accounts: post updates to multiple channels at once, schedule future posts, and see how well each of them performs.
  • Website traffic analysis: see what pages are driving the most visits, where visitors are coming from, how long they spend on your pages, and more.
  • Contacts: build forms for people to fill out on your site so you can track leads and gather information about them
  • Email workflows: Set up email workflows with triggers according to the actions the user takes in their account (e.g. when they sign up for an email list)
Image of Hubspot

Prospect.io

Ratings: 9.3 stars out of 10 on Trustradius

Pricing: Starting plan $99.00

Product Description:

Prospect.io is an automation service that helps representatives to find their prospects’ email addresses and phone numbers on the Web and to send automated follow-ups. With the Chrome extension, you can get anyone’s email address in a few clicks without leaving your browser.

Their cold emailing system allows you to send automated follow-ups at scale. You can personalize your templates using variables like first name, company name, job title, etc.

You can also schedule calls directly from our app and have them synced with your calendar. It’s also possible to make your calling scripts that will be shown during the call.

Image of Prospect.io

ActiveCampaign

Ratings: 4.6 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $9 Per Month ( Free trial available )

Product Description:

ActiveCampaign assists businesses of all sizes engage with customers and offers a powerful set of marketing automation, analytics, and integrations.

It is an easy-to-use all-in-one solution for businesses looking to improve the quality of their marketing messages, automate their customer journeys and provide actionable insights and details that accelerate growth.

Connect ActiveCampaign with 850+ applications to automate many tasks such as sending mail blasts, connecting with Shopify for eCommerce automation, or creating a personalized Slack message whenever a new contact detail is added to your system.

Image of ActiveCampaign

SalesLoft

Ratings: 4.5 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $0.00

Product Description:

SalesLoft is an engagement app that assists teams to connect with prospects. You can automate your outreach to save time and increase efficiency, personalize your messages to speak directly to prospects’ needs, improve your workflow to close more deals faster and optimize your content delivery process.

SalesLoft features great tools for email automation, personalization, messaging, and analytics. Its templates can reach more prospects in less time, and its data capture feature lets you track how recipients respond to your messages.

For example, you can use Salesloft to send follow-ups according to how recipients interacted with previous messages.

Image of Salesloft

Outreach

Ratings: 4.3 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $0.00

Product Description:

Outreach is a cloud-based engagement app that increases productivity and engagement with clientele. Teams can prospect more efficiently with the Outreach Execution Platform.

Your teams can deliver personalized messaging across multiple channels and automate manual tasks to scale fast. They can also write messages and deliver them seamlessly to representatives with the right data to close deals faster.

Teams can measure pipeline contribution and the impact of their programs in real time for actionable insights that drive improvements in their ROI.

It integrates engagement, conversation intelligence, and revenue intelligence into one place. They also provide analytics, coaching, and automation services to help users streamline their workflow.

Image of Outreach

Groove

Ratings: 4.7 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Data unavailable

Product Description:

Groove empowers teams to engage with prospects at scale. Groove increases rep productivity by automating tedious manual tasks and ensuring reps hit every step of their process.

It provides revenue leaders with real-time insights into what’s happening at every stage of the sales cycle, enabling them to make agile decisions that accelerate growth.

Groove is also Salesforce Native — this means it can be installed and launched seamlessly from within your Salesforce org. We work with your existing Salesforce data model, so you can maintain accurate reporting and forecasting, lower compliance risk, and streamline admin tasks.

Image of Groove

Zoho CRM

Ratings: 4 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $14.00 ( Free plan available )

Product Description:

Zoho CRM empowers businesses to generate quality leads, close deals faster, and optimize team performance. Businesses can stay connected with their clientele, automate repetitive tasks, and analyze performance across multiple channels with ease.

It also provides users with a centralized view of all the information such as contact information, deals, call logs & notes, campaigns, feedback & surveys, tasks assigned & completed, etc.

They are available in both cloud-based and on-premise deployment models. They offer several different tools, including contact management, funnels & pipelines management, workflow automation, AI-powered conversational assistant, and task management.

Image of Zoho CRM

Apollo.io

Ratings: 4.8 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $49.00 ( Free plan available )

Product Description:

Draw insights and details from the data and discover ways to improve your process. What’s more, Apollo CRM also gives you the ability to track interactions across multiple channels.

You can also use Apollo to search for new contacts within your target companies and make lists of prospects in a matter of clicks. Apollo is an all-in-one intelligence solution.

It helps you prospect, engage, and scale outbound activity with sequences, grow accounts with outreach efforts, and more. With Apollo’s smart insights and automated features, you can efficiently personalize every interaction while keeping your teams focused on closing deals.

Image of Apollo.io

Cirrus Insight

Ratings: 4.2 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $27

Product Description:

Cirrus Insight is an app that integrates with Salesforce. It gives representatives the ability to manage their contacts right inside Gmail, Outlook, or Office 365.

