The best sales prospecting tools for 2023 and beyond

Sales prospecting used to have much more in common with prospectors of the silver and gold rushes of the 19th century. Sales teams would move into untapped markets only to find them not as bountiful as initially claimed.

To make up for their newfound desert of prospecting, they adopted scattershot, “spray and pray” methods for finding and qualifying leads. But today, those tactics simply aren’t good enough, especially for modern businesses looking to grow.

Today’s consumers expect personalised interactions where sales development representatives (SDRs)understand their pain points and tailor pitches for them. Whether in B2C or B2B sales, sales prospecting can be labour-intensive and unsatisfying for your team.

The good news for you is that a wealth of sales prospecting tools are available to help you qualify more leads and close deals quicker.

What is sales prospecting?

Sales prospecting is the process sales representatives take to connect with and qualify leads for your business.

The job of your SDRs is to find out which leads are not only interested in, but also in the right position to buy your product or service.

Sales prospecting isn’t a single step in the buyer’s journey. It takes place over several touchpoints. The end result is either a win or loss for your outbound sales account executives.

The process typically involves cold calling or cold emailing, but it can also involve warm emailing and social selling on platforms like LinkedIn.

What elements of sales prospecting can the best tools help you with?

Prospecting involves many steps and interactions. The top sales prospecting tools can assist you in the following key areas:

Building a prospect list

Your marketing team uses many tactics to drive leads to your sales team. This usually requires both inbound and outbound prospecting specialists. Outbound SDRs need resources to help identify leads that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP).

During this part of the qualification process, information like a prospect's industry, company, and job title all play a part in the final judgement. Additionally, lead scoring data will need to be compiled and readily available.

Lead qualification software streamlines information gathering and list building. Tools like Dialpad have built-in CRM integrations. Using these tools in combination makes the transition from prospect to customer a breeze.

Prospect outreach

Qualified leads are contacted by cold calling, warm emailing, or other methods. Prospect outreach relies heavily on email. So marketing tools and email templates can go a long way to saving your reps valuable time.

Sales dialler tools automate prospect calling and speed up outreach. Prospect management tools also aid in the process of moving past gatekeepers as you can transfer prospect information accordingly to account for buyers and decision-makers.

Discovery calls

Often, after an outreach method has made contact, it’s time for your business development representatives (BDRs) to set up a call. This first official contact with a gatekeeper can make or break your prospecting efforts. You want a seamless system to ensure calls are prioritised and conducted on time.

The best sales prospecting solutions integrate with your communication and calendar tools for easy discovery call scheduling. The best platforms provide AI in sales outreach to guide and coach your team.

Fun fact: Dialpad comes with Ai sales coaching features like Real-Time Assist (RTA) cards. These AI-powered solutions can guide your sales executives to ask the right questions to understand a prospect’s needs, budget, and buying process:

Needs evaluation

Armed with actionable information, your prospecting team will educate potential customers on how your product meets their needs.

With sales prospecting software or a CRM solution, you can find all of the prospects' interaction history and information in one place. This keeps your team organised and on task.

From here, your sales experts can curate a value proposition or a pitch that meets the pain points and objections of a prospect.

Closing deals

All of your team’s efforts come down to one final test: the close. Today, closes can happen on your website, over the phone, and even through online video conferencing. The best sales prospecting tools give your team support to maximise the opportunities in each of these conversation channels.

Dialpad is at the cutting-edge of AI in sales, and comes with a variety of sales enablement features to help your team win deals. There's AI-powered coaching, and even live sentiment analysis that lets team leaders analyse multiple calls at a time. Instead of having to personally coaching every single call, sales managers can now quickly see if a sales call is going poorly, read the live transcript to get more context, and barge into a closing call to save the day:

The 5 best sales prospecting tools

Building and maintaining your prospecting process is time-consuming. The best sales prospecting solutions cut out administrative and manual tasks. They also boost the sales performance of your team. Here are some of the best tools for sales prospecting for UK-based companies:

1. Dialpad Ai Sales Centre

First on the list of the best prospecting tools for sales in 2023 is Dialpad Ai Sales Centre. Not only does it let your sellers handle communications with prospects on every channel using one app, it also comes with other essentials like call forwarding, call recording, and the ability to create coaching call playlists:

Unlike more narrowly focussed prospecting tools, Dialpad also gives sales teams an all-in-one workspace that lets you seamlessly transition between prospect conversations, team calls, meetings, and messaging. You can do it all from the mobile app, desktop app, or your web browser:

Dialpad Ai Sales Centre also comes packed with integrations that optimise your sales prospecting. Connections to productivity apps let you connect to the Google ecosystem with built-in integrations for Google Workspace, Calendar, and Chrome. You can also link up with tools like Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

Want to take customisation even deeper? Dialpad's open APIs let you connect to every business app. Get your development team on board to automate workflows to your heart’s content!

