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10 Essential Sales Prospecting Tools for High-Quality Leads
May 23, 2025
By
Irina Maltseva
Sales prospecting tools help your sales team book more sales meetings with qualified leads.
They help you discover target leads, find contact info, personalize your outreach, and even automate entire outbound sequences across email, phone, or LinkedIn.
Some tools do one of the above. Others manage a few. And a small minority are end-to-end prospecting solutions that do them all.
Here are the ten best sales prospecting tools and their key features, unique qualities, pricing, and more.
Artisan is an all-in-one, AI-first outbound sales platform with the following core areas of functionality:
Artisan scrapes the web and social media platforms like LinkedIn for data points to create fleshed-out lead profiles. When set to autopilot, Ava uses this information to auto-generate outreach sequences for your leads. She also tracks website visitors and reveals which companies they’re from.
One of the most comprehensive AI sales tools currently on the market, Artisan is definitely worth trying if you’re looking to scale your outbound sales team without hiring new reps.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the go-to prospecting software for finding and engaging B2B leads on LinkedIn.
Sales reps use its 50+ advanced search filters to quickly identify LinkedIn users that fit their ideal customer profile (ICP). This is great for building lists of marketing-qualified leads.
The Relationship Explorer feature even gives your reps suggestions about which leads to target to break into your target accounts. The platform makes these suggestions based on your buyer persona, relationship signals, and shared experiences that represent an opportunity for an easy introduction.
Sales Navigator also offers tools that help you start conversations with those leads. For example, you can InMail decision-makers you aren’t yet connected with. Without Navigator, you can only InMail connections.
You’ll also receive automated alerts about decision-maker job changes or promotions, so you can strike at the right time. One downside of Sales Navigator is that, unless you buy the Advanced Plus plan, you can’t integrate the tool with your CRM.
If you do a lot of outbound lead generation on LinkedIn, it’s worth investing in this tool.
ZoomInfo is a popular go-to-market intelligence platform.
The company started out as a B2B prospecting tool and database for businesses to find prospects and contact info (phone numbers, emails, etc.). That’s still its bread and butter. But it has expanded its offerings significantly over the last few years.
Some businesses appreciate the platform’s breadth and love getting lead data, conversational intelligence, web visitor tracking, and sales automation cadences all in one solution.
But others think its attempt at breadth has hurt the product. One of the most common complaints, according to research from CB Insights, is that its B2B database feature has remained stagnant while its pricing has increased.
Regardless of fluctuations in user sentiment, ZoomInfo remains one of the biggest and most reliable B2B databases on the market, now with powerful sales workflow management features to boot. Enterprise brands that can afford it will find it a valuable addition to their sales tech stack.
Reach out for a custom quote.
Hunter is a popular email verification and prospecting tool. It’s especially useful for finding email addresses of existing leads, and you can do this in three main ways.
With the Email Finder tool, simply type in the lead’s full name and company domain name, then click search. This feature is free until you reach the limit of 25 email searches per year. For more searches, you have to upgrade to the Starter plan.
Second, you can use the Domain Finder. Type in a company domain name, and Hunter will find the names and email addresses of people who work there. Results are hidden if you’re using the free plan.
Third, Hunter offers a Chrome Extension that allows you to uncover the contact information while browsing. For example, if you visit a prospect’s website, you’ll get a list of email addresses associated with that site.
Hunter’s paid plans also offer tools for managing simple email marketing campaigns. However, this campaign feature set is rather barebones, offering tools like link tracking, reporting, email account rotation, and other basic email automation features.
If you need an affordable, easy-to-use tool for finding, verifying, and sending cold emails, Hunter is a great option.
Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps sales teams create, automate, and track multi-channel outreach sequences.
The software shines when it comes to email automation and prospect management. Prospecting reps can use templates with smart fields to bulk personalize their outreach emails, and they can track key metrics like open rates with built-in analytics.
There are also some great tools for optimizing your email outreach, such as AI A/B testing and conversation intelligence. Outreach also identifies your most effective outreach sequences so you can understand how to consistently build high-performing sequences.
Outreach also offers tools for account executives and sales leaders, including deal insights, sales forecasting, and coaching tools.
Salesloft is primarily for SDRs, who use it to build cold outreach cadences consisting of email, phone, and social touchpoints. However, some AEs and customer service managers also use the platform to manage and automate their communications and follow-ups with prospects and customers.
