A constantly full order book, a growing sales forecast, that's what all business leaders dream of, isn't it? For this, no mystery: you need salespeople who prospect effectively. A good prospecting plan allows you to continuously detect new potential customers, and thus secure your turnover over time.
But beware: we no longer prospect in 2022 as in the year 2000. To organize your prospecting, there are many software and tools that will make life easier for salespeople and business leaders. We review them in this article!
4 benefits of sales prospecting software
Do your salespeople manage their prospecting in Excel
tables? You are well aware of the limits of this approach: the data is not
shared, not secure, and you have no overview of the current opportunities.
Developing a reliable forecast is mission impossible. You will therefore
quickly understand the advantages of commercial prospecting software!
1. Centralize prospect information
With commercial prospecting software, all your prospects' data is accessible in the same place: contact details, relationship history, emails sent, etc.
When a salesperson contacts a customer or a prospect, he has all the useful information in front of him: this facilitates discussion and improves the commercial relationship. It is also easier to take over a case when a team member is absent or has left the company. And then, it prevents several salespeople from contacting the same prospect without knowing it!
Finally, it facilitates the recovery of prospect data
for marketing actions: invitation to a trade show, sending a newsletter (pay
attention, however, to compliance with the GDPR, which you can check in
particular using GDPR software).
Facilitate remote and mobile work
Salespeople are rarely in the office every day: traveling to meet customers and prospects is part of their job. And in 2022, even sedentary salespeople need to work from everywhere, with the development of telecommuting.
Sales prospecting software is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, allowing all team members to work from home and on the go.
Commercial prospecting software also generally offers
a mobile application, which is very practical for mobile salespeople. They can
find the contact details of their prospects from their phone, access their
appointment schedule, and write down the minutes of their calls and meetings,
even on the train or in the car! These applications also work in offline mode,
you do not need an internet connection to use them.
Organize and optimize the work of salespeople
Sales prospecting software does not waste time: it saves time.
It also makes it possible to structure prospecting
work, thanks to the establishment of a clear sales cycle shared by all. This
helps teams prioritize their tasks, focus on the actions with the greatest
potential, and ultimately shorten time-to-signature.
Provide visibility on commercial activity
Sales reps hate reporting. And yet, you need visibility into their current actions to reliably predict sales. With well-used sales prospecting software, they can focus on their job: engaging in conversations with prospects!
Indeed, a prospecting software offers you an overview of all the actions in progress and a detailed report on the activity. You can therefore check the progress of the objectives at any time, overall and for each salesperson.
You also have statistics on the number of calls made,
the number of appointments made… This allows you to identify which salespeople
are the most efficient and which need help to progress.
Our selection of the best sales prospecting software
Commercial prospecting software is a kind of CRM
software, dedicated to prospecting activities. It allows you to centralize your
prospects, or leads, to follow your prospecting actions and all the stages of
qualification of your prospects. Here are the prospecting software that caught
our attention.
noCRM
With its somewhat provocative name (initially, the software was called "You don't need a CRM"), noCRM has adopted an original positioning: it wants to be the simplest and most effective software to help salespeople prospect and sell.
NoCRM is all about prospecting and selling, so sales reps really want to use it. The features are particularly well thought out, since they are inspired by the way salespeople manage their prospect lists in Excel.
Opportunity tracking is also powerful, with a simple and uncluttered pipeline, and a minimum of information to enter. Pre-built dashboards let you track sales rep activity, sales performance, and sales forecasts.
noCRM is perfect for freelancers, startups and SMEs
who use sales prospecting to develop their business, and do not want to be
burdened with customer relationship management features. To learn more, read
our review of noCRM.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a CRM software focused on sales management and sales planning.
Thanks to its particularly successful sales pipeline, with Pipedrive salespeople focus on following up on open opportunities and their tasks.
Pipedrive is appreciated by salespeople because entering information is very fast and easy. It offers powerful reporting with many personalized dashboards, which will help you monitor the activity of your teams and manage your revenue forecasts.
Pipedrive is particularly popular with startups and
growing companies in B2B industries. To learn more, read our Pipedrive review.
HubSpot
Hubspot CRM is a very rich software, and its free version already offers a lot of possibilities to manage your commercial prospecting.
HubSpot CRM is a completely free software that allows freelancers and businesses of all sizes to manage their contacts, their prospecting activities, their sales cycle, and follow up on their opportunities.
Beyond the CRM, HubSpot integrates tools to generate leads and communicate with your prospects and customers: web forms, making appointments, chat, newsletter... Be careful though, the free CRM version is very limited and some attractive features require to switch to the paid offer (automated email sequences, recording of telephone calls, etc.).
Hubspot can be suitable for any type of business: from
the self-employed who will be satisfied with the free offer, to the large SME.
It is particularly appreciated in startups and companies that rely on the web
to acquire new customers. To learn more, read our HubSpot review.
