Do you struggle with prospecting for high-quality leads? Well you’re not alone as it can be extremely challenging. In fact, a majority of salespeople agree that prospecting is the most difficult part of the sales process, so there’s no surprise that 68% of companies struggle with lead generation. Although finding high-quality leads presents a challenge, there are many emerging technologies which are helping companies excel at prospecting.

If you didn’t already know, sales technology can give your sales team the boost they need to stay competitive. Even if you’re already using a CRM, supplementing your sales stack with additional tools can have a positive impact on your bottom line. In fact, high-growth sales teams typically have five solutions in their technology stack. In today’s ultra-competitive market it's no surprise that top-performing sales teams leverage nearly 3x more sales tools than underperforming teams.

What can smart sales technology help you achieve?

Smart sales technology can mean the difference between massive growth and stagnant sales, and I’m sure it’s safe to say all of us want to avoid the latter. Here are just some of the ways the tools featured in the post can help supercharge your sales efforts:

• Discover & focus on high-quality leads
• Uncover key data insights on prospects
• Leverage insights to personalize your sales approach
• Improve your email outreach response rates
• Decrease email bounces with email verification
• Increase the velocity of your sales pipeline

Did you know that over 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting? Leveraging sales tech can help you focus more of your time on only qualified prospects and avoid wasting time on leads who will never buy.

Not only can sales tech help you focus on the right leads, it can also help you have more productive sales conversations with those leads. At a time when 38% of salespeople state that getting responses from prospects is harder than ever before, customizing your sales approach can set you apart. 

Gaining a greater understanding about prospects before reaching out can have a huge impact on your sales success. Studies show that personalizing sales emails increases click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Personalizing your sales outreach can help drive 18x more revenue than mass cold email campaigns.

Sales technology can improve the way you discover and engage with prospects. When leveraged properly, the sales tools listed below can help you pinpoint the best leads for your business and create a personalized sales strategy to win those deals.

1. Prospect.io

Prospect.io is a combined tool that helps you not only find the right prospects but also contact them, all within one dashboard.

This is particularly useful, as you don't have to move your data between places to generate a conversation that can end up in a great sales or a partnership (cold emailing potential is endless).

For the prospecting part, Prospect offers a browser extension to find and verify your recipients' email address on their websites & LinkedIn profiles (or alternatively, you can verify your own database in a CSV format with a few clicks).

Once the prospect list gets populated with email addresses, you can use built-in cold email campaign scheduling to set a multistep outreach - all this without a need to send a single outreach email manually. Definitely worth taking a closer look for small teams that want to do this usually tedious and time-consuming part of sales better.

2. Badger Maps

Badger Maps is the ultimate prospecting tool for anyone in field sales. Their  interactive map interface helps you better understand and prioritize your prospects. This will enable you to maximize your sales potential. Badger Maps also lets you discover, visualize and target new leads by searching for keywords.

3. Siftery

Siftery can help you discover and research the technology tools your prospects used to power their operations. This information can be particularly helpful for those selling SaaS products or other technology solutions. To use Siftery, simply search a company’s name and quickly discover the technologies they use organized by category (marketing tech, sales tech, developer tools, etc.). Siftery can help you identify if prospects are currently using your competitor’s product, or if they use any products you have an integration for.

4. Owler

Owler is a database of companies. They use their key insights to help you target accounts. Company pages include key information like who’s on the leadership team, a list of competitors, and revenue and employee count estimates. Much of the data in Owler is crowdsourced, which means users help fill out the company pages, so some company pages will be complete. You’ll know how accurate each company’s data coverage is by the “completeness percentage” Owler assigns to each page. On more complete pages you’ll find in-depth insights including employee count growth, revenue change over time, funding history, and recent news coverage. While Owler doesn’t include contact information for leads, it can still be a great source of company insights to create a compelling sales case.

5. Elucify

Elucify is a crowdsourced database of businesses and contacts. This means all the information in Elucify’s database has been added by users themselves. Elucify’s database is relatively new and growing, with additional companies being added every day. On each company page you’ll find key insights such as company size, location, funding, and some of the tech stack. They also suggest key contacts from each company you might be interested in prospecting.

6. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is another searchable database. It offers  niche in startups and technology companies. The database provides basic company demographics, and recent news coverage. Crunchbase also provides  in-depth financials including funding rounds, investors, investments, and acquisitions. It is particularly useful if you target startups or leverage funding or investment information during your sales process.

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7. Angellist

Angellist is another company database focused on startups and technology. Angellist provides information on investment portfolios, leadership team, funding rounds, and open job postings.

8. Charlie

Charlie provides you with in-depth insights on prospects before you meet with them. Charlie monitors your calendar and prepares insightful briefs on each of your leads prior to your discovery call. Each brief is delivered straight to your email inbox and includes key information like social media accounts, recent company news, common connections, and company stats. Charlie makes sure you go into each discovery call with key insights you can leverage to create a compelling sales case.

9. Rapportive

Rapportive brings key insights on prospects straight to your inbox. This neat app paints a complete picture of your prospects by providing you all their social media information in one place. You can also quickly discover connections you have in common and even connect with them on LinkedIn straight from your email inbox!

10. Voila Norbert

Voila Norbert is a prospecting tool with a 98% success rate thanks to its massive database of B2B email addresses. Input your prospect’s name, and the tool will find their email address in seconds. It even gives you a certainty rating as to how sure it is. Voila Norbert can help you enrich your email list with other data such as job title, company, location, and social profiles. This allows you to create the right message for better conversions.

11. GetProspect

GetProspect is a B2B lead finder that allows single and bulk extraction of corporate email addresses from web and LinkedIn pages. This software helps sales and marketing teams conduct proper research before contacting their targets. In terms of B2B prospecting, there are various options. The sales specialists can find information on prospects within the leads database or use a Chrome extension, either the Google sheets or email finder plugin. The latter works excellently on LinkedIn. Why? Due to the ability to get prospects’ email addresses from the search or profile page in several clicks. Lastly, GetProspect has email verification and CRM features, making it perfect for managing campaigns and leads.

Key Takeaways

No matter which sales tools you choose to implement, here are some key takeaways to keep in mind:

• Sales technology is key to your team’s success
• The most successful sales teams leverage multiple sales tools to fuel their prospecting activities
• Leveraging sales tech to discover high-quality leads can make your prospecting more effective and more efficient
• Personalized sales outreach far outperforms cold email
• Leveraging sales tech to better understand prospects and personalize outreach can have a big impact on your bottom line

About the Author: Carolyn Kick is the marketing manager at RepIQ. RepIQ’s prospect database and lead generation tools help salespeople discover the right customers for their business.