7 prospecting tools to generate quality leads
Are you equipped with the best prospecting tools to generate qualified leads and boost your sales? Prospecting is part of the sales strategy adopted by every company, whether you're a self-employed entrepreneur or the sales manager of a major corporation. It's the key to reaching potential new customers and boosting your sales.
How can you promote your sales development and guarantee a good return on investment? To help you find the right software for your business, we've selected seven prospecting tools and detailed their uses.
Definition: what is a prospecting tool?
A sales prospecting tool is, quite simply, a piece of software that helps your sales force in their search for new prospects, whether BtoB or BtoC.
In concrete terms, prospecting software is useful for :
- define your prospecting plan,
- target your prospects,
- find prospects,
- segment your contact base in your prospecting file,
- track your prospecting history for each contact,
- track your prospecting campaigns,
- personalize your sales approach (sales pitch, etc.) and your contacts,
- generate qualified leads,
- convert more prospects into customers,
- increase your sales.
What do you need?
To define which prospecting tool is right for you, you need to identify your needs in advance. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help you make your choice.
☞ Do I need access to all my information in a single tool that centralizes all data and enables me to track the progress of each customer case?
☞ Do I have a lot of time to devote to gathering lead information, or do I need a sales intelligence tool that does it for me?
☞ Data obsolescence and contact database maintenance: how can I ensure that information gathered a few weeks or months earlier is still valid?
☞ Do I need a collaborative tool to ensure that my entire team has access to the same information in real time?
Mistakes to avoid to optimize your prospecting
Prospecting with your head down
You've just asked yourself what your needs are, but have you asked yourself what your prospects' needs are? That's the first question you need to ask yourself before you start prospecting. The answer will determine which prospect profiles you're trying to reach, and will guarantee a good customer relationship in the long term.
Knowing your prospects' needs is essential if you are to know which targets to aim for and how to meet their needs with your product or service.
Running generic campaigns
Lack of personalization is one of the reasons why many marketing campaigns fail. By personalizing your campaigns, you can show your prospects that they are unique, and begin to build a lasting relationship of trust.
1in 2 B2B marketingdecision-makersregularly send personalized messages according to the profiles involved in the purchasing process.
Le baromètre des décideurs BtoB
Doing things by halves
If you're missing information about your prospects, you're less likely to convert that lead into a customer. It's as simple as that.
It's vital that you have all the information you need to close the sale. What's more, by personalizing your marketing campaigns and your sales relationship, you're better able to respond to the prospect's objections, and therefore, ultimately, increase your chances of signing.
Don't use all the levers
SEO, emailing, events... there's no shortage of ways to prospect. And yet, companies often use only a fraction of the levers available to them.
For example, 57% of B2B decision-makers are not familiar with the concept of marketing automation.
Le baromètre des décideurs BtoB
What about you?
Choose a free prospecting tool
Freeware can be an interesting tool if you're just starting up your business and your cash flow doesn't allow you to invest in paid software. That said, you'll quickly come up against the limits of these solutions in terms of :
- hosting and data security,
- limited or optional functionality
- lack of interoperability with your CRM, etc.
Top 7 best prospecting tools
1 of 6
 Bypath |  Corporama |  Decidento |  Easybusiness |  Sparklane |  Visiblee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| For all companies | For companies with more than 1 employees | For companies with more than 1 employees | For all companies | For companies with more than 1 employees | For all companies |
| See software | See software | See software | See software | See software | See software |
| Learn more about Bypath | Learn more about Corporama | Learn more about Decidento | Learn more about Easybusiness | Learn more about Sparklane | Learn more about Visiblee |
The software we have selected is designed for companies of all sizes, from very small businesses to major corporations.
ByPath, sales intelligence for prospecting
ByPath, a sales intelligence solution, is based on Big Data combined with data from the Kompass database. Its algorithms analyze data collected online: social networks, blogs, press, etc. Each lead generated is qualified.
Every lead generated is qualified. You know :
- who to contact,
- why to contact this person at this precise moment,
- how to approach them.
Identifying decision-makers is much simpler and faster, as is securing closings. You know all the risks and levers of influence on your contacts. You'll have all the information you need to convince your contacts and close the sale.
ByPath in figures :
- over 200 million contacts,
- 12 million companies,
- 200K sources,
- 20 million emails,
- 60 countries covered.
Connect your CRM to ByPath to optimize your prospecting processes and save time. ByPath updates your data automatically.
Bypath
Corporama feeds your pipeline daily with smart B2B leads
Corporama is the benchmark B2B smart lead database.
More than 2,000 marketing and sales managers from SMEs and ETIs use the platform's extensive capabilities:
- to qualify B2B prospects: the platform's integrated business intelligence cross-references data from a database of 11 million prospects with 60,000 sources of information;
- refine and segment their database using 35 available search criteria (location, financial, by sector of activity, etc.);
- to work intelligently with their CRM tool: Corporama is interoperable, enabling them to track prospects and follow-up with continuously updated information.
Focus on the SmartLeads offer: by following the ideal customer profile and your selection criteria, the solution establishes a predictive scoring of prospects to contact by detecting strong signals from companies. It notifies sales staff daily by email: they receive a list of prospects where opportunities have been identified.
This solution is particularly recommended for sales managers with limited processing capacity, given the size of their market.
