Effective sales prospecting is a multistep process that requires systematic prospect discovery, qualification, and outreach. In this post, you’ll learn the 19 best sales prospecting tools to help you engage with your ideal prospects.

From software that leverages your partner ecosystem to prospect databases, every tool on this list can help you fill your sales pipeline. But first, we’ll dive into the benefits sales prospecting tools have for your organization.

What Is a Sales Prospecting Tool?

The Benefits of Sales Prospecting Tools

The 19 Best Sales Prospecting Tools

Choosing the Right Tools

Whatever you’re looking for, a sales prospecting tool will help you do one or more of the following:

• Identify high-quality prospects.
• Qualify and prioritize these prospects.
• Find accurate contact data for your prospects.
• Engage with your prospects.

The Benefits of Sales Prospecting Tools

While sales prospecting can be conducted manually, sales prospecting tools provide unique advantages. See common benefits below.

You’ll boost sales prospecting efficiency.

In 2022, 29% of salespeople reported that improving sales process efficiency was their top goal, according to HubSpot research.

To create a more efficient sales process, teams need to focus on all stages of the sales lifecycle. That includes how prospects are identified.

Unlike manual prospecting, sales prospecting software allows you to quickly identify potential customers. You can automate parts of the search process to save time and resources.

Prospect and data quality will improve.

HubSpot’s 2022 Sales Strategy Survey found that 18% of salespeople cite a lack of high-quality leads as their top challenge. Your team may also struggle to find high-caliber prospects, which results in low-quality leads.

Even in instances where salespeople can identify interested customers, 19% of salespeople struggle with getting in direct contact with decision-makers.

Sales prospecting software solves both of these problems by helping salespeople find, qualify, and prioritize leads. Additionally, these solutions help teams find accurate contact data and manage outreach.

You can conduct sales prospecting at scale.

Meeting sales quotas is a top challenge for 20% of salespeople. In fact, 26% of salespeople only get between 1 to 10 new leads a week.

For most salespeople, exceeding this number is nearly impossible with manual prospecting.

When each stage of the prospecting process is automated (whether in part or fully), your tea can speed up the discovery, qualification, and outreach process. Many sales prospecting tools also provide access to prospect databases, which can be filtered and sorted based on your ideal customer profile.

The 19 Best Sales Prospecting Tools

Looking for a sales prospecting solution, but not sure where to start? Our team gathered 19 of the best sales prospecting tools on the market in 2023. Review key features and find out which will work best for you.

1. HubSpot Sales Lead Software

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If you’re looking for a robust sales solution, consider HubSpot’s Sales Hub. Here you can both find prospects and leverage additional features to move them along the buyer’s journey.

Core features include:

• Automated prospect list building and real-time prospect tracking. This allows you to see which companies visit your website and what actions they perform on your site.
• Custom views. Here you can sort and prioritize prospects using filtering criteria. That includes sorting by the user’s number of visits, number of page views, location, and company size.
• Automations. This helps to ensure timely prospect engagement. You can set up automated notifications to alert your team when high-priority prospects engage on your site.
• Automated email sequences. This feature optimizes and boosts the effectiveness of your prospect outreach.

What we love: Aside from its powerful core prospecting features, HubSpot’s sales lead platform offers a comprehensive sales solution.

Pricing: A limited version is free as part of Hubspot’s Sales Hub. For more advanced functionality, HubSpot offers premium features in the Starter, Professional, and Enterprise versions of Sales Hub. Prices start at $45 per month, $450 per month, and $1,200 per month, respectively.

What Users Say

“The platform is easy to use and has an incredibly good customer service team to accompany it. I spend around two hours a day using the sequencing tool to prospect and have never had any issues. We also use it as our CRM, which does exactly what we need it to. Recommend to any size organization,” Sam H. for G2.

2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

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LinkedIn has a huge global user base of 875 million members. Of this user base, many are high-income earners that are currently “in the market” to buy products. Additionally, nearly 16 million of these people hold ownership or senior C-suite positions within their organizations.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a sales tool that’s designed to help you engage with prospects on this powerful platform.

