In 200 BC China, a wise man developed a water clock—a mechanical device that measured time with the help of water.
This clock featured a container that slowly filled with water. When the water level rose enough, it triggered a mechanism to ring the clock’s bell. With this water clock, the ancient Chinese could measure time more accurately. Quickly, this became a popular timekeeping tool in other ancient societies too.
Why are we telling you this? Because the water clock was one of the earliest examples of automation in action.
Fast forward to 2023, when you can automate anything and everything—from cleaning your house to assembling huge infrastructure.
So, why not technologize your sales outreach process and shorten your sales cycles?
In this article, we’ll explain how to automate your outbound sales and list the best outbound sales software you can use in different stages of your outbound outreach process.
So, First, How Do You Automate Outbound Sales?
Manual outbound sales in the B2B space looks like this.
- Manually import prospects from CSV or sheets to your CRM.
- Send as many cold emails as you can to these prospects, maybe 10-50.
- Follow up with them over 1-2 months at least 8 times. But definitely missing follow-ups since it’s humanly impossible to remember to follow up with that many prospects
- Manually updating the status of your prospect’s engagement with your outreach in the CRM
Undoubtedly, this whole process makes reporting and analytics virtually impossible. Leads tend to leak through the pipeline without timely follow-ups and multichannel touches.
When working at that scale, it’s understandable that you don’t get the time to personalize your sales emails. But copy-pasted templates will make your prospects go incognito, leaving you hanging with fewer and fewer meetings booked.
Now, How can you automate that process?
All of the sales activities mentioned above can be automated. So, instead of spending time on data-entry tasks, you can focus on personalizing cold emails and building relationships with your prospects. What exactly can you automate and with what kind of tools? We mention that below.
What Is an Outbound Sales Software?
An outbound sales software is an online software application that allows you to automate the manual parts of the outbound sales process like:
- Gathering information about the prospects to build better relationships with your prospects. Use Prospect Research Tools or Sales Intelligence Tools for this.
- Scouring the internet or LinkedIn to build prospect lists using Prospecting Tools.
- Importing prospects from LinkedIn, CRMs, and large Excel database sheets by buying outbound tools that have Native Integrations with your CRM.
- Automatically sending personalized cold email campaigns to new prospect lists every day using Cold Email Software.
- Automatically follow up with prospects at your preferred time and date, using Cold Email Software.
- Reach out to prospects on multiple channels like LinkedIn, calls, emails, and SMS using a Sales Engagement Platform.
- Keeping track of cold calls, cold emails, and LinkedIn messages and tracking opens and replies using a Sales Engagement Platform.
Top 3 Benefits of Using Outbound Sales Tools:
- Shorter sales cycles by minimizing repetitive processes and optimizing the outbound outreach process at each sales stage.
- Increased rep efficiency by improving the pace of their task execution.
- Creating predictable revenue by establishing repeatable sales processes.
But as they say, one shoe doesn’t fit all, all the outbound sales tools are not for everyone. So let’s help you find your best match.
16 Best Outbound Sales Software for Your Sales Tech Stack
We’ve compiled a list of the top 16 outbound B2B sales software based on their G2 reviews. And for easier scannability, these tools are further divided into their different functionalities like prospect research, building prospect lists, sales outreach, scheduling meetings, managing remote teams, and the CRM.
First, let’s look at researching tools.
Outbound Sales Tools To Help You With Prospect Research:
To craft a personalized conversation with your prospects, you need data like their contact information, info about their current processes, business goals, funding, the tools they use, their location, and industry.
With these best-in-the-industry outbound sales tools, you can ensure your cold emails will never be bone dry again.
1. Zoominfo SalesOS
Zoominfo SalesOS offers an extensive database of accurate B2B data, including professional and social profiles.
Apart from helping you out with research, it also arms you with features like advanced demographics, buyer intent analysis, and website visitor tracking. These features allow you to find your exact ICP among your total addressable market, find out companies that are looking for solutions similar to yours, and identify visitors to your website.
Pros:
- Alerts you when someone updates their professional or personal information on platforms like LinkedIn.
- Comes with 300+ company attributes like job title, industry, and software for optimal refinement. This helps SDRs identify their prospects who are an exact match for their ICP.
Cons:
- Difficult to navigate the many features available in the software.
- Users complain about inaccurate data.
Price: Unavailable
G2 Rating: 4.4
2. BuiltWith
Builtwith is a technology research tool that allows you to discover the tools and frameworks used to build your prospect’s website.
It also highlights these companies' annual expenditures on their software, helping you determine if they have the wherewithal to invest in tech, how much their tech spend has gone up or down, and what their history of tech spend looks like. BuiltWith also has extensions and integrations.
When is this useful?
Personalizing first names and company names is now a run-of-the-mill emailing strategy. Today, it's crucial to form a narrative around personalization rather than doing it for the sake of personalizing.
In a world where even your grocery store sends your marketing emails personalized to your name, first name personalization is simply not enough. If you’re writing B2B sales emails, you have to go further. Tools like BuiltWith can help you build a story around personalization to make it more meaningful to the prospect.
Pros:
- Allows you to check the prospect’s purchasing power to send the right offer.
