The rolodex has taken its place in the archives of history as an old-school way to collect and organize contact information.

Physical business cards are being steadily replaced with a phone tap which sends data straight from device to device.

When reps pick up a phone, it’s a pretty sure bet that they pulled that number out of a curated online database.

Sales prospecting has gone digital.

And the tools to harvest relevant, timely prospect contact information are digital too.

Collected by the team at ASLAN, here are some important ones.

Sales Intelligence for Sales Prospecting

Great prospectors do their homework, and there are a few ways to get gold star insights.

Company Research Tools

Company research tools for sales prospecting use tech-driven mechanisms to reveal more information about a company. This is important to have a relevant and meaningful sales conversation. You can learn things like:

• Are they going through a merger?
• Have they changed leadership?
• What’s their status in the market?
• Where do they lead or lag?
• What are other indicators that help reps understand how to make an appeal?

All of this research supports the investigation process and understanding of whether it’s a good opportunity or not.

A couple of examples of what to look for in these types of tools:

• A way to track companies and investors, searching by revenue, location, industry, and other prospecting metrics.
• In B2B sales prospecting, you should be able to find company research tools that go beyond company data into modules and features that can support market research and marketing research as well.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) powered prospecting tools are a dime a dozen. Any list of contact information probably has an algorithm or code it’s using to pull in various fields from various sources. Data management is accelerated or streamlined through the use of AI or natural language processing (NLP). 

Website Tracking

A website is any company’s digital front door. Anyone interested in doing business with an organization can find out a lot of great talking points from its website. It just takes a little digging, and there are tech-savvy ways to find things out.

For instance:

• Search engine optimization efforts uncover what a company is prioritizing in terms of organic search ranking. You can learn what keywords the site is ranking for (including new ones) using tools like SEMRush, Spyfu, Moz, and more. When you know what a site is about, you know what matters to a company and what kind of business they want to attract. This helps you sleuth out what’s important to them.
• Paid advertising also uncovers a company’s key priorities. You can easily use Google tools as well as website scanners and SEO tools to find out what a company is paying for ads on and how much it’s spending. Do they emphasize a core product? A bunch of products? Are they paying to advertise something new? Again, it helps you get under the surface and find a company’s priorities, which indicates what’s important to their leaders… the people you want to meet with.

Using website tracking tools, reps can learn what a company is doing in terms of digital strategy and sales, which says a lot about its business goals and needs.

Press Tracking

Media mentions are often published or endorsed by a company. What does that mean for sales prospecting? It means you can find out what a company thinks its biggest news is, then follow the trending wave right to their front door. 

Reps should stay in the know in their industry. These objectives are achieved by using media monitoring or press tracking tools. There are plenty, some of which are better for PR professionals but many which have a little learning curve and then you’re off to the races.

Social Media Tracking

Likes, follows, impressions, highlights, stories — it’s all on social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more all have built-in metrics, many of which are visible to the public.

For sales reps, social media is also a rich vein to tap for actually finding prospects. It’s a place to make initial, early connections and build a casual relationship. The value of social media for sales prospecting is immense, and reps who learn to leverage it the right way can see a ton of results.

If you want to go deeper practicing this, we recommend getting fluent in the following on-platform tools:

• Meta Business Suite
• LinkedIn Premium & add-ons like Sales Navigator
• Twitter for Business

Other great places to start showing up, depending on your industry, could be Reddit, Medium, Vimeo, and Discord.

Want a deeper dive on this topic? Bookmark this to read next: The Complete Guide to Sales Prospecting

Customer Relationship Management & Automation Tools

CRMs have been around for a long time, dating back to early databases derived from phone books and other public contact sources. Now, they are the lifeblood of any sales department. They enable reps to be faster and smarter with sales prospecting.

Email Outreach

Email outreach can be done in bulk or one at a time. Both are valuable to sift through possible prospects, and both are only possible through the security of a CRM that is connected to a verified domain. 

A lot of reps forget to prospect an existing database. Filter by old customers, customers who haven’t bought in a while, or even deals that didn’t go through but made it to the final stage. Closed-lost and no decision prospects are usually worth following up on.

There are a lot of ways to refine email outreach which are beyond the scope of this “tools” discussion. Check out some of the tips we have here: 3 Tips for Successful Cold Outreach

Direct Messaging

CRMs can be used to log/record/organize direct messaging just like you would emails. If reps are doing a lot of DMing on social media or other platforms, you can find CRMs that integrate to track, analyze, and report on those interactions. This is especially helpful at scale. 