But you’re here for prospecting, and Dialpad Ai Sales Centre comes with a boatload of integrations to help get, qualify, and close more leads:

• Copper - Build better customer experiences from one space, log calls to existing leads

• Salesforce - Automatically log and schedule Dialpad meetings, advanced Ai coaching and objection handling, native calling, enable power dialler directly from Salesforce

• Wingman - Automatically pulls sales calls from Dialpad for analysis and pitch insights

• Cloze - All received and missed calls, voicemails, and texts are automatically logged and connected to your contacts, call log information is matched up to incoming calls and displayed on-screen

• Outreach - Connects Dialpad features like Real-Time Assist cards and live call transcription to the prospecting software

• HubSpot - Add a native sidebar and Dialpad calling capabilities to the CRM so your team can conduct prospecting from one place.

And it’s not just about integrations. What really sets Dialpad Ai Sales Centre apart is its built-in, industry-leading AI. Powered by Dialpad Ai, which has analyzed over four billion minutes of business conversation data, it gives sales professionals a variety of useful features to help them before, during, and after sales prospecting calls, like keyword tracking ("Hey, how often did Competitor X come up on our sales calls?") and many other features that SDRs, account execs, and sales managers will find useful.

Ai sales coaching and sales training

Dialpad comes with versatile coaching group capabilities. Live Ai coaching can come through at just the right moment to nudge a close over the line.

Real-time sentiment analysis gives you a snapshot of how all of your agent’s calls are currently going. Managers can step in and offer additional support when needed.

Ai-powered call guidance

Your team works hard to generate leads and qualify prospects. Dialpad Ai helps your team get the most out of their efforts. The Ai Agent Assist instantly connects your reps to all knowledge resources, which lets them learn on the fly (without having to manually search for information to answer prospects' questions).

Real-time call transcriptions and agent assists

Automatic call recording and transcriptions ensure your team members don’t miss a thing. Conversations with prospects are tracked for action items and keywords and call summaries are sent directly to your inbox.

You can also empower your reps with RTA cards for guidance. Real-Time Assist cards are created beforehand and will trigger when Dialpad Ai detects a keyword or phrase.

Once spoken during a prospecting call, cards with tailored notes will pop up automatically on your screen. When a word like “price”, “cost”, or “expensive” is mentioned, instant prompts may appear to guide objection handling, for instance.

Outbound calling tools

Dialpad also helps your team with outbound lead generation and prospect outreach.

The power dialler is much more than your standard sales dialler. It automates call selection and dialling during outbound cold calling. This feature saves your SDRs loads of time from ending calls and dialling new prospects.

When combined with other features like automatic call logging and call summaries, your team will have much more time to spend on what they’re good at—outreach and qualifying prospects.

Dialpad’s power dialler can be integrated into other sales tools such as Salesforce CRM, ServiceNow, and Bullhorn.

Another time saver for cold callers is the voicemail drop feature. You record a message before working through your prospect list. If a call goes to voicemail, simply click the voicemail drop button, and move on to the next call:

While they’re connecting to the next prospect, the message will be automatically delivered. If you place a high rate of outbound calls, voicemail drops will save you loads of time.

Sales readiness features

Dialpad helps you better prepare your prospecting and closing teams. You can streamline outreach and discovery calls with sales playbooks and smart responses.

When your sales team encounters prospect resistance, Dialpad's Custom Moments can track these interactions so managers can build objection-handling strategies. Along with RTA cards, your reps will be able to quickly dispatch common obstacles to lead nurturing and closing deals.

Pricing

Dialpad Ai Sales Centre is available on either a Pro or Enterprise Plan. To find out which best suits you, and get a customised quote, you simply need to get in touch for a quote.

2. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a part-sales, part-CRM solution built to meet the essential needs of your prospecting teams. The platform comes with plenty of capabilities to help businesses manage most aspects of the sales funnel.

The platform's opportunity management tool lets you track and adjust deals or quotes in real-time. You can quickly generate PDFs from approved templates and email them directly to prospects.

For lead management, Sales Cloud provides an activity path where you can monitor the progress of every prospect. You can also see where each lead came from, read insights, and track emails. Basically, you can track your campaigns and the leads they produce from the same space.

Other features include:

• Contact management - Track social media activity and collaborate across the organisation with a Chatter feed

• Sales forecasting - Track top performers and set customised goals for each team member

• Territory management tools - Assign, track, and define hierarchies

• Sales data intelligence - A Data.com prospector that helps you discover new contacts from your existing customer accounts

• Dashboard reporting

• Mobile CRM app

Salesforce Sales Cloud comes with a lot of features that enterprises and large businesses might find useful. However, many SMBs find these capabilities useless or not user-friendly. Additionally, the vendor's customer service sometimes lets clients down.¹

Pricing

The Essentials plan starts from £20 per user per month. If you need pipeline and forecast management you will need to bump up to the more expensive Professional plan at £60 per user per month.²

3. HubSpot Sales Hub

Customer relationship management is key to maximising lifetime value after you close a deal. Tools like those provided by HubSpot can help keep your SDRs and account executives on track during sales prospecting.

In this area, it’s the HubSpot Sales Hub which focuses on your prospecting needs.

Sales Hub tools can help with your cold and warm emailing efforts. Users get access to 5,000 email templates, custom properties, and customizable quotes. Email reply tracking lets you assess how email campaigns are going and implement easy A/B testing.

The platform comes with payment processing but you will be expected to pay fees ranging from 0.5-2.9% per transaction. The basic paid plan includes two deal pipelines per account. This feature lets you add deals, assign tasks, and track your best prospects.

Other features include:

• Customer/ client engagement tools

• List segmentation

• Live chat with website visitors

• App marketplace integrations including Facebook Messenger, Slack, Gmail, and Microsoft Exchange

• Sales content analytics for email templates, documents, and sequences

• Sales document library

• Sales automation for tasks and emails

• Mobile app

Sales Hub will help you manage your SDR team during the outreach process. However, some users have found the product difficult to set up and describe the user interface (UI) as “clunky.”³

Pricing

There are free tools with the HubSpot Sales Hub. The more feature-rich Starter plan for professionals and small businesses starts at £17 per month for two users, and the comprehensive Professional plan comes in at £396 per month for five users.⁴

4. Zendesk Sell

Zendesk is best known for its customer support and ticketing tools. Zendesk Sell is a sales CRM that helps boost productivity and maintain pipeline visibility.

The platform is powered by an intuitive interface and comes with many of the expected capabilities. Core features include email integrations for alerts, templates, and automatic tracking with Gmail and Microsoft Office 365.

For prospecting, the app includes several sales enablement tools and features. Zendesk gives you access to more than 44 million business and 350 million prospect records, making it easier for your reps to find new opportunities. You can filter leads and build lists by geography, industry, title, and other details.

An email sequence feature lets you build customised flows and automate messaging tasks. This helps you tailor things like cadences to suit your needs. The Pipeline Development report gives you a good overview of how your leads, prospects, and deals are going.

Other features include:

• Call, text, log, and record straight from leads, contacts, and deals

• Bulk email outreach

• Power dialler

• Smart lists and email templates

• Sales triggers - Automate admin tasks and after-call work

• App marketplace - Integrations including Mailchimp, Zoho CRM, Intercom, and Shopify

• Forecasting for deal volume and revenue growth

• Task player - A simple tool to help you stick to the plan and complete prospecting steps quickly

Zendesk is a good option if you want fully integrated sales and support management systems (of course, you will need to pay for each product). However, many customers report that the former Base CRM has been continually stripped of features while becoming more expensive since Zendesk purchased the app.⁵

Pricing

The Sell Team plan starts at £15 per user per month. This includes up to two customisable sales pipelines. You will need to pay extra if you want advanced sales reporting and forecasting capabilities.⁶

5. Zoho SalesIQ

Going down the CRM merchant ladder brings us to Zoho’s prospect solution, SalesIQ. The platform has a unique collection of capabilities (some outside the scope of sales prospecting) that some businesses may find useful.