- Offers a Chrome plug-in extension to check the list of software used by a company on any website instantly.
Cons:
- Instances of inaccurate information.
- Limited access with the free version.
Price: $295 per month
G2 Rating: 4.3
Outbound Sales Tools To Build Your Prospect List:
There are tools that help you build large lists of prospects who exactly match your ICP. The hitch is that with large amounts of personal data comes inaccuracies like invalid email addresses, out-of-service contact numbers, etc.
Invalid emails are a huge issue if you’re doing outbound outreach since they can cause deliverability issues. So, in the prospecting stage, we suggest using an email verification tool as well. This will clean out your list of all non-existent email addresses.
We’ve given two options: 1 that’s affordable and best in its category, and 1 that’s feature-packed and fit for those who have got the moola to spare.
3. RocketReach
RocketReach is a sales intelligence tool that provides the most accurate phone numbers and email addresses. Start features include bulk lookups where you can download a large list of prospects along with their contact information and browser extensions that allow you to use it when you’re prospecting on LinkedIn or LinkedIn sales navigator.
Point to note: Zoominfo also provides contact information, but our SDRs recommend RocketReach for better accuracy of information.
Pros:
- User-friendly interface with intuitive search options.
- Used by bigshots like Apple, Disney, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and 95% of the S&P 500.
Cons:
- Missing information for small businesses.
Price: $59 per month
G2 Rating: 4.5
4. Linkedin Sales Navigator
LinkedIn is one of the most extensive databases of B2B information, with over 875 million professionals and 58 million companies.
Its premium B2B sales prospecting product, Sales Navigator, helps you identify prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). You can use its advanced search capabilities and lead recommendations to create a solid prospect list based on your search criteria and existing connections.
Pros:
- Access to the most accurate and exclusive B2B database of prospects.
- Prospect information is mostly always up-to-date.
Cons:
- Expensive for individuals and small companies.
- Tricky to get around the platform in the initial stage.
Price: $99.99 per month
G2 Rating: 4.3
Outbound Sales Tools To Automate Your Sales Outreach:
When reaching out to prospects at scale, you must have multiple touch-points, often ranging from 8–12 follow-ups, in order to get them to respond. Doing this manually by keeping track of replies and bounces can get nearly impossible.
That’s why you need sales outreach or sales engagement tools.
Sales engagement tools help you create sales sequences that have automated follow-ups and multichannel outreach steps to be sent to prospects over a set time period. For sales teams that contact more than 20 - 30 people a day, a sales engagement platform is no longer an option today, it is imperative.
When choosing your sales outreach tool, look out for personalization, deliverability, and sales sequence features and how well it integrates with your CRM. In this list, we’ve covered:
- a multichannel outreach tool for SDR teams of 4 and above
- a cold calling tool for outbound SDR teams invested in cold calling
- a LinkedIn automation tool for SDR teams focused on social selling
5. Klenty
Klenty is a sales engagement platform that helps create and execute hyper-personalized outreach campaigns based on the prospects' buying intent to schedule more meetings.
The tool helps sales teams be consistent with their outreach efforts by automating follow-ups. SDRs can reach out to prospects via multiple channels, personalize every touch point, and ensure their messages actually reach prospects.
And that's not all.
Klenty also determines your prospects’ buying journey. It identifies your most engaged prospects, allowing you to focus on them, while nurturing others in the background until they are sales-ready.
Read how Klenty helped Blueink increase their # of meetings booked by 100% in a single quarter.
Pros:
- Highly responsive support team.
- Allows you to run multiple outreach sequences simultaneously.
Cons:
- The reporting feature can be enhanced.
Price: $50 per month
G2 Rating: 4.6
6. Myphoner
Myphoner, an affordable cold-calling dialer tool, can help you manage your prospects seamlessly with their simple cold outreach CRM. It auto-assigns the prospects to your outbound sales team, sets follow-up reminders, and takes important notes on prospect profiles.
Pros:
- Simple user interface.
- Integrated power dialing and SMS messaging system.
Cons:
- Sluggish tech support provider.
Price: $19 per month
G2 Rating: 4.5
7. Expandi
Expandi is a cloud-based tool that extracts useful information on LinkedIn and allows you to create outreach sequences with LinkedIn steps. And to mimic human behavior of doing LinkedIn outreach, you can add random delays between outreach activities to comply with LinkedIn laws.
Pros:
- Manage multiple LinkedIn accounts from a single dashboard.
- Helps you follow LinkedIn rules when using automation.
Cons:
- Risk of getting banned on LinkedIn owing to LinkedIn’s limitations on sending messages.
- Occasional glitches when handling large datasets.
Price: $99 per month
G2 Rating: 3.9
Outbound Sales Tools To Help You Book Meetings:
These are tools that empower salespeople to crush their quotas. It turns reps into the Marie Kondo of sales outreach.
Outbound sales outreach is a time-consuming process that stretches across different stages with a different set of activities to execute at each stage. Which is to say that there’s always room to improve, declutter, and optimize processes.
So, think of time-saving, process-improving, intelligence-providing tools that help you 10x your sales productivity. It’s the jelly to your peanut butter sandwich.
Sales Enablement Tools