Corporama
Decidento, turnkey generation of targeted leads
Decidento, thanks to its monitoring technology and experts, collects, sorts and synthesizes Big Data on your behalf, free of charge but also available for a fee and confidential, as well as data outside the web, notably in the printed press. In figures, this means 72,000 business signals detected per year and 3,500 filter keys available. Several advantages
- you benefit from contextualized data that you wouldn't be able to collect yourself;
- you save precious time on finding qualified leads, which you can then devote to converting them into customers;
- you know your customers better, so you can build loyalty and generate additional sales more easily;
- you benefit from industry, competition and regional intelligence, enabling you to adapt your prospecting techniques;
- you benefit from personalized support and a solution tailored to your specific needs;
- your sales teams are better equipped and appreciate the collaborative workspace where everything is centralized.
Decidento also ensures ROI tracking through report generation, and guarantees regular b2b prospecting, fed by notifications on company news corresponding to your targets. Prospect qualification and contact segmentation, combined with consent management for RGPD compliance: all the conditions are in place to benefit from a qualitative, compliant database, and generate sales!
Decidento
Easybusiness, the all-in-one prospecting tool
Easybusiness is a database of over 16 million companies worldwide. It enables you to target your prospect searches very precisely, thanks to over 60 filters, including :
- geographic location,
- business sector,
- number of employees,
- manager (with or without email address),
- sales figures, etc.
Easybusiness also includes tools for running relevant marketing campaigns. Its advanced features enable you to create your own customized search lists, which you can then export.
With Easybusiness, you have access to this data 24/7. Data is hosted in France. You can also connect your applications to Easybusiness to enhance your sales prospecting.
Easybusiness
lead, data science for lead generation
97% of your visitors leave without giving any contact details, and therefore remain anonymous. So many lost sales opportunities!
Here's how lead proposes to remedy this situation:
- rather than buying irrelevant B2B contacts, the solution generates your own leads by identifying those who have already visited your site and expressed an interest;
- lead then segments your audience by marketing profile (persona) according to sector of activity, geographical area and browsing behavior;
- use lead scoring to track their level of interest and prioritize your prospecting strategies;
- then feed your sales force when these leads are mature.
API documentation (included in the offer) is available to guide you in connecting Lead with your other tools, in particular to synchronize your data with your CRM and promote sales automation. For example, every time a visitor is identified, a record is automatically created and assigned to a sales rep. The latter can also receive e-mails every Monday with the leads to be followed up during the week.
Predict by Sparklane, predictive lead scoring
Would you like to better target your prospects and accelerate your sales prospecting? Predict by Sparklane could be the tool for you.
The strengths of Predict by Sparklane lie in several key areas:
- global exploitation of your market: automated targeting, identification of the total available market, on-boarding of your data;
- saving time: predictive scoring, automatic score calculation, improved conversion capacity on your accounts, account suggestion engine;
- improved conversion rate: business signals, personalized sales approach, better response to objections;
- a shorter sales cycle: detailed information, better targeting of needs, improved responsiveness of your sales force.
Predict is highly interoperable with CRM systems such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. As for the security of your data, it is hosted on servers in France, benefits from the highest security standards and is backed up daily.
The sales intelligence solution saves you time tracking and analyzing the information you receive on your leads, and optimizes your sales actions. It includes a predictive lead scoring engine based on artificial intelligence, and displays lead results according to your sales results. In other words, the more you use the solution, the more you'll see the benefits.
Sparklane
Visiblee to generate qualified leads
Orbite, the company behind Visiblee, is based on a simple fact: only 3% of visitors to your web page leave their contact details to be recontacted.
The benefits of Visiblee are twofold:
- to generate qualified leads for sales reps
- and to identify visitors to your website.
By identifying your website visitors in real time, Visiblee enables you to generate three times as many qualified leads, thanks to targeted prospecting. Your visitors are no longer anonymous.
Visiblee's functionalities enable you to :
- identify individual visitors or companies visiting your website,
- obtain their contact details (telephone numbers and email addresses),
- enrich your contact databases by scanning the web and retrieving information such as a company's workforce, sales figures or new contact data,
- identify the hottest prospects,
- contact these prospects on a priority basis,
- convert leads into customers through lead nurturing and personalization.
Visiblee
Prospecting tools for a perfect first contact
Sales prospecting has come a long way since the days of telephone prospecting. The digital transformation of companies and the advent of Big Data now enable software publishers to offer powerful prospecting tools that make salespeople's work easier.
Sales teams no longer waste time prospecting; they focus their energy, time and actions on personalizing sales actions to close more sales.
Take care of the first contact - it's often decisive. Now it's your turn to win new customers!
Updated article, originally published in May 2018.
Article translated from French
Maëlys De Santis, Growth Managing Editor, started at Appvizer in 2017 as Copywriter & Content Manager. Her career at Appvizer is distinguished by her in-depth expertise in content strategy and content marketing, as well as SEO optimization. With a Master's degree in Intercultural Communication and Translation from ISIT, Maëlys also studied languages and English at the University of Surrey. She has shared her expertise in publications such as Le Point and Digital CMO. She contributes to the organization of the global SaaS event, B2B Rocks, where she took part in the opening keynote in 2023 and 2024.
An anecdote about Maëlys? She has a (not so) secret passion for fancy socks, Christmas, baking and her cat Gary. 🐈⬛