Sellsy
Sellsy is an all-in-one French software that allows you to manage your prospects, customers, quotes, invoices, and (partly) your accounting. You can choose the functionalities you need, and opt only for the Prospecting and sales module, or integrate invoicing and accounting.
Sellsy is a very complete prospecting software, with pleasant ergonomics and designed for the comfort of salespeople. It easily connects to your mailbox, which allows you to centralize the history of exchanges with a prospect in the CRM, but also to know when a prospect has opened your email.
We can also automate the sending of an email according to the stage of the sales cycle: a real time saver for salespeople! Finally, you can manage your quotes with Sellsy, and even opt for electronic signature. To go as far as invoicing, you will have to opt for the dedicated module.
Sellsy is aimed at any type of business, and will suit
both a solo entrepreneur and a well-established SME. To find out more, read our
opinion on Sellsy.
Salesforce
Well known to sales teams, Salesforce is the world leader in the CRM software market. It adapts to the activity of all companies and all team sizes, thanks to the many configuration options.
It integrates all the functionalities of prospecting software: contact management (leads, prospects, customers), customizable sales pipeline, task and activity monitoring, very comprehensive reporting and dashboards, automation and scoring (optional).
In addition, Salesforce allows you to create quotes and send them directly to prospects by email from the software. If you opt for other modules (Marketing, Customer Service), you will have with Salesforce a real 360° view of your customers.
Salesforce offers CRM offers for small businesses, but
it is especially very suitable for large startups, SMEs and ETIs. To learn
more, read our Salesforce review.
Other commercial prospecting tools
Social networks
Where to find leads? On social networks of course,
starting with LinkedIn, THE professional social network!
The LinkedIn search engine is a powerful tool for discovering potential prospects thanks to its many filters. You can contact your prospects directly on LinkedIn by sending them a connection request, or send them an Inmail if you have a LinkedIn premium subscription.
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription is even more powerful since it offers you an interface dedicated to the discovery of prospects, as well as a kind of integrated CRM to follow your prospecting actions. However, this tool is quite expensive.
There are also tools like ProspectIn, which connect to your LinkedIn account and allow you to automate your prospecting on this social network: profile visits, connection request, sending private messages. Be careful, however, not to abuse it so as not to tire your prospects!
Some prospecting software like noCRM allow t add a
prospect in one click from LinkedIn, which is very practical; but you will
rarely recover the prospect's professional email this way. This is why you will
need a data enrichment tool (we talk about it right after).
B2B databases
If LinkedIn is not enough for you to find your prospects, there are online databases for finding prospects and their contact information, such as Corporama, Kompass or Salezeo. The business model of these directories is variable: either you pay a price per contact, or a subscription. Some players offer an API allowing you to connect to your prospecting software or your CRM.
They sometimes also offer additional services such as
the analysis, qualification and enrichment of your data.
scraping tools
Very trendy at the moment, web scraping consists of
recovering contact details from the internet and exporting them in the form of
a file. Most often, the data is scraped on a social network like LinkedIn. For
this, you can use PhantomBuster, or Captain Data. Be careful however, scraping
is not officially authorized by LinkedIn, and it remains a practice with rather
vague legal contours.
Tools to find the contact details of your prospects
and enrich your files
Once you have recovered a list of prospects (via a scraping tool or another method), you must now enrich it with information to better qualify your target (city, sector of activity, etc.), but above all, to retrieve the professional emails of your prospects.
This is where data enrichment tools come in handy! You send them a file with a list of contacts (surname, first name, company, etc.) and they take care of collecting the rest of the information. This enrichment can be automated. Among the enrichment tools, we recommend Dropcontact, which is French and complies with the GDPR.
You can also find the contact details (email and
telephone) of a contact directly from their LinkedIn profile with a tool like
Kaspr. Finally, to find any email address and verify it, you can use Hunter.io
and its handy extension for Google Chrome.
Cold emailing tools
Sending emails to prospects is a time-consuming and not very rewarding task, especially if you are more or less always writing the same thing to them.
To solve this problem, cold emailing tools have appeared in recent years. They allow you to create email sequences (contact, follow-up 2 days later, follow-up 5 days later, etc.) and automate their sending to your prospects. You can personalize the content of these emails (first and last name of your contacts, company name, etc.) and you have detailed statistics on the openings, clicks and responses to your emails. These tools make it possible to guarantee optimal deliverability, i.e. to prevent your emails from ending up in SPAM.
Some CRM software integrates the automation of email sequences: this is the case with Hubspot (paid option).
But there are also dedicated software like Lemlist, a very famous French cold emailing tool.
Other players like Datananas (also French) integrate
the creation of email sequences with the search for leads and the enrichment of
data, which can be practical to avoid multiplying the tools.
