B2B sales professionals are responsible for running multi-channel outbound activities. Reaching out to a complete stranger without any prior context continues to be a challenge for sales reps. 

Top sales professionals spend an average of 6 hours every week just to research their prospects so they can conduct more meaningful sales calls. That's a lot of time, considering B2B sales cycles are already long. 

Sales prospecting tools simplify prospect research, allowing sales reps to dedicate more time to selling. Nonetheless, selecting the right tools from a pool of available options is time-intensive and demands careful evaluation. All this lead to sales teams hoarding multiple tools without leveraging them properly. 

Purchasing all these tools cut a significant percentage of the sales team's yearly allocated budget.

Your sales team needs a set of sales prospecting software solutions to streamline their sales operations and shorten sales cycles. 

In this article, I have handpicked a set of 8 tools and categorized them based on their respective functions to help the sales leaders build their sales tech stack. 

What is Sales Prospecting? 

Sales prospecting is identifying your potential customers whose intent matches your targeted buyer persona, whose pain points are solvable by your product's features, and whom you can help achieve their goals through your product. 

B2B sales prospecting is a rather tricky job. 

Despite having a warm sales pipeline, B2B organizations often struggle to narrow down to high-intent prospects who really need their products. 

That's precisely why sales teams need a dedicated sales prospecting process. 

Typically, a prospecting process looks somewhat like this: 

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Step 1: Building a Lead Pipeline

Create a pipeline by collating all generated leads from various channels like social media, website visitors, referrals, outbound campaigns and contact lists.   

Step 2: Qualifying the Prospects 

Conduct detailed research for all these leads based on a business' Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and relevant intent. A targeted ICP with the clear intent of target customers is the key to qualifying suitable prospects. 

Step 3: Outreach Campaigns and Call Booking

Reach out to shortlisted prospects through a personalized outreach campaign. Such campaigns encourage prospects to book a discovery call with your sales team. 

Why does B2B Sales Prospecting Take a Long Time? 

"One of the truisms in our sales process at QBench: "B2B SalesB2B sales prospecting takes a long time because you must identify the correct contact within the company you're targeting and find a unique angle to get their attention.

Finding the correct contact is only half the battle. Prospects are pitched with tons of different products and services every single day, and getting through the noise can be difficult.

Doing your research on the prospect will allow you to create a personalized email that will give you the best chance of standing out. But doing this research takes time." - Trevor Ewen, COO at QBench

Your entire sales cycle becomes pointless if you go wrong with prospecting research. Here are a few other reasons behind a long B2B sales cycle: 

• Most sales teams don't have a scalable process to conduct sales prospecting seamlessly. They hoard too many sales prospecting tools without using them to their advantage. 
  

• Sometimes, B2B sales cycles become unbelievably long because these organizations have too many gatekeepers, and reps cannot reach the key decision-maker. 
  

• Despite creating a notable first impression, sales reps often hesitate to follow up with prospects. 44% of sales reps give up after following up only one time. 

Best Sales Prospecting Tools for B2B Sales Teams in 2023 

Manual sales prospecting is a long and rigorous process without any certainty of success. Sales leaders should rather automate sales prospecting. 

Here is my list of the best sales prospecting tools for various stages of the prospecting process. 

A List of Sales Prospecting Tools with Different Use Cases

Now, let's explore these tools at length.

AI Lead Generation and Prospecting 

Plena

Plena is an AI-based lead generation robot that can automate your prospecting process and fill your sales funnel with leads. It reads through your prospects' LinkedIn profiles, matches your ICP to filter out low-intent leads, collects organization-level data points, validates contact information and speeds up your outreach campaigns.

Top Features

• Plena's Harvestor feature helps sales teams to find more high-intent leads. It can extract the contact information of your target prospects from their social profiles and public websites and validate the same before sharing. 
  

• With Plena's Prospector feature, sales reps can run successful outbound campaigns. Once sales reps create criteria for prospecting, Plena's AI robots identify target profiles, extract and validate contact details, initiate an outreach sequence, and continue the same process across all CRMs. 

• Plena helps sales teams with an advanced LinkedIn analytics dashboard by tracking their impressions and engagements, daily usage stats, and campaign performance. Its Smart Control Panel allows sales teams to manage LinkedIn conversations effortlessly. 
  

• Sales leaders can manage their entire team within Plena's control panel, assign responsibilities, monitor individual analytics of team members, and provide campaign-level analytics. 

Integrations 

• Zapier 
• Pipedrive 
• Salesforce 
• HubSpot 
  

And many more. 

G2 Score and Reviews

5/5

Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder is a lead generation tool helping businesses to have a comprehensive overview of their website visitors. It helps sales teams to convert these visitors into leads by providing detailed insights. With Leadfeeder, companies can get the real identity of anonymous website visitors, analyze their behavior, remove spam traffic, and score the visitors based on their activities.

Top Features 

• Leadfeeder Creates behavioral filters to segment the leads and perform auto-lead scoring to help your sales team build the lead pipeline. 
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• With Leadfeeder's Contacts feature, sales reps can identify the decision-makers and export their email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles. 
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• Sales teams can sync Leadfeeder with their CRMs to create intuitive dashboards with complete visibility. With high-level automation, you can receive new visitor alerts without manual browsing. 
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• Leadfeeder's advanced search feature helps you acquire the complete browsing history of companies to identify their interest areas. 
  

Integrations 

• Pipedrive 
• Salesforce 
• HubSpot 
• Zoho 
• Slack 
• Looker Studio 
• Zapier 
  

And many more. 

