Claeyssens Gregory for StoryChief

Posted on May 10, 2022 • Originally published at william-inc.webflow.io

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We face many of the same challenges in B2B sales prospecting as 20 years ago: finding leads, warming them up making a compelling pitch, and of course the final conversion. But in this digital era, the last thing that should be holding your sales back is sales prospecting tools. Don’t you want an update?

Here are the top 24 B2B sales tools (particularly around effective prospecting) that we find the most promising for the future of sales.

How these B2B prospecting tools can help you increase your sales

There are a million and one ways to go about sales prospecting (let alone actually cold calling, running demos, running a cold email campaign, etc). But these tools help you get ahead of the curve. The benefits of using the right sales tools boil down to three interrelated net positives. With sales tools, you can:

Discover more leads
Boost your sales team’s efficiency
Build a better sales pipeline

As we wrote in this edition, it’s not 1987 anymore. No one’s here for the hard sell. Instead, use these sales tools to hone in your messaging, find qualified leads, and personalize your message.‍

Top 24 B2B sales prospecting tools

‍2. Wiza

‍Speaking of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you’ll need some way to contact all of those promising leads (since you’re limited to just 30 InMail messages per month).

With Wiza, you can export your saved lead lists and your searches as you prospect. With lead email addresses, you’ll have a much more direct way of warming prospects up.

Key Features:

Extract valid email addresses from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Integrate with Salesforce and email outreach tools.
Run ‘no-email’ scrapes to support account-based efforts.
Set up cold email campaigns on the same platform.

Wiza is $50/month for the Pro account (300 valid emails), or $100 for the Team account (1,000 valid emails and unlimited seats). You can get started with 20 free email credits.

‍3. Blaze Verify

‍Blaze Verify offers exactly what it sounds like: email verification for your existing lead lists. Clean up your lists and determine which emails are the most promising for deliverability.

Key Features:

Upload .csv files to verify directly on the platform.
Use an API to verify emails in your own system.
Deduplicate emails, verify domains, and get an email quality score.

Blaze Verify is priced by email credit: it’s half a cent per record, so $25 for 5,000 emails. You can get started with 250 credits for free.

‍4. Clearbit

‍Clearbit is a marketing data engine for customer interactions. Sales teams can use Clearbit to “identify ideal prospects, find more like them, and reach out when the timing is right.”

Key Features:

Enrich records without research and data entry.
Set up custom scoring and routing rules.
Use the Prospecting tool to access 200 million contacts at 20 million companies.

Clearbit pricing is available upon request.

Key Features:

Comprises a tentative excel file containing up to 10 Data points (Client Name, Job Position, Job location, Business details, Company Email Id, Related Business contacts, etc.)
Easy to install in a jiffy by adding the tool as an extension to Chrome.
Allows you to verify whether the emails in your list are legit.

You can now get more information on potential clients directly from LinkedIn with the "Take off" package for $49/ month giving you access to 700 records or 10,000 records at $499 per month.

‍9. Echobot

‍Echobot helps you through four main phases of your B2B sales. This includes sales preparation, establishing contacts, offer & conclusion, and after-sales. Each step with Echobot uses various features to help you optimize your B2B sales pipeline.

Key Features:

Optimizes your sales processes specifically for B2B sales
Recognizes cross-selling and up-selling potential
Automatically observes and alerts you on relevant lead conversion behavior

Prices for Echobot are available upon request. This is due to the customizable options that you can include in your plan.

Email & outbound tools

With lead lists and emails, it’s time to start reaching out directly. These tools will help you do it effectively.

‍10. Mailshake

‍Mailshake is the tool for when you’re ready to move from lead generation to actual outreach. It’s meant to set up and track cold email campaigns.

Key Features:

Send cold emails at scale (thousands of emails in one campaign).
Track engagement via email, phone, and social media.
Set up sequences for automatic follow-up.
Clean your lead lists for better initial email outreach.

Mailshake starts at $59/month (and you can pay extra for lead list cleaning).

‍11. GMass

‍GMass brings mail merge to Gmail. Instead of using an external platform, you use the GMass extension to draft mass cold emails directly in Gmail, then send them as a mail merge campaign.

Key Features:

Set up mail merge campaigns with automatic sequences.
Connect with Google Sheets to use existing lead lists.
Personalize, schedule, and track email engagement.

GMass starts at $8.95/month, but you’ll have to upgrade to $12.95/month to remove the GMass branding.

