What Are Sales Prospecting Tools and How Do They Work?

The old sales adage (repeat it with me, everyone!) says that it’s five times more expensive to find a new customer than it is to retain a current customer. Still, as you well know, you can't keep every customer forever. They move on, go out of business, or change directions. To remain successful, finding new customers is a must.

However, seeking out new clients is an incredibly time-consuming endeavor that’s often full of dead-ends. Salespeople have to carefully review their list of leads to identify high-quality prospects that could be a good fit for their offerings, establish contact with those buyers to determine their needs and budget, and nurture these prospects over time to ultimately generate a sale.

The first part of the process alone can consume an unthinkable amount of time and energy! That's why using a sales prospecting tool is a good way to accelerate the job of finding new customers.

What Are Sales Prospecting Tools?

There are a number of digital tools to help B2B companies generate new leads – from B2B lead generating websites to simply creating a blog for your business website. Once leads start coming in from the strategies you’ve implemented, sales prospecting tools help you move to the next step of validating those leads and keeping track of exactly where you are in the process with each of them.

Simply put: sales prospecting tools reduce tasks by introducing automation into the process. This is important to save time – which in business terms, means saving money. Nancy Nardin, the founder of Smart Selling Tools, highlighted this for a TrustRadius report on the ever-growing sales technology landscape. “Reducing the non-selling tasks from the average of 65% of a rep’s time to 50% will increase revenue by 42.85%,” she said.

How Do Sales Prospecting Tools Work?

Sales prospecting tools help put a company’s sales team on the fast track to closing deals by automating and organizing the entire lead-seeking and data organization process. There are a variety of tools on the market today, and each of them have various features and associated costs.

Sales prospecting tools can help you:

• Search: Before you can sell, you have to seek out and find new prospects for your sales campaigns. Popular tools such as UpLead will help you find high-quality leads that are an ideal fit for your company. In addition, because email deliverability can be a big communication hurdle, today’s tools can verify email addresses in your lists to ensure that you’re not wasting time reaching out using invalid contact information.
  
  
• Schedule and track: Digital tools can also determine what time of day a lead will be most likely to open your email and schedule it to be sent out at that time. In addition, you’ll have the ability to see which emails were opened as well as track all visits to your website.
  
  
• Observe competitors’s clients: Many businesses that need your product have likely recently stopped using a solution offered by a competitor. Sales prospecting tools like Datanyze help you keep an eye on prospects that have recently moved from a competitor’s product…and may now be on the hunt for a better solution.
  
  
• Upload and integrate: The best sales prospecting tools on the market have the ability to play nicely with one another. UpLead, for example, has a native Salesforce integration that allows users to export their contacts directly into the CRM. This creates a seamless experience as the process moves from identifying prospects to educating them about your offerings and pushing to close a sale.

From identifying contacts to solidifying them into concrete prospects, there’s no reason all of your time has to be tied up chasing leads. While finding new customers is a necessary evil, sales prospecting tools can help take a lot of the pain out of the process.

Ready to start implementing sales prospecting tools in your organization? Contact us today!