Sales Prospecting — 10 Tools and 5 Killer Tips from Gurus

My name is Lusha — I help sales professionals save time and meet their goals faster. Today I’d like to cover sales prospecting — the art of finding qualified people who are likely to turn into concrete sales opportunities.

If you’ve ever done it, you know that sales prospecting is one of the hardest parts of the sales process. But it’s also the most vital — without opportunities, the sales pipeline will run dry and even the best sales executive will not be able to close a deal.

In this post, I’ll help you understand what sales prospecting entails, and give you a few things that can help you get much better at it! Namely, 10 tools that can automate different parts of the prospecting process, and 5 tips from real gurus in the industry who have been kind enough to share their secrets.

What is Sales Prospecting?

Sales prospecting involves the following activities:

• Finding companies by qualifying attributes — such as industry, geography, revenue, specific product already in use
• Researching companies — identifying specific companies that could be relevant for your product or service
• Researching contacts — finding contacts within those companies that could be relevant decision-makers, and their contact details (leads)
• Connecting with contacts — reaching out via phone, email or other means to see if the lead is a relevant prospect for our company’s product or service.

Here is how sales prospecting fits into the general sale cycle, as defined by :

In a modern sales process, the first three stages are done by a sales prospecting team, also known as Inside Sales, SDRs or Sales Development Representatives. Once a prospect is qualified, it is handed over to sales reps or sales executives who are responsible for educating the prospect, making the right offer and closing the sale.

However, in many organizations, the entire process is handled by one small team, or even by just one person.

Whether sales prospecting is your entire job or only part of it, getting it right will generate huge improvements in productivity for the entire sales process. Getting the right prospects into the system will directly result in more closes and more sales revenue.

10 Sales Prospecting Tools: Beating the Grind

Sales prospecting used to involve huge amounts of manual labor. Collecting lists of prospects, qualifying them, researching contact info and scheduling calls — was all done manually.

Today there are many tools that can help automate different parts of the process. These tools can help you be more productive and also make you feel better — using your brain instead of endless, repetitive work.

Competitive Intelligence Tools

3. Google Alerts

A complement to something like Owler or Siftery is the free service. Type in any search term — for example, the name of a prospective company, your own product or a competitor’s product — and you’ll start getting emails every time Google picks up a new mention of that term. Google Alerts

Tip: For search terms that are not written about so often, such as the name of a smaller company, be sure to select All results from the How many drop down.

Contact Finding Tools

I may be biased, but I recommend you start with our own tool called (yes, named after me ?). Lusha is a service used by thousands of organizations to enrich lead data and expand business profiles. While you are researching prospects on LinkedIn and other social networks, Lusha can enrich the social profile with missing information, such as emails and direct phone numbers, allowing you to reach your target immediately. There’s probably no shorter path to starting a conversation with a relevant prospect.

Cost: Free for 5 business profiles per month, paid plans starting at $29 per month

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Check out the full blog post on Lusha’s blog.

Originally published at https://www.lusha.com on December 19, 2017.