The platform's lead scoring and visitor tracking tools are its main prospecting features.

The app UI streamlines qualification during outreach with a simple “click the box” interface. Lead scores can also be created depending on website visitor behaviour, such as interacting with a landing page or campaign source. This makes it easy to evaluate sales-readiness.

You also get online live chat so your sales reps can instantly contact new leads and gather more information.

Other features include:

• Chatbots - Codeless builder for virtual assistants that uses your knowledge base documents and FAQs to generate leads

• Instant messaging - Outbound marketing channels such as WhatsApp Business, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and mobile app chat

• SalesIQ mobile app - Allows sales teams to make audio calls to prospects

• Score analytics

• Email chat transcripts

Zoho SalesIQ is a sales prospecting tool that can work for businesses that spend a lot of time on website visitor prospecting.

Pricing

The Basic plan starts at £5.60 per user per month and allows for 1000 chat sessions per month.⁷

Considerations when choosing a sales prospecting tool

With so many options, you will need to take the following into account when choosing a sales prospecting tool:

Features and functionality

The features and capabilities of a solution are why you’re interested in the first place. What sales productivity functions do you need?

To aid in your search for a solution, you will need to build a prioritised list of must-haves and nice-to-have features.

What prospect-researching capabilities do you need? Do you need access to large databases and filters or do you want CRM functionality that keeps all logs in one place?

Do you want to reach prospects on any channel, or are you only looking for outbound email templates? There are a lot of decisions to be made here. We propose an easier path: Choose a robust tool that does multiple things well.

The specialist tools may prove useful in the short term. However, your business will quickly outgrow them. Plus, having capabilities like VoIP calls, team messaging, and call transcriptions all in one place lets you consolidate your tech stack for operational and cost efficiency.

Ease of use

Almost as important as the features are the ease of use. Implementing a new prospecting tool can be a big deal. You don’t want to be in the middle of the onboarding process only to find out the key stakeholders can’t make any sense of the app.

If a sales solution is overly complicated, it’s probably not worth your time. All headaches aside, you can expect low and slow adoption rates that would make American Southern barbecue champions jealous.

Pricing

Whether we like to admit it or not, buying decisions almost always come down to price. It’s one of the biggest objections your closers handle daily.

The first step is to have an estimated budget before getting too deep into your search. Going back to features, finding a solution with a lot of crossover capabilities will go a long way toward reducing costs elsewhere.

A sales prospecting solution or sales productivity tool packed with features will empower you to ditch smaller pieces of your tech stack. By spending money, you’ll be saving money!

Customer support

The best sales prospecting services offer 24/5 technical support at a minimum. Of course, 24/7, 365 days a year is worth paying a bit extra for when possible. Besides expert availability, you want a range of DIY and self-help resources.

You likely need onboarding and educational materials. And what about a customer success team? It all depends on the size of the organisation and the scope of your sales prospecting.

Integrations

The best prospecting tools will connect to your other business applications. You want a platform with CRM integrations and connections to other business tools, too.

More seamless prospecting empowers your team to maximise every opportunity. Dialpad boasts a wealth of built-in integrations and open APIs. Combined, they give you ultimate control and flexibility over how to build your tech stack and operate.

The right sales prospecting tools will help you improve your prospects list & boost your revenue

Businesses like yours need every competitive edge to thrive and grow. Sales prospecting tools streamline mundane tasks and free your SDRs to do what they do best.

With Dialpad Ai Sales Centre, your team will find better leads, qualify more prospects, and close more deals. Get a hands-on look at how it works today!

¹uk.trustpilot.com/review/salesforce.com

²salesforce.com/uk/products/sales-cloud/pricing/

³capterra.co.uk/reviews/140219/hubspot-saleshub?overall_rating_ge=3#facets

⁴hubspot.com/pricing/sales/starter?products=sales-hub-starter_1&term=annual

⁵capterra.co.uk/reviews/199865/zendesk-sell?overall_rating_ge=2#facets

⁶zendesk.co.uk/pricing/sales/

⁷zoho.com/salesiq/pricing.html?src=headermenu