As sales professionals and entrepreneurs, we are always looking for the best tools to help us reach out more, convert leads collected and qualified by digital marketing processes and close more deals.
The benefits of these tools are clear and easy to comprehend. That said, not all tools can be good. In fact, many sales people fall for the hype surrounding any one tool without realizing that it might not provide the value expected from a given tool.
If your sales outbound prospecting process is broken, salespeople aren’t hitting their numbers, or you’re drowning in sales leads then I have some sales tools recommendations for you. These tools are perfect for outreach and helps in creating a strategic marketing campaign, no-matter if your organization is B2B or B2C.
A sales outreach process has two parts –
- Discovering new prospects / leads or finding more information on your current prospects;
- Reaching Out to Your Prospects or Leads and Sealing the Deal!
While there is no one-stop shortcut, these sales outreach tools are sure to improve, automate and cut unnecessary and time-consuming slack out of your sales process, so that you can find and convert more quality leads fast.
First, Why Should You Trust Our Sales Outreach Tools Recommendations?
Most articles that you find on the Internet, prescribe solutions like 20+ sales tools etc.
This article is not like that. I put in 30+ hours into research and trying out various tools ourselves to find out what works the best.
Of course, being in the SEO consultancy space, I did have prior experience in some of the tools that I tried. For others, I just ordered in a free trial, or better yet, asked my client to order a free trial! (Don’t worry! Some of our clients let us use them for our experiments!)
We also talked to several entrepreneurs and sales reps to find tools that they suggest. We dug deep and asked them how they used their tools to find their shortcomings as well.
Overall, we arrived at the following 4 tools that are sure to serve all your outreach needs, be it in B2B or B2C!
Best Sales Outreach Tool for Finding Information on Prospective Leads
To create a comprehensive outreach campaign, you first need to find proper information regarding your potential leads, which include their social media accounts, their job and position and most importantly their email address.
Unfortunately, there is no one tool for it and you might need to use different tools for your campaign, depending on how deep you want your search to be and how much information you want to collect.
However, there are two tools that are indispensable for most outreach professionals.
#1. Hunter.io – Best for Finding and Verifying Emails
Hunter.io is the best tool out there for finding emails of prospective leads. It’s got a really good and trustworthy database.
Plus it has a free plan that offers a lot more searches than any other competitor.
Features
- With the free plan, you can have 25 monthly searches and 50 verifications and it goes up all the way to 30,000 searches and 60,000 monthly verifications for the business plan ($279/ month for the yearly subscription).
- You can even search for emails in a bulk within a domain, but it is limited to 10 emails in the free plan. So, it won’t be useful unless you are looking into a very lean business.
- It also offers link tracking and email campaigns with just its starter plan ($34/ month for the yearly subscription).
- G2 Score – 4.4/5, TrustRadius Score – 7.5/10
Pricing
- Hunter.io has a free plan. So, if you are like I was, 5 years back, you can probably use it to the fullest by creating five accounts! But, you won’t be able to save time and the email campaign feature will be limited.
- There is also the Starter ($34), Growth ($69), Pro ($139) and Business plan ($279).
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I believe the starter plan will be enough for one-seven member startups with funds less than $10k. But, if your business is bigger than that, the growth plan will be enough for all your needs.
Give it a shot!
#2. RocketReach – Best For One-Person Use
RocketReach is good and has a comparable database with Hunter. As part of my research, I had to look up several websites as well as talk to sales professionals and business executives, wherein I heard that the database of these two sales outreach softwares were pretty much the same.
However, in my personal experience, working for my clients, I did find some cases wherein RocketReach could not find the right person I was looking for.
However, I did use it at times to find contact information of individuals which even Hunter didn’t have.
Features
Plus, RocketReach finds social media accounts of prospects which is a really nice feature. Its advanced search filters are also great tools to even discover new prospects.
It also offers more searches than Hunter on its Essentials plan (1500 compared to Hunter’s 500), and is priced the same.
However, it is limited to one user, and the Teams plan and Enterprise plan requires you to pay more.