Core features include:

• Advanced search capabilities, which leverage filters such as job titles, organization size, and company.
• Custom prospect list building and management. Here you can take notes and gets alerts about relevant prospect updates, such as job changes.
• Personalized prospect outreach via LinkedIn mail.

What we love: LinkedIn Sales Navigator has the ability to tap the most important social media platform for B2B businesses. Here you can find prospects with precision and ease.

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“What I like the most about LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the amount of information that you can find about any person or company’s profile without number limitations, including different filters to select the information that you want and what is relevant for you,” Nicolas G. for G2.

3. PartnerTap

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If you’re looking to leverage your ecosystem, PartnerTap may be the solution for you. This enterprise solution enables “co-selling, co-marketing, and lead-sharing” among business partners.

This works via a simple three-step process:

1. You sign up for the platform.
2. Your data is automatically pulled from your customer relationship management system (CRM) or a CSV file.
3. You then invite your partners to connect on the platform at absolutely no cost to them.

Once you’ve done this, PartnerTap allows you to uncover overlapping customers, prospects, and opportunities within your ecosystem. That includes prospects that are current customers of one or more of your partners.

Plus, you (and your partners) have full control over what and how much data you share.

What we love: For many salespeople, partners are often an untapped or underutilized prospecting resource. PartnerTap provides a non-competitive, mutually beneficial system for uncovering opportunities throughout your partner ecosystem.

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“Well-organized and intuitive — time is gold in sales, and sales enablement tools need to provide quick returns with limited effort … [I] have never used another sales tool that does this better,” Nick L. for G2.

4. Apollo

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Apollo is a sales intelligence and engagement platform that enables prospect discovery, outreach, and management. The platform’s engagement features (especially those that leverage automation and AI) are incredibly powerful.

Core features include:

• A prospect database of over 250 million contacts, including verified phone numbers, email addresses, and job titles. These prospects can also be filtered using 200+ attributes.
• Prospect monitoring functionality. This alerts you of job changes, funding news, and hiring decisions.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI). This allows you to use the “Persona Lookalike” functionality that suggests prospects based on your ideal client persona.

What we love: Apollo has multiple integrations. Not only can you integrate your CRM, Apollo also has a Chrome extension that allows you to find contact details of LinkedIn connections.

Pricing: Limited versions are available for free. For more advanced functionality, paid plans start at $39 per user per month.

What Users Say

“The best thing I like about Apollo is being able to find almost all the emails of the decision-makers I need to contact… I also like how integration with HubSpot works so that I don’t need to do the double work by adding the leads to both systems separately (+ email tracking is great too),” Kate K. for G2.

5. Crunchbase

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Crunchbase is a company database that collects insights on private and public companies. Here you can filter prospects based on company, investor, and funding data. Crunchbase also gathers the latest news on the companies you track.

Core features include:

• Access to verified contact data. You can also connect with contacts from within the platform.
• Account recommendations based on predefined criteria.
• Market monitoring. This helps you to recognize industry trends early, track buying signals and identify trigger events.

What we love: With Crunchbase, you can access and monitor key financial data and insights that indicate buying power and readiness. That includes news related to funding, information about funding type, and who financial backers are.

Pricing: A limited version is available for free. For more advanced functionality, paid plans start at $29 per user a month.

What Users Say

“Great source of research for sales pros looking to get additional information on prospects and relevant news on your clients. It is a great tool if your account base includes startups! Information on VC’s funding and investors and recent deals can [be] very helpful in understanding your customers,” Donald B. for G2.

6. Usergems

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Usergems is a sales intelligence platform that offers two powerful sales prospecting solutions: account tracking and contract tracking.

Account tracking allows you to monitor relevant job changes within target organizations. You can also access verified contact data and identify previous “touch points” within the organization.

Contact tracking focuses on job changes for prospects, users, leads, and former customers. Every time a former lead or customer moves to a new company, it provides an opportunity to pitch your product or service to that new organization through a warm introduction.