‍12. Reply.io

‍Reply.io offers both sales prospecting and outreach capabilities. Use the Chrome extension to find new prospects, then you can use the rest of the platform for engagement.

‍13. NinjaOutreach

‍While NinjaOutreach is designed for influencer outreach, it can be a helpful prospecting tool for sales. Influencers are often decision-makers, after all.

‍14. MailChimp

‍15. Outreach.io

‍Outreach.io is a sales engagement platform built for account-based, inbound and outbound sales processes.

16. Newoldstamp

Key Features:

Manage email signatures centrally for the entire company
Send email signature banner campaigns
Integrations with Google Workspace, Exchange, & Microsoft 365
Built-in email signature analytics
A wide range of apps available (like Marketplaces, CTAs, social media buttons, & more)

Newoldstamp pricing begins at $7/month (with the annual plan).

Sales meeting tools

The stage we’ve all been waiting for: booking a meeting and getting those sales conversations going.

‍17. Demodesk

‍Once you have qualified your lead, it’s time to reel them in with a winning demo using a tool specifically built for sales teams. You could use a basic meeting tool and allow your lead to fall through the cracks, or you could use Demodesk to create a perfectly curated pitch in an interactive environment.

Key Features:

Automates scheduling workflows to ensure fair distribution of leads and improve customer booking experience.
Allows customers to interact with your product and content with the interactive screen sharing and co-browsing experience.
Coaches your reps at scale with call shadowing, live meetings overview, and meeting recordings.
Automatically loads the perfect playbook into every meeting to create a consistent sales narrative amongst your team, use call best practices, shorten ramp time, and make sure reps have the right collateral when they need it.

Demodesk’s pricing starts at $25/month for screen sharing and scheduling. But check out the pricing page for more information on packages and features.

‍18. Zoom

‍Zoom is another meeting tool with various capabilities. It is a simple video conferencing software that combines webinar hosting, chat functionalities, and the ability to share your local desktop screen. However, the product is not built specifically for sales teams so it works best for companies looking for a quick fix.

Key Features:

Audio & video conferencing
Webinar hosting for live virtual events and broadcasting
Create private or public chat groups

Zoom can be free for a basic personal account but the starting price for a team account is $13.99 per month.

Sales pipeline tools

To keep those sales calls going, you’ll need a way to manage your pipeline. From simple collaboration to pipeline visualization, these tools will help.

‍ChartMogul

‍If growth breeds more growth, ChartMogul helps you boost your sales by visualizing how far you’ve come. The platform is focused on visualizing your sales analytics.

Key Features:

Visualize subscription analytics (revenue and customer data).
Automate financial reporting.
Integrate with your payment processor and customer-facing apps (i.e. Intercom or Mailchimp).

ChartMogul pricing is based on MRR. It’s free up to $10k MRR, then $25 for every additional $10k.

‍Close.io

‍Close.com combines pipeline view, calling, lead management, and email automation for sales teams.

Key Features:

Set up the workflow that will work best for your team.
Minimize administrative tasks and data entry.
Create multiple pipelines for different teams, products, or sales processes.

Close.com pricing starts at $65/month per user for the basic version.

‍Hubspot

‍Hubspot is an inbound sales tool that can closely align with your marketing department. This CRM system also simplifies the management of your leads through the sales process and makes communication more customized.

Key Features:

There are available integrations for HubSpot to connect all your sales tools without coding.
Get the conversation going with an online website chat function.
Automate your sales follow-ups without being impersonal.

Hubspot starts its pricing at $50/month for the Sales Hub. You can also combine this subscription with other Hubspot services like the Marketing Hub or Service Hub.

‍Salesforce

‍If you haven’t heard about this cloud-based software already, Salesforce is a CRM system. This product allows you to track your lead through the sales funnel while providing various metrics for sales goal evaluations.

Key Features:

Use reports and dashboards for sales forecasting.
Track all your leads through the integration of different tools.
Better understand your team's deals with opportunity management

Pricing for Salesforce ranges from $25 to $300 per user/month. Each plan includes a different variety of features you can choose from.

‍Pipedrive

‍Pipedrive, as the name implies, is built to manage sales team pipelines. Billed as the ‘original’ CRM, Pipedrive offers a simpler version of SFDC along with pipeline management.

Key Features:

Visualize your sales pipeline with indicators for where leads are in the funnel.
Follow up consistently with email and text alerts.
Combine with your email efforts by setting up campaigns on the same platform.

Pipedrive starts at $15/month per user.