Which Sales Tools are Best for Prospecting?

In August of 2020, Steli Efti, the CEO of Close put out a post to his community that asked for opinions on their favorite sales tools.

In response, we've created this short article of our favorite prospecting tools and how they are used together.

For starters, we see the answer of this question as a multi-tool approach to achieve the level of success and efficiency that the modern B2B company needs to achieve. Simply, organizations need to get in front of their target market enough times, effectively, to drive awareness, interest, and action towards exploring a conversation about if you could help the prospective company to reach a desired state.

Prospecting Campaigns and Strategy

1) Campaign Strategy: What are we selling? Who are we selling it to? How are we positioning it? These are all critical questions that need to be considered - and there is no magic tool that will provide answers to these questions. This comes from many strategic iterations by the C-Suite, Sales Leaders, and Marketing Leaders and should be passed down through execution. Winning strategies are often a logic built on fulfilling a business problem or goal that a certain type of organization has in a relevant time-frame. If you'd like to see our guide on what you should be considering during your campaign planning - download our Prospecting Campaign Strategy Planning Document.

2) Stakeholder Identification: Look no further than LinkedIn.com and it's inexpensive Sales Navigator upgrade. Sales Navigator is perfect for building customized lists of the stakeholders that you or your organization should be selling to.

3) Data Acquisition: Seamless.AI. Once you have your targets identified on Navigator, utilize Seamless to grab the corresponding contact data on each target (email, phone number, physical address, etc.) In 2020 and beyond you can only sell and market to a person that you have validated contact information for, and Seamless allows you to acquire that data in minutes.

4) Message/Script development. While there is no tool that will write your outbound messages for you, there are a couple concepts to keep in mind. A) It takes 20-36 exposures for somebody to even know who you are. Build an intelligent messaging sequence designed to position you and your organization as advisor to your prospects. B) Talk to them about their business objectives, recommendations for improving their business, and external trends that could affect them- not about how great your product is. C) Don't look to close on every single message. Stay in front of them, make your recommendations, and offer availability to talk. Don't send messages that say do you wanna talk, do you wanna talk, do you wanna talk?! every time. If you'd like specific messaging recommendations, shoot me an email at [email protected] and I'd be happy to share some of our messaging formulas with you.

Prospecting Messaging Tools

5) LinkedIn Connections and Messaging: ClickedIn. ClickedIn is the ultimate tool for LinkedIn automation. With the ability to schedule automated LinkedIn connection requests to your identified prospects and a sequence follow-up messages once they accept, you will drive real conversations through your LinkedIn profile like you'd never believe. This is a must have tool for prospecting in 2020 and beyond.

6) Email Campaigns: Mailshake. Remember all of those people that you will be sending requests to through LinkedIn? Let's continue reaching out to them through email by using an email automation tool that is designed for cold email. Hook up your email to this tool to send a spaced out sequence of automated messages that look like you've crafted them one by one from your outlook.

7) Automated Voicemail. Stratics Networks. Once someone has accepted your LinkedIn connection & a relationship has been established, leverage Stratics to mass send out recorded voicemails from you. Stratics is the #1 ringless voice-mail dropping service we've seen out there that will allow you to get in front of your prospects through yet another vital medium having to pay somebody to dial for you all day and make silly mistakes.

8) Engagement Tracking: Visual Visitor. Now that we are reaching out across email, LinkedIn, voicemail, and direct mail (although I don't have a specific technology that I recommend at this time for physical mailing, I do have recommendations for direct mail scripts if you message me), let's find out who is actually engaging with our outreach. Visual Visitor is an identification tool that will allow you to see who actually visited your website from your digital outreaches and will provide insight on what pages they visited.

So as you can see, the answer to which sales tool is best? is the combination of these tools leveraged under the same strategy to get your targeted prospects to know who you are and to get the to engage with you (by visiting your website, submitting a form, responding to your messages, calling you back, etc.)

Automated Sales Prospecting - The Lead Gen Automation Solution

Automated Sales Prospecting is the campaign & automation management solution that we developed to get you noticed by your target market and drive leads without adding any additional headcount to your organization. It's designed to develop real leads through outbound prospecting automation at 1/3 of the price of a entry-level SDR.

If you'd like to explore Automated Sales Prospecting, visit our website at www.automatedsalesprospecting.com or schedule a conversation with our team to see if an automated campaign solution could be a good fit for driving the real leads that you need to meet your growth goals.