What we love: Not only does Usergems alert you when a former lead or prospect leaves their company, the platform also adds them to your CRM as a new contact (with their new information).

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“It’s opened up a new customer base for us to target and prospect. It’s user-friendly and has been straightforward in receiving the leads,” Hannah H. for G2.

7. Leadfeeder

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Leadfeeder is a B2B lead generation software that uses a tracker script to help you identify and monitor website visitors.

Using Leadfeeder you can:

• Identify the companies that visit your site.
• Monitor prospect behavior while on your site.
• Score and qualify prospects based on their activity on your site and demographic filters.
• Set up email alerts based on predetermined criteria, such as “when X company visits your site.”
• Integrate with your CRM for data enrichment.

Leadfeeder also provides a filterable contact database, which allows you to contact and engage with relevant leads.

What we love: Prospects that visit your website have already shown some form of interest in your product or service. This makes them more likely to engage and convert during the outreach stage. With Leaderfeeder, you can identify people who are most likely to buy.

Pricing: Limited version available for free. For access to more features, paid plans start at $79 per user a month.

What Users Say

“Leadfeeder gives us a great idea of which qualified enterprise prospects are checking us out so we can follow these leads,” Ben O. for G2.

8. Bombora

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Bombora Company Surge is a software platform that helps users access and monitor intent data. To do this, Bombora collects data from a consent-based data cooperative of B2B publishers. The platform then analyzes this data using machine learning and maps the data to specific businesses.

This data can then be used to:

• Score and prioritize prospects based on “readiness” or interest.
• Plan timely and relevant prospect outreach and follow-up.
• Identify “at-risk” accounts by seeing if prospects are also researching competitors.

What we love: Bombora allows you to set up “automatic surge reports” that periodically populate your CRM with prospects who have shown buying intent.

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“The platform is incredibly intuitive, and the user experience is easy to use. My favorite part of the tool is the automatic surge report and net-new account to HubSpot,” Ashden K. on G2.

9. UpLead

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UpLead is a platform that offers users access to a suite of sales prospecting products. That includes three important features:

• The prospector. UpLead’s prospector provides access to a database of over 100 million contacts. This database is filterable using 50+ search criteria such as industry, title, and location. Select prospects can then be pushed directly into your CRM.
• Email verification. The platform conducts an instant verification procedure to ensure accuracy.
• Data enrichment. UpLead users have the option to upload a prospect list. The platform then automatically enriches each prospect with over 50 data points.

What we love: UpLead uses a pay-as-you-go system, which makes it a more affordable solution for most salespeople. Users purchase “credits” that can then be used to download or export contacts.

Pricing: A limited version is available for free. For access to more features, paid plans start at $74 per month.

What Users Say

“The leads on UpLead are more up-to-date; I get leads with higher quality. That’s more important to me than the largest database because I know for sure that the email will get through… It’s affordable and worth it,” Julia K. for G2.

10. HG Insights

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HG Insights is a market intelligence platform. Specifically, this platform monitors the “digital infrastructure” of over 9 million companies and uses this data to produce actionable insights for sales teams.

Here are some of the things you can do with HG Insights:

• Monitor and analyze your overall market. This can be used to estimate “vendor penetration” and identify opportunities in underserved markets.
• Identify high-quality prospects. These are prospects that are likely to buy your product based on factors such as the current tech stack and usage data.
• Leverage “contextual intent data” for prospect qualification, scoring, and prioritization.

What we love: HG Insights is an especially powerful tool for software companies because the platform focuses heavily on “technographic” data. Here, you’ll find out which companies have installed certain technologies. This can help you narrow your pool of prospects.

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“This tool is pretty neat. With a click of the button, you’re able to find what software stack other companies are using — which is especially useful when you’re in sales looking to find target companies by systems used,” Nikko J. for G2.