Phone tracking tools
We talked about LinkedIn and emails, but in 2022 telephone prospecting is not dead!
This is why there are prospecting tools dedicated to this use.
Aircall is one of the best known: this business telephony tool allows salespeople to initiate calls in one click and save time in their telephone prospecting tasks. It is possible to record a call and connect Aircall to your CRM. You have valuable statistics on your telephone prospecting.
Among the prospecting software in our selection, Hubspot is the only one that offers functionality similar to Aircall: indeed, with Hubspot, you can make calls directly from a prospect's file, and record the call in your CRM.
But good telephone prospecting requires above all a
good script: this is why we are talking to you again here about noCRM, which
allows you to create prospecting scripts, and automate the entry of
qualification data: a very good way to optimize your commercial prospecting.
The unclassifiable
Today there is an impressive amount of tools for commercial prospecting, which is why it is impossible to be exhaustive! Here are some other solutions you might find useful:
- Discover anonymous visitors to your website: tools like GetQuanty or Visiblee are capable of es to detect, via their IP address, to which company belong the anonymous visitors of your site. A great way to discover hot prospects.
- Share your sales presentations: Do your sales reps send a sales presentation as an attachment to each prospect? Do you know that you could collect valuable data if you go through a dedicated tool? Tilkee, a French software, allows you to store all your business documents and share them easily. You will know in detail who has read your documents, which pages have been viewed… This is also a standard feature of Hubspot CRM.
- Automate appointment booking: You can use online appointment scheduling software like Calendly to allow your prospects to book a slot in your calendar themselves. Calendly connects to your calendar (Google, Outlook, etc.) and offers a pleasant interface for making appointments. Note, Pipedrive or HubSpot also offer this feature.
- Send impeccable emails: Are your sales reps angry with the spelling? There are handy little tools to automatically correct syntax and grammar errors. We fell in love with Merci App, which automatically connects to Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, or even your web browser.
The criteria for choosing a commercial prospecting
tool
Niche tool or all-in-one software?
You saw it while reading this article: there are a
number of tools for prospecting, more or less specialized, more or less
complete.
If you want to streamline your processes and not multiply the tools, it is in your interest to opt for a complete prospecting software integrating CRM and other more innovative features, such as Hubspot, Pipedrive or noCRM.
But no software will meet all your needs. This is why
we advise you to start by collecting all your needs by discussing with your
sales team. It all starts with your targets: who are your prospects? Where can
I find their contact details? Are they present on LinkedIn or not? Do you
prefer email or phone? How many leads do you process per month? What takes your
sales reps the most time on a daily basis? Answering these questions will help
guide your choices.
But if you don't have the time to devote to this
reflection, and if your sales team is not very comfortable with digital, it is
in your interest to choose a more classic all-in-one prospecting software, such
as Sellsy, which has the advantage of also integrating commercial management
and invoicing.
Ease of use
Ease of use and ergonomics are major criteria for the
implementation of your prospecting software to be a success with your sales
representatives. If the software is wasting their time, they won't use it. It
must also be easy to take in hand by newcomers to your team if it is growing
rapidly.
We therefore advise you to involve your sales
representatives in the choice of software: do not hesitate to test a product
together before buying it! Check the time spent on each process: creation of a
customer file, an opportunity, a task, etc.
Prices
Your budget is not extensible: the prices will
therefore be an important criterion for the choice of your software. Be
careful, this does not mean that you must necessarily choose the cheapest
prospecting software!
Above all, you need to carefully study the prices of the different players, including the options. Most software offers a base price, which will increase depending on the number of users or the features used: so remember to do a simulation.
And don't forget that your prospecting software is not
a cost, but an investment, which will quickly pay for itself when it is adopted
by your teams.
How much does prospecting software cost?
Complete prospecting software such as Pipedrive, noCRM
or Sellsy offer rather accessible pricing and without too many surprises: the
entry price is 10 to 25 € per month and per user.
HubSpot and Salesforce, for their part, have a fairly attractive call price (25 € per month and per user), and HubSpot even offers a free offer as we have seen. On the other hand, if you want to unlock advanced features, it can go up very quickly!
As for the additional tools for your prospecting
(search for contacts and email, cold mailing, data enrichment, scraping, etc.),
their cost is very variable. Be careful to study them carefully: sometimes
choosing an all-in-one tool will be more profitable than combining several
specialized tools.
Some tools can be used for free without too much constraint: this is the case with Calendly.
Conversely, Prospectin's free offer is limited to 15
actions per day: you will therefore have to pay a minimum of €17 per month and
per user to unlock this quota.
On the cold emailing side, Lemlist costs $59 per month per user to send automated email sequences: when you know that Hubspot offers the same functionality in addition to all the others, it makes you think!
If we look at B2B databases or email search and
contact enrichment tools, the operation is different, since you generally pay a
price per contact: the return on investment is therefore easy to calculate.