It has a G2 score of 4.5/5 and a TrustRadius score of 7.4/10.
Pricing
RocketReach has three plans which are meant for just one user –
- Essential plan costing $39.00 per month.
- Pro at $79.00 per month.
- Ultimate at $199.00 per month.
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| Note that these prices are for the yearly subscription. Monthly subscription costs 30% more, just like that of Hunter. Here’s the link to RocketReach Pricing Page. |
RocketReach also has a free plan, but it just offers 3 searches; so that’s pretty useless! Anyhow, its plans are pretty cheap if you have a one-person startup or if you have just one user who is in charge of outreach.
While it does not have an outreach campaign optionality, with its integrations with other sales tools like Outreach and HubSpot CRM, it can be a pretty strong sales outreach tool.
Interesting B2B Sales Tools Mentions
Some of the sales reps we talked to, mentioned Voila Norbert and Lusha. While Lusha is a new player in this segment, I liked Voila Norbert more, due to its nice free plan and enrich optionality.
However, Lusha is the cheapest option out there.
Best Sales Outreach Tool for Actually Reaching Out
#1. MailShake – The Most Versatile Sales Tool to Reach Out to Prospects and Leads
MailShake is unlike most other outreach tools. It defies most other pricing norms. It does not have a trial period, nor does it have several pricing plans (just two!).
But, it does make up for that with its extremely efficient and easy to use processes.
Features
With just its email outreach plan, you get features like email personalization (a must, if you follow the Marketing 3Ps), and email writing assistance with SHAKEspeare AI. It also lets you create automated follow-ups and email sequences combined with scheduling and email throttling features.
To top it all of, it lets you A/B test your emails and can be integrated with SalesForce, Pipedrive and HubSpot.
The sales engagement plan also lets you create ‘tasks’ which lets you use social messaging and phone-calling as a follow-up with email messages. Plus the plan provides you with unlimited free dialer minutes to phone numbers in North America.
It has a TrustRadius score of 9.4 out of 10 and a G2 score of 4.7 out of 5. Plus, the business owners and sales professionals that we spoke to, spoke rather highly of MailShake as a sales outreach tool.
Pricing
Costing just $44/ month for plain and simple email outreach, and $75/ month for its sales engagement plan, MailShake is extremely cheap compared to any other sales outreach softwares at present.
Plus, it is hyper-focused on just one thing – reaching out to leads, which makes some of the features that it offers a real boon for sales personnel and sales executives as well as digital marketing execs.
Here’s the Pricing Page for MailShake.
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| While it does not have a free-trial, it does offer a thirty day money back guarantee! Try it out. |
#2. HubSpot Sales Hub – The Best Tool for an All-Encompassing Sales Outreach Experience
HubSpot’s founder, Dharmesh Shah had famously said that they didn’t believe in the business philosophy of doing one thing very good and sticking to it.
Rather they believed in providing business professionals with all-encompassing solutions for all the requirements that their business might have.
Features
And, that’s where HubSpot’s Sales Hub really shines. It is not just an outreach tool, but a sales outreach tool that is combined with a CRM, quote and CPQ capability, analytics and reports features.
And that’s not even what HubSpot is most famous for. HubSpot’s suite of tools and their interoperability make it a very strong and almost an unmatched contender when used along with other HubSpot tools.
G2 reviews score it at 4.4/5 and TrustRadius scores it 8.5 out of 10.
Pricing
HubSpot Sales Hub starts out free, but its functionalities are limited. The starter plan costs just $45, a month and has several advanced features such as setting up of goals, automating outreach, using multiple currencies as well as allows you to track the productivity of your sales personnel.
The starter package is sufficient for most small startups, but if you have a big team, you could go for the pricier professional plan which costs around $450/ month.
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| Here’s the pricing page. |
Wrapping it Up
Well, that’s all for the best sales outreach tools. Here are the four tools that we suggested for ease of access –
- Hunter
- RocketReach
- MailShake
- HubSpot Sales Hub
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments and I will get back to you. And, if you use any other tool, let me know what it is and why you use it in the comments!
Also, if you liked this article, do give it a share.
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