Are you looking for ways to take your prospecting efforts to the next level?
Do you feel like you’re not reaching as many decision-makers as you could with the effort you’re giving?
Sure, there are thousands of tips and tactics available to you, but you only have so much time in a day–and prospecting isn’t the only thing you do day in and out.
Like ancient hunters, the right tools are needed to bring in the right customer. Tools that’ll help any salesperson move faster, gather intelligence and engage prospects.
Arranged by each stage in the prospecting framework, along with a detailed description of each tool, here is my personal list.
First of all, the sales process:
01 - Ideal customer profiling
An ideal customer profile is a description of the company that's a perfect fit for your solution. Every business must have clear in mind a good ICP to build a healthy sales process.
Now that the ICP is defined, a few questions arise:
What they search for?
Is there a trending topic they look for?
What's on their desk as a "problem to solve asap"?
Answer the Public
Price: Free for 3 searches per day
AnswerThePublic listens into autocomplete data from search engines like Google then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and questions people are asking around your keyword.
It’s a goldmine of consumer insight you can use to create fresh, ultra-useful content, products, and services. The kind your customers really want.
02 - Building a list of prospects
Building your list is the stage where you begin to determine whether a prospect is a good fit for the business, the best way to approach them, and ultimately determine whether or not there’s an opportunity for them to become a buyer.
You probably want to collect info like company, name, role, email address, etc.
AngelList
Price: Free
AngelList was originally designed to be a platform for startups, VCs, and angel investors to learn more about one another. For salespeople though, it’s a directory of different companies that you can filter by organization type, the number of employees it has, and even what stage of funding they’re currently at.
Moreover, this platform allows anybody to surf the job opportunities published by these companies, coupled with the key person responsible for this search. I find this tool incredibly effective as a job-search can indicate a current need (e.g. sales management in my case)
Linkedin Sales Navigator
Price: Paid plans starting at $65/month.
As the world’s largest professional social network, LinkedIn is an obvious choice for many salespeople looking to find prospects. To accommodate that, LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a tool that allows for more advanced search filters, displays more detailed information about each prospect.
Others
Mattermark
Price: 14-day free trial; paid plans starting at $49/month.
Mattermark was built entirely with salespeople in mind. You can easily search through their directory of businesses through filters such as geography, company size, industry and niche, business model, b2b/b2c, and even the amount of funds their raising.
The best feature though is that MatterMark integrates directly into Salesforce, allowing you to save businesses into specific lists. Also helping salespeople automate their prospecting by creating saved searches with over 80 different data fields, complete with company and news alerts.
Price: Free as a Google extension; paid plans starting at $295/month.
With BuiltWith, salespeople can find businesses that are using specific pieces of software or technology. This is particularly helpful when looking for competitors in your space. With BuiltWith, you can find out which companies are using specific tools, and it goes a step further by also providing you with the contact details of each business.
For those who are turned off by the starting price point of $295 a month, you can always check out the free Google Chrome extension, which provides some basic insight into the tools a website is built with.
To find emails and contact details
There are several tools and websites to find prospects' emails. For this task, I highly suggest getting in contact with a lead search freelancer for two reasons:
They already have the premium Softwares necessary to automate the process, thus a high number of emails can be provided in a short time (e.g. for a project, Holborn Consulting has provided 300 emails within 3 days)
The cost associated with this service is extremely affordable (e.g. 1€/email)
So said, two tools are mentionable:
Price: free trial, paid plans starting at 39$/month
Hunter works as a simple tool to find all the associated email addresses of any given domain. It’ll even give a score on how likely it is that someone will reply to that email address.
Even if you can’t find a specific prospect’s email address, Hunter supplies you with the common pattern behind all associated email addresses so you can effectively guess what your target’s contact details would be. MailTester
Pricing: free
MailTester is a super simple tool where you enter an email address and it checks whether or not that email address actually exists. While the tool itself is limited in some regards, it is useful in helping you "guess" and verify if a prospect’s email is working or not.
03 - Getting in touch
This step can be done in different ways: (a) Linkedin, (b) email, and (c) call. I will report here some useful tools for all of these possibilities.
SalesHandy - email tracking
Price: Free limited version
SalesHandy integrates with all major email clients — such as Gmail, Outlook, and Android. With this tool, you can schedule emails as well as track if the recipient has opened your email. You can also see whether or not they’ve clicked through on your links and attachments.
Skype & Gmail phone call - international phone calls
Phone calls directed to the US or Canada can be made using the Gmail tool for phone calls, as they are free when the recipient is within these two countries.
Phone calls directed in other countries can be made using Skype.
Skype does not have a native feature for call recording like some of the other services, although that can be solved with third-party apps like Call Recorder for Skype at $39.95.
04 - Following up
Follow-ups can be scheduled per single user or with a common message to your crowd (e.g. email marketing). We will cover briefly both the strategies.
Note: for more in-depth analysis about email marketing, check this article: 5 Email Marketing statistics (tested in 2020)
Hubspot Sales - follow-up per single user
Price: Free basic plan; paid plans starting at $400/month.
HubSpot Sales is one of the most popular email management and tracking tools in the world right now. A division of Hubspot’s CRM platform, HubSpot Sales allows users to set up custom email sequences, track email open and click-through rates, and automate routine sales tasks like rotating leads. The tool can also help you find more prospects by recording who’s visiting your website. It also gives you the option of engaging with them directly with their live chat feature.
Mailchimp - email marketing tool
Price: The free plan allows you to have up to 2,000 subscribers and send up to 10,000 emails per month.
MailChimp is one of the leading email marketing providers, with over 1 billion emails sent a day using their service.
There’s even social media integration too. The template selection is decently sized, and they’re very easy to customize. You’ll also find advanced email marketing features available as well, like contact segmenting, autoresponders, service and app integrations, time-zone based sending, A/B testing and a lot more.
Their support team is also very responsive via live chat or email. Plus, there are a variety of educational resources available.
05 - Meetings & web events (e.g. demo)
There are many tools to schedule or host video calls. I'm not going through that. On the other hand, it makes sense to mention a tool that makes it easy to find and block a slot on our calendars.
Calendly
Price: free
As one of the most popular scheduling tools on the market, Calendly makes it easy for prospects to schedule calls, meetings, and demos. The tool works by first syncing up with your Google Calendar and then you can create a schedule based on what times you’re available.
From there, send a link and a prospect can pick a time that works for them. With Calendly’s Gmail plugin, you can create ad-hoc meetings and send over a clickable schedule of available times right in the email itself.
Now that you are here
Holborn is a Sales advisory boutique in London, specialized in supporting high-tech firms in the B2B market development.
The question is: do you need sales done?
Comments