G2 Score and Reviews

4.3 / 5 

CRM

HubSpot 

HubSpot's CRM software is beyond contact management. It helps enterprise sales teams to track real-time sales operations and build an effective sales funnel to monitor the leads throughout their lifecycle. 

Top Features 

• Real-time view of your sales pipeline with an intuitive dashboard, and access to comprehensive reports on individual sales reps' performances. Accommodate unlimited users for up to 1000000 contacts. 
  

• HubSpot offers free tools like a meeting scheduler, email template builder, live chat software, call tracking and AI writer to simplify sales operations. 
  

• HubSpot's built-in sales pipeline management software adds deals to the database, assigns tasks to team members, and tracks progress within a single dashboard. 
  

Integrations 

• Salesforce 
• Drift 
• PandaDoc 
• Survey Monkey 
• Facebook Ads 
• Unbounce 
  

And many more. 

G2 Score and Reviews

4.4 / 5 

Social Selling 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator 

The next sales prospecting software on our list is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This prospecting tool helps sales professionals in finding leads through social selling. With Sales Navigator, you can prioritize targeted accounts, identify high-intent prospects and mark out irrelevant profiles to expedite the B2B prospecting process.  

Top Features 

• Sales Navigator frees up sales reps' time by offering authentic insights on high-intent accounts that are more likely to convert. It uses connectivity data to identify relevant companies within your network. 
  

• B2B organizations generally have a narrow buyer group. With Sales Navigator, sales leaders can get in-depth data related to buyer-intent signals. These signals will rank your target buyers depending on their intent levels to help you plan your outreach campaigns. 
  

• This prospecting tool shares critical insights about target buyers like the latest company updates, hiring trends, leadership hires and more. All this data help the reps to build better rapport with the target buyers. 
  

Integrations 

• Microsoft Dynamics
• Salesforce
• HubSpot 
• SAP 
  

G2 Score and Reviews

4.3/5

Sales Intelligence 

Gong 

Gong helps sales teams with AI-based sales intelligence and guides them to identify the best ways to slide in the potential customers from the awareness to the conversion stages of the sales funnel. 

Top Features 

• Gong provides sales teams with real-time insights into their strategic initiatives. Hence, they can understand why these initiatives are working or not working from the beginning and change their approaches accordingly.  
  

• Gong provides data-driven coaching to your sales team with actionable feedback. As a result, your sales team gets the guidance they need to perform better. 
  

• Gong provides 360-degree visibility into your sales pipeline to note which prospect is at which sales funnel stage. Hence, your sales team can stay informed and plan better. 
  

Integrations 

• Apollo.io 
• Google Workspace 
• HubSpot CRM 
• Slack 
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator 
• Salesloft 
  

The list goes on. 

G2 Score and Reviews

4.7/5 

Database 

Zoominfo 

Zoominfo provides sales teams with personalized B2B databases to identify target customers and boost conversion. It helps sales leaders, reps, and account executives to access authentic data and run highly convertible outbound campaigns. 

Top Features 

• Zoominfo provides access to verified email addresses of target audiences. Sales reps can also get critical details like LinkedIn profiles, designation, responsibilities, and work experience of the prospects to craft a personalized sales pitch. 
  

• With Zoominfo, reps can get advanced information like a department-level organizational chart and direct dials of the decision-makers to develop strategic initiatives. 
  

• Zoominfo has an advanced B2B search engine, providing over 300 data attributes and advanced engagement filters. 
  

Integrations 

• Zoho CRM 
• Salesforce 
• Pipedrive 
• HubSpot 
• Marketo 
  

And many more. 

G2 Score and Reviews

4.4/5 

Personalization Tools 

Hyperise 

Hyperise helps sales reps to run hyper-personalized outreach campaigns by creating targeted images, videos and website creatives. In this AI era, B2B prospects often look for human touches in sales emails. Hyperise can create personalized visuals to grow engagement. 

Top Features 

• Hyperise helps you build stronger bonds with your target audiences through visually pleasing LinkedIn messages and emails. 
  

• It helps sales reps create images that drive engagement and trigger further conversations.  
  

• Hyperise's intuitive SaaS dashboard provides visibility into prospects' actions. It helps reps with a pictorial representation of prospects' pain points to get a detailed understanding. 
  

Integrations 

• WordPress 
• Wix 
• Shopify 
• HubSpot 
• Zapier 
• Intercom 
  

And many more. 

G2 Score and Reviews 

4.7/5 

Buying Intent Analysis 

Bombora

Bombora helps large sales teams to perform a detailed intent analysis of their prospects to simplify the prospect prioritization framework. Bombora helps sales reps to be more confident about their sales approaches. 

Top Features 

• Bombora matches the search history of prospects with your products to prepare a list of high-intent leads that are more likely to be interested in your products. 
  

• Bombora provides you with a list of 13000+ B2B topics based on your prospects' intent. As a result, sales reps can avoid guesswork and write highly-converting email subject lines. 
  

• Bombora also provides intent data for existing customers so sales and marketing teams can get an idea of how satisfied their customers are and develop retention strategies accordingly. 
  

Integrations 

• Adobe 
• Salesforce 
• Marketo 
• LinkedIn 
• HubSpot 
  

And many more. 

G2 Score and Reviews

4.4/5 

Final Thoughts 

B2B sales teams need an updated tech stack containing specific sales prospecting tools. Such a tech stack can save time, reduce manual tasks and simplify the sales process. 

This article consists of 8 sales prospecting solutions covering various areas of B2B prospecting like lead generation, social selling, CRM, intelligence, personalization, and intent analysis. It all comes down to which stage of prospecting are you currently at. 

As a next step, play around with these tools, identify your favorite ones and get started.