11. Cognism

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Cognism is a sales intelligence platform that provides users access to a suite of products. These products include:

• A prospector. Cognism allows users to build prospect lists (which include email addresses and verified phone numbers) based on ideal customer profiles.
• A Chrome extension. This tool can be used to export contacts from LinkedIn and push contacts into the user’s CRM from the sales navigator.
• Intent data monitoring. Cognism helps users identify prospects that are currently “in-market” and actively looking to purchase a solution.

The way the platform pulls this data is through a partnership with Bombora — the buyer intent platform listed earlier in the post.

Why we recommend it: Cognism offers users a combination of artificial intelligence and human verification to ensure the accuracy of its data.

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“I use Cognism pretty much every day for prospecting, outreach, and monitoring intent data. The biggest attraction of the platform for me is that it is the only solution that effectively covers both of our core markets (the US and the UK). I have found the quality of data in the US to have been excellent in the past 12 months, and this has helped to lift our connect-to-dial rate considerably,” Humphrey C. for G2.

12. TechTarget’s Priority Engine

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TechTarget’s Priority Engine is an intent data platform that helps users engage with prospects in their technology category.

Core features include:

• Identifying in-market prospects and building prospect lists based on intent data.
• Qualifying and scoring prospects using behavioral data. This data is also useful for understanding the buyer journey.
• Optimizing prospect outreach and improving response rates. Priority Engine uses AI-powered lead generation and intent data insights to aid in the process.

What we love: TechTarget highlights high-quality leads. These prospects have been triple-verified and shown significant interest in your solution by conducting relevant research with TechTarget.

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“It is easy to filter on specific events like viewing our website/content, their interests, and other attributes that we look to go after for specific campaigns. The click-to-add feature is a really easy way to send contact information directly to our CRM,” Christina L. for G2

13. Demandbase

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Demandbase is an account-based marketing (ABM) solution that offers a suite of intelligence solutions. The program works by taking first-party data from your data sources (CRM, website, etc.), matching this data with information from third-party sources, and then analyzing the resulting data to draw insights.

Here are some of the data and insights you can access from Demandbase:

• Company data. This includes data such as location, revenue, and number of employees.
• Contact data. This database includes email, LinkedIn, and phone numbers for over 113 million contacts with decision-making positions within their organization.
• Intent data. Demandbase’s intent data leverages data science to determine and score buying intent based on the prospect’s search activity.

What we love: Demandbase allows you to qualify, filter, and score prospects using intent data in various ways. For example, you can score based on what they viewed on your site or how long they spent on your site.

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“What I like best about Demandbase is that it helps me identify potential customers and partners based on website visitors. It’s allowed me to target new prospects with even a tiny amount of interest that I wouldn’t have otherwise identified,” Amanda S. for G2.

14. Vainu

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Vainu is a B2B business database and sales intelligence software. Core features include:

• Company profiles. This allows users to filter through a database of millions of companies and identify prospects that fit their ideal customer profile. These profiles also include contact details such as emails and phone numbers.
• Workflow triggers: This allows users to enable automation. These trigger points can be used to build prospect lists based on predefined criteria.
• Artificial intelligence. This helps users identify buying windows and make prospecting suggestions.

What we love: Vainu allows easy access to data and straightforward integration with multiple platforms. One of the top reasons Vainu users love the platform, besides its functionality, is that it is incredibly easy to use.

Pricing: A limited version is available for free. For access to more features, paid plans start at €6,600 per year with a one-time onboarding fee.

What Users Say

“I like the company’s 360-degree view a lot. It saves us a lot of time in the prospect research phase,” Pernilla C. for G2.

15. Tami

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Alt text: sales prospecting tools, Tami dashboard

IMG name: sales-propsecting-tools-tami

Tami allows users to build prospect lists from profiles in its extensive database. This database can be filtered using multiple conditions, including geographical area, merchant size, company type, and even by which bank the prospect uses.

You can also access verified emails for decision-makers within their target organizations. And if contacts switch jobs, you can set up alerts to keep you up-to-date.

What we love: With Tami, users can skip the gatekeepers and go straight to the correct points of contact.