Cirrus Insight lets you:

  • Track email and attachment open rates.
  • Create personalized templates.
  • Set follow-up reminders.
  • Schedule three times more meetings with customers.
Image of Cirrus Insight

Mixmax

Ratings: 4.6 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $9

Product Description:

Mixmax makes it easy to personalize your emails with the name of your lead, their company name, and other relevant information. It lets you send mail from whichever email address you prefer and include all of your usual signatures.

With Mixmax, you can schedule meetings without the back-and-forth by suggesting multiple dates and times to choose from. It also integrates with Google Calendar, Outlook, Office 365, and CMS solutions like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zapier to show you real-time availability so there are no scheduling conflicts.

With Mixmax’s tracking feature, you can see when key prospects open your emails and click on links to give you more information about the next steps.

Image of Mixmax

Freshsales

Ratings: 4.6 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $15 (Free plan available)

Product Description:

Freshsales is a SalesForce automation solution. It provides you with quality leads, engages in contextual conversations, drives deals with AI-powered insights, and nurtures relationships.

It also offers robust inbound and outbound calling, email tracking, mobile CRM, and customized reports.

Finally, it has a visual deal funnel feature that lets representatives prioritize deals and work on them more efficiently.

From lead generation to relationship building to revenue growth, It gives you the tools you need to create a modern sales stack. It has everything you need to build better relationships with your customers.

Image of Freshsales

Reply

Ratings: 4.6 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $50

Product Description:

Reply drives revenue by automating multichannel touchpoints throughout the buyer journey. Reply uses AI technology to understand the context of conversations and provides live recommendations.

It Increases productivity by automating multichannel touchpoints, including phone calls, text messages, and social media.

With native integrations with CRMs, rich API with 40+ methods, and Zapier integrations, Reply is perfect for anyone that needs to send mass emails at scale.

Image of Reply

Yesware

Ratings: 4.4 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $15.00

Product Description:

Yesware is the leading productivity platform for salespeople and their managers at businesses. It empowers salespeople to sell smarter and close more deals by bringing data and insights directly into their workflow — right where they live every day — inside their email inbox. Yesware’s full suite of tools includes:

  • Email Tracking & Analytics – Track when prospects open your emails, click links, and view attachments
  • Templates Create, save, and send emails from frequently used templates with merge tags
  • Meeting Scheduling – Automatically suggest times according to your calendar availability
  • Presentation Tracking – See who opened your proposals and get notified when they’re viewed
  • Phone Dialer – Log calls directly to Salesforce; sync your contacts to Yesware for 1-click dialing
  • Reporting Dashboards – Monitor everyone’s progress in real-time with customizable reports
Image of Yesware

InsideSales

Ratings: 4.5 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Data not available

Product Description:

InsideSales.com is the leading engagement platform built on the world’s first and only AI-fueled Predictive Sales Acceleration Platform. It helps teams deliver personalized engagement that aligns with where buyers are in their purchasing journey.

InsideSales’ sales prospecting tool is powered by its patented Neuralytics engine which aggregates internal data, buyer signals, and intelligent automation to help teams know who to engage when to engage them, how to engage them, and what message will resonate most.

Image of InsideSales

Dooly

Ratings: 4.7 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $25.00 (Free trial available)

Product Description:

Dooly is the connected workspace for representatives. It brings together data and lets you access everything in one place, and update it in real time.

Dooly makes it easy to collaborate on deals with your team and share information with the systems that need to know.

It automates crucial parts of the sales process, so you can focus on creating value for your clients. It records account activity in the system automatically, so you don’t have to worry about logging your work manually.

Its connected workspace lets you share information between tools, so you can keep everyone up to date on what’s happening. Sharing notes in Dooly will automatically update your CRM, keeping everyone on the same page.

Image of Dooly

Dripify

Ratings: 4.6 stars out of 5 on G2

Pricing: Starting plan $39 (Free trial available)

Product Description:

Dripify is a multifunctional sales automation tool designed to help business owners and sales teams improve prospecting and close more deals while being on autopilot. You can use Dripify while your device is switched off since it provides complete automation and works in the cloud. This automation software allows you to scrape leads, export data, and build completely automated outreach sequences on LinkedIn. With Dripify, you can create drip campaigns using various actions to boost lead generation.

Dripify sales automation tool also allows you to manage your onboard team members by monitoring and assessing their performance. You can analyze your daily statistics and see the metrics on each campaign that you may have created.

Dripify also offers you features like:

Download any data relevant to your leads and export it to a CSV document.
Automate LinkedIn invitations and connection requests.
Automate endorsements on LinkedIn.
Managing all the conversations in your LinkedIn smart inbox.
View detailed analytics and metrics for each sequence step, engagement rate, and campaign activity.

Conclusion

With the help of these sales prospecting tools, you can establish an effective sales process and start streamlining your sales pipeline. Not only that, but these tools will also help you build solid relationships with customers and increase your brand loyalty.

Hope I have helped you choose the right sales prospecting tool to increase your sales and close more deals. Of course, you can always experiment with multiple tools and see which ones work best for your organization.

This was our top 20 list! Let me know which sales prospecting tool you like the most!

Do you think I missed your favorite one? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below! Cheers!