Use a good CRM to DM with ease, then identify the responses that indicate an opportunity is opening up.

Lists and Pipeline Management

Perhaps the biggest innovative leap in sales prospecting tools in the last decade has been the accuracy and usefulness of lists. Digital databases are an outcome of big data, and indexing technology (think, natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence) have made it easier than ever to get a list reps can trust.

That said, what reps do with lists — how they organize, categorize, track, and more — makes a big difference. This is where pipeline management comes in handy, with set operating procedures, tags, notes, and more. These functionalities centralize data and make sure repeat touches are well-documented for seamless interactions.

Managing lists and pipelines well gives reps the ability to “pick up where they left off,” ensuring every attempt or even conversation builds on the last.

Power Dialers

Gaining access is a headline-making issue most reps face these days. By “access,” we mean getting that all-important meeting. It’s the goal of sales prospecting: to get face to face and find out if there’s a deal on the table.

Power dialers are outbound sales tools that can take the number-punching off a rep’s plate. Many now come with a voice AI integration that cuts out any robotic moment, ensuring the prospect feels a human connection from “Hello?”

Text Messaging

Text messaging has overcome the same security and access hurdles that email faced less than a decade ago. It’s possible now to procure big, verified lists of phone numbers and then use a CRM for outbound sales prospecting via text.

Care has to be exercised with this, because it’s all too easy to look like spam. But the right reps can get really good at creating precision language that earns attention and responses.

Schedulers

Last, a CRM’s ability to integrate with calendars is a big whopping priority that has changed the game in sales prospecting. No more coordinating calendars or sifting through lists of dates (converting time zones in your head) to find time for a call. People can schedule with you while you’re sleeping. They can book in anytime. And the scheduler will do much more than reserve the slot: you can create auto-messages, reminders (to reduce no-shows), and draft meaningful follow-ups that go out right away.

Taking the time to get totally comfortable with a scheduler is a sweet way to accelerate progress in any prospecting project.

More Communication and Sales Prospecting Tools

But wait… there’s more!

We’ve found a few more tools for sales prospecting we think your reps should check out.

Video Messaging

An outbound video message has a place in emails, social media DMs, and even text messages. 

The big fear of using technology too much in sales prospecting (or business in general) is it feels impersonal. Video can solve for that.

At ASLAN, we use videos in email nurture sequences. It’s awesome. And the best part is it doesn’t need to be formal (it’s actually better if it’s casual).

You can use all kinds of video capture tools — Vidyard, Loom, etc. — to create warm, friendly, fun messages to send to prospects.

Creative Decks and Pitches

People are accustomed to slick as heck presentations. A white background, black text, Arial font isn’t going to impress anyone.

Sales reps are usually facing a tight window of time to make a splash. That’s where creative decks and pitches come in, and there are plenty of graphic tools and facilitation tools they can use to up the game.

They may find assistance from drag and drop graphic tools, such as Canva, Digideck, Pitch Deck, Piktochart, Slidebean — there are lots of options. 

It may also be worth looking into specific software meeting platforms that provide virtual sales rooms. Everything can be customized, ensuring a streamlined audio/visual experience with easy presenting tools, chat features, recordings, and more. 

Something Surprising

In this tech-heavy sales prospecting tool list, let’s not forget that sometimes the most surprising thing is pretty basic.

Reps shouldn’t forget the power of handwritten notes. A quirky gift. These are human gestures that can showcase a lot of personality and provide a powerful impetus for someone to get in touch.

For example, reps at ASLAN will send copies of Tom Stanfill’s book, UnReceptive, with areas of interest highlighted. It’s personalized. It’s unusual. It’s effective.

Find ways to stand out from the crowd, be it a physical or virtual touchpoint, and prospecting will get a whole lot easier.

The Best Sales Prospecting Tool is… the Rep!

Okay, we’re not calling them tools. But the idea is there: all of the tech in the world won’t solve for clumsy, untrained, unmotivated reps.

At ASLAN, we believe sales is human-centric. No matter how sleek the technology gets, this is still about people with real needs finding people with real solutions.

That’s the art of sales, and one that will never grow old or outdated. It’s what we’ve dedicated our lives to teaching. 

To learn more or connect with us (as humans), head here: https://www.aslantraining.com/contact-us