B2B Prospecting Software: 7 Best Platforms to Grow Your Sales Pipeline

What Is B2B Prospecting Software?

Getting the right contacts and company information so you can talk to real people is tough. Prospecting software can save you time and ensure your sales efforts are going after qualified, relevant businesses. 

B2B prospecting software are platforms that help B2B marketers find potential customers, confirm their contact information, add additional information, automate outreach efforts and ultimately get them in front of the right people so your pipeline can continue to flow and your sales can continue to come in.

How We Evaluated These Platforms

There are plenty of prospecting tools on the market right now, but few offer exactly the same solutions to your sales challenges. For our guide, we analyzed factors such as:

• Quality of leads
• Accuracy of data
• AI and automation functionality
• Integrations with CRM software
• User-friendliness
• Cost and scalability
• Total B2B team value

We didn’t aim to simply compile a list of the biggest prospecting tools. Instead, we want to spotlight solutions that make it truly easier for your team to build pipelines.

Quick Comparison Table

The 7 Best B2B Prospecting Software

1. Outreachbox - Automate B2B Prospecting

Best for: B2B companies that need an integrated prospecting and outreach solution

Outreachbox merges lead discovery, data enhancement, and automated outreaches onto one convenient platform. This allows you to uncover, qualify, and contact leads without hopping from one tool to another.

Key features:

• A B2B prospect database
• AI for discovering the best leads 
• Automated outbound email, text, and social media campaigns 
• CRM connection
• Lead tracking and management
• Prospect enrichment
• Automation

The good stuff

• All your blank">B2B prospecting and outreach in one place
• Spend less time on tedious research
• Great for growing sales teams or new ventures

The downsides

• May require talking to sales to determine the custom price 
• Building advanced workflows requires a bit of upfront effort

2. Apollo.io

Best for: Lead generation for b2b sales. Apollo.io comes with one of the largest B2B databases of business contacts on the market.

With it, you can find companies and make the right contacts (including people who have the purchasing power) within your target audience, and then immediately start your campaign.

It comes with a Chrome extension for easier prospecting and even built-in email sequencing capabilities to automate outreach.

However, the quality of its data may vary based on the country you're targeting.

3. ZoomInfo

Good for: Large-scale sales teams

Sales team that need access to in-depth buyer information ZoomInfo's bread and butter is its in-depth, quality company information and buyer intent.  

Sales teams at companies that utilize sales organizations size ZoomInfo to help them define who their ideal prospects are, who the decision-makers are within those prospects and what type of messaging will get their attention.

Pros

• Extensive company information
• Extensive buyer intent Rich enterprise features

Cons

• High sticker price
• Not great for small and medium-sized businesses

4. Clay

Top pick for AI-powered data enrichment

What is Clay?

Clay integrates multiple data sources in a single workflow and speeds up prospecting process considerably.

Great choice if you’re developing sophisticated personalization and outbound campaign processes. 

Top features

The main strengths of Clay:

Pros

• It excels at enriching data. Workflow powered by AI.
• Supports custom and repeatable automation flows. 

Cons 

Can take some getting used to.

5. Outreach

Best For: Sales Engagement. 

Outreach aims to assist sales reps in implementing multi-touch engagement strategies, tracking email engagement, and connecting with clients through emails, phone calls and meeting schedule reminders.

Pros

• Robust workflow automation
• Features for coaching sales 
• Sales-specific CRMs and third party integrations

Cons

• Primarily focused on engagement instead of lead exploration

6. Salesloft

Best for: revenue teams with a massive sales pipeline. 

Salesloft’s automation, pipeline management, conversation intelligence and analytics features help teams increase their sales performance.

Pros 

• Amazing analytics 
• Elite coaching capabilities 
• Enterprise integrations 

Cons 

• Expensive 

The high price tag is its major downside, making it ideal for companies with deep pockets that prioritize analytics and coaching tools over affordable software.

7. Lemlist

Best for: Personalized Cold Outreach

Lemlist empowers companies to deliver hyper-personalized email sequences featuring unique videos, GIFs and images. It is especially used for outbound sales and marketing teams. 

Pros

• Highly Personalized Emails
• Very Easy to Automate
• Very Good deliverability

Cons 

• Limited to no native prospect pool when compared to specialized lead platforms.

How to Choose the Right B2B Prospecting Software

Best Sales Prospecting Tools based on Sales Process The best software for you will depend on your specific sales process. If lead generation is the main obstacle, choose software that offers high quality data sources and data enrichment features. 

If you’re spending too many hours on manually chasing leads, then the automation features and AI capabilities of the software will be crucial. 

If you want your entire team to search for prospects, initiate conversations, and follow up, selecting software that incorporates these features is the ideal option. 

Other factors to consider include: 

• Quality of data Whether the software integrates with a CRM Workflow automation
• Ease of onboarding
• Price
• Customer service

Scalability It’s typically easier and more effective to use software that aligns with your sales process than to try and shoehorn a new process around software with a large list of features.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is B2B prospecting software?

B2B prospecting software allows businesses to find prospects, confirm contacts, handle leads, and run automatic outbound campaigns for more sales prospects.

What is the best B2B prospecting software?

B2B prospecting software allows businesses to find prospects, confirm contacts, handle leads, and run automatic outbound campaigns for more sales prospects.

How much does B2B prospecting software cost?

Prospecting software B2B helps identify leads, verify contacts, manage opportunities and manage automated outbound for a more efficient B2B pipeline.

Is there free B2B prospecting software?

Yeah. A few platforms offer free trials or free plans with limited searches, contacts or automations. These are a great way to test a platform out before committing.

What's the difference between sales engagement and prospecting software?

Prospecting software’s objective is to find and then disqualify the right contacts. Sales engagement software's objective is to get to those right contacts using phone and email sequences.

Does B2B prospecting software integrate with HubSpot and Salesforce?

Many prospecting tools sync to the popular CRM platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot and others so you can add leads, update contact records, and trigger workflow automations.

How does AI video personalization fit into a prospecting stack?

Personalize messages at scale AI-created personal videos for outbound emails offer an alternative for generating hyper personalized outbound messages that are personalized at scale. Integrated into your prospecting tools they can significantly increase response rates and improve first impressions.

Final Thoughts

Prospecting is no longer limited to collecting emails. Sales teams require the right data, smart automation and processes that ensure the most opportune customer interactions.

For companies creating their first outbound operation, or scaling experienced teams, the choice of prospecting software can impact the top line significantly. 

Outreachbox’s sales engagement solution, for instance, supports you through the whole prospecting cycle, including prospect discovery, management, outreach automation – enabling your business to invest more energy in creating customer relationships than searching for new leads.