It’s exceptional at helping sales reps manage their day. The dashboard, for example, shows pending outreach tasks in detail. It’s also good for bulk personalization. You can create email sequences with emails that auto-populate with lead information.
Unfortunately, there have been several complaints on G2 about poor customer service. But overall it’s a solid tool for streamlining your cold outreach, automating follow-up, and improving cold email personalization.
Clearbit, which was recently acquired by HubSpot and is now called Breeze Intelligence, is a B2B data enrichment tool for your CRM.
Powered by AI data sourcing, Breeze Intelligence contains information on over 200 million B2B professionals and the companies they work for.
HubSpot customers use Breeze Intelligence to flesh out their contact and company records quickly with data like location, annual revenue, web visits, pageviews, and employee headcount.
This data is then populated in automations like email personalization. It also ensures reps are knowledgeable about the accounts and prospects they’re trying to connect with.
One big downside, however, is that Breeze is only for HubSpot users. It won’t enrich records in another CRM.
Cognism is a sales intelligence tool known for its accurate and GDPR-compliant B2B data.
Companies use Cognism to enrich lead profiles with contact information, demographics, technographics, company details, intent data, and more.
The platform is also excellent for finding potential buyers. Reps can use filters to build lists of ideal leads that align with their ICP. With AI search, they can use natural language queries to pull up potential customers that fit their specifications. For example, they could type “content managers from salestech brands with 100 to 1000 employees.”
As far as B2B databases go, Cognism is one of the best, especially if your business has its sights set on the European market.
Apollo.io is a sales engagement and intelligence platform that incorporates AI features.
It's unique in that it combines a B2B contact database and a sales engagement tool in one platform. That means you can discover target leads and reach out to them from the very same software.
In addition to email templates, automated personalization, and multi-channel sequencing, Apollo also comes with a built-in dialer, making it a useful tool for sales teams using cold calls to prospect.
The call feature will also automatically transcribe calls and log them in your CRM so you have a record of past conversations. There’s even an AI call analysis tool that will summarize the conversation and recommend next steps for progressing the deal.
All this comes at a cost, however, and there have been complaints from smaller teams that the pricing structure is inflexible.
Seamless AI is a prospecting tool with a large B2B database. Sales reps use it to build lists of leads that fit their ICP and find contact email addresses, mobile phone numbers, and other business intel for cold outreach.
Seamless AI also offers Pitch Intelligence, an AI feature that gives you lead information for creating relevant and engaging messages. For example, reps can use it to tailor their emails with information like employee reviews, social media activity, and revenue reports.
The Job Changes feature also alerts reps when leads go to a new company or receive a promotion. This empowers salespeople to reach out when leads are most open to sales conversations.
Seamless AI is a solid platform and will work well alongside your cold outbound tool. It helps you better understand your leads so you can craft personalized emails and LinkedIn messages.
Let’s look at some practical tips for selecting the best possible sales prospecting tool for your sales team.
Follow these five steps to evaluate the ROI of a particular prospecting tool:
Here are some other factors to keep in mind when picking a sales prospecting tool:
A tool’s scalability and compatibility with other sales software significantly impact its effectiveness over the long term.
Your chosen provider should make it easy to switch plans as your sales team and prospecting demands grow.
The platform should also connect with your current sales software—especially your CRM. Manually transferring all the sales communications from your sales engagement platform to your CRM is a headache you don’t want.
Lastly, put together a forecast of future needs. Are there tools you might invest in later? Find prospecting tools that have wide integration capabilities, increasing the odds they’ll be able to integrate with any new software you buy.
From AI prospecting tools to sales engagement platforms, there are many sales prospecting tools to choose from.
Today, we’ve introduced ten of the best.
Of that list, here are the most standout tools and who they’re best for:
Always remember to take advantage of demos and free trials. Reading about these tools gives you an overview. Seeing them in action shows you whether they’re really a fit.
Artisan is your AI-powered sales rep that finds leads, personalizes outreach, and follows up automatically so you can spend less time prospecting and more time closing deals.
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Irina is a Founder at ONSAAS, Growth Lead at Aura, and a SaaS marketing consultant. She helps companies to grow their revenue with SEO and inbound marketing. In her spare time, Irina entertains her cat Persie and collects airline miles.
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