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“You don’t have to waste your time with gatekeepers; you can find contact details of specific people to help focus your time,” Gareth D. for G2.

16. Hunter

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Hunter is a platform for accessing verified and accurate professional email addresses. Plus, results in Hunter are returned with a confidence score, which indicates the estimated level of accuracy of the email address.

Core features include:

• Domain search. This allows users to find the email addresses of all users linked to a specific domain.
• Email finder. This allows you to find a professional email address using the prospect’s name and the company’s website domain.
• Email verifier. This tool allows users to verify the validity of an email.

What we love: Hunter makes finding contact information incredibly easy — even for users that have very little information to go on.

Pricing: Hunter provides a free version of the platform, which allows users to conduct up to 25 searches per month. Paid plans start at $49 per month.

What Users Say

“Hunter has a simple system to instantly generate contact information for leads…all I need to do is enter the domain for the company I’m searching for and the name of the contact, and it generates the email,” Jacob U. for G2.

17. Groove.co

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Groove is a comprehensive sales engagement platform for Salesforce. Core features include:

• Multichannel campaign automation. Groove allows users to automatically import prospects into automated, multichannel flows and sequences. Users can also A/B test sequences and templates.
• Call automation and optimization. Groove provides a desktop app, the OmniDialler, that allows you to make calls within the app or from any webpage. You can also surface relevant information before or during calls.
• Online meeting scheduling. Groove offers users access to a customizable meeting-scheduling tool that allows users to schedule emails.

What we love: Groove is an especially powerful tool for email outreach and activity tracking.

Pricing: Available upon request.

What Users Say

“When you think about what you need when making sales in an online environment, Groove has everything, from booking appointments to automatic responses to follow-up emails, to read status. I love this tool and can’t imagine doing my job without it,” Mariana A. for G2.

18. Reply.io

Reply is a sales automation and engagement solution. Core features include:

• A Chrome extension for LinkedIn integration and automation. This allows you to scrape the email addresses of LinkedIn users and automatically verify these addresses.
• Multichannel sequences. This allows you to engage with your prospects (initial outreach and follow-up) across multiple channels.
• AI-powered smart features. This allows Reply to suggest actions based on your prospect’s activities. These suggestions include holding off on further contact and making a call while the prospect is highly engaged.

What we love: Reply is especially great for automated cold email outreach because of its advanced email capabilities.

Pricing: This sales engagement tool starts at $60 per user a month. The email warmup tool starts at $29 per email account a month. The email search tool offers a free version for users.

What Users Say

“I must say that we are not disappointed, Reply is an easy-to-use tool. We managed to book a lot more outbound meetings thanks to Reply,” Rene N. for G2.

19. Close

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Close is a comprehensive CRM for small-business sales teams. To use this platform, you’ll need to first import your prospect list into the CRM. This list can then be filtered using search tools and smart views.

Here are some of the things you can do with Close:

• Automate cold calls through predictive dialing and leveraging Close’s “Power dialler.”
• Sync your existing email provider to receive and send emails within the CRM.
• Set up automated, customized, and personalized email sequences.

Aside from these features, Close also offers additional features specifically for sales leaders such as reporting and call coaching.

What we love: Close allows you to manage and automate almost all aspects of your prospect outreach and engagement without having to leverage any add-ons.

Pricing: Prices start at $29 per user a month.

What Users Say

“I would find that I would meet with prospects and when I couldn’t close on the first or second meeting, I would move on to the next prospect. Close has given those types of prospects new life by reminding me about not only the prospect but what the potential and eventual client and I spoke about, giving me an edge that I did not have before,” Tim M. for G2.

Choosing the Right Tools

If you’re looking to improve your sales team’s efficiency, sales prospecting tools can help you get there. All you need to do is pick the right ones. The suggestions above can help you identify prospects, find their email, and keep in touch after an initial engagement.

See which part of your sales lifecycle is the slowest and most difficult. From there, you can pick the best solution to support your sales team.