15 Great Tools For Sales Prospecting and Sales Automation

We can easily call 2020 a year of sales automation, as many companies shifted from manual sales outreach to automated. There are hundreds of robust tools for automating prospect list building and outbound outreach that can help your team generate new customers and scale sales while saving plenty of time.

Overall, there are six main categories of tools for sales prospecting that are also tied to the key steps of your sales prospecting process:

1. Tools for researching prospects;

2. Tools for organizing and managing prospects (CRMs, etc.);

3. Tools for building contact lists and cleaning up data;

4. Email services for building and automating outbound email outreach;

5. Services for automating and scaling LinkedIn outreach;

6. Tools for social listening.

Sometimes you can get overwhelmed from spending weeks testing out a bunch of different tools and identifying the best solutions for each category. Our team already tried a lot of them, so here we’ll share the top tools for sales prospecting that we at Signum.ai chose to use and recommend trying out.

Tools for researching prospects

 1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

One of the essential tools used by pretty much any B2B salesperson and an excellent tool for building an Ideal Customer Profile and doing basic prospect research.

Their paid subscription for Sales Navigator allows you to do advanced searches and filter contacts by titles, roles, industry, company size, and other criteria to do sales prospecting. LinkedIn offers three types of licenses — Professional, Team, and Enterprise, so you’ll find the package that suits you in terms of both goals and pricing.

Pricing: their basic plans start from $79. Free demo is available.

2. Signum.ai LeadMachine

An AI-powered lead-capturing tool that helps companies identify hyper-targeted leads and boost sales. The tool can surface hyper-precision sales prospects that look like client’s best customers and that are more likely to turn into valuable customers.

LeadMachine builds a complete list with accurate contact data to help salespeople streamline and automate their prospecting efforts.

Pricing: the pricing is volume-based. The Enterprise packages start from $700 per month. Free demo is available.

Tools for organizing and managing prospects

3. Close

An all-in-one platform that combines CRM, automated emailing, and calling features. Perfect for small and medium-sized teams. Close offer adds-on features like custom onboarding and data cleanup and import.

Pricing: the prices start at just $25 per month, and a 14-day trial with the whole range of features can be received in a few clicks.

4. Outreach

A reputable sales engagement platform that uses machine learning capabilities to optimize companies’ communication workflow and improve sales pers’ performance. Outreach provides useful and extensive stats on employees’ activity and helps to point out the stages to work on.

Pricing: around $100 per month, but the final offer will be given after sending a request. A demo version is available.

5. Prospect.io

The other multichannel sales automation platform that helps to find and organize leads info and build multi-touch drip campaigns for several market segments. Apart from tracking the engagement data, Prospect.io also allows companies to analyze sales teams’ performance and encourage their members via gamification. The pricing is more moderate compared to Outreach.

Pricing: starts at $79 per month, and at $29 for an additional user. A 30-day money-back guarantee gives Prospect.io extra credits.

Tools for building contact lists and cleaning up data

6. LeadIQ

If you’re already using LinkedIn, LeadIQ is a great way to find a prospect’s email or direct dial. It works great within the LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator workflow.

Pricing: starts at $75 per month.

7. ZoomInfo.org

The service is known for a solid database and quick access to leads contact data. ZoomInfo does also integrate with most CRM and relevant apps.

Pricing: the prices are provided upon request. There is an opportunity to schedule a live demo.

Email services for building and automating outbound email outreach

8. Lemlist

A useful tool for automated cold email sending. Relatively new on the market, but works perfectly for setting up email cadences. It offers a wide variety of cold email templates and integrates a wide range of email providers and related apps. At the moment, Lemlist is mostly popular among SMBs and startups due to its affordable pricing.

Pricing: starts at $29 per month, and a 14-day free trial is available.

9. Reply.io

An alternative to Lemlist for building and automating email outreach; very popular among the Saas companies. It allows sales teams to combine emails, follow-ups, and other tasks into a coherent sequence. Reply.io offers a broad range of features and licenses to choose from (Individual, Business, and Enterprise packages).

Pricing: the basic business package starts at $50, individual — at $55 for a user. 14-day free trial with the full set of features is worth requesting.

10. MixMax

Simple tool for sending your cold emails. MixMax allows you to manage prospecting workflows within Gmail: sending emails, making calls, managing tasks, sending LinkedIn connection requests, and scheduling all in one place.

Pricing: plans start at $12 per month.

Services for automating and scaling LinkedIn outreach

11. ProspectIn

A great tool for automating LinkedIn outreach and sending a cadence. It allows you to create different campaigns depending on your list of prospects, send personalized bulk messages, and automated connection requests. ProspectIn also synchronizes with several CRM systems.

Pricing: their basic plan is free. The other packages start at €9.99. and a demo can be requested.

12. Expandi

An alternative to ProspectIn that helps sales reps to build various campaigns for different market segments automatically. Expandi is slightly more advanced in terms of stats provided and interface features and does also integrate with your CRM. Though, all these perks affect the only package price.

Pricing: the basic and only-option plan is $99. A demo can be scheduled.

Tools for social listening

 13. Owler

A tool that helps to get insights on the prospects and uplevel social listening. Owler allows sales reps to access information on an extensive number of businesses, both public and private. Thus, one can generate new prospects, research the relevant companies, and get the freshest updated on them.

The basic package is free, and the more advanced start from $99.

14. Feedly

An AI-based alternative to Owler providing salespeople with exclusive insights on their leads. A research assistant called Leo analyzes lots of sources and grasps the info corresponding to a team’s goals and intentions. With Feedly, it’s also easy to investigate news collected with a huge variety of filters — prioritize topics, mute irrelevant pieces of info, generate a summary of articles, etc.

Pricing: should be requested, as well as a free plain reader.

Other great tools for sales analytics and for refining your sales prospecting process:

15. Gong.io

The more advanced tool for analyzing sales conversations. Gong.io is a cloud-based platform that helps to record, transcribe, and scrutinize sales calls and provides real-time data on how a company’s customers react to the market transformations.

Pricing: depends on several factors (eg., a number of your team members). The free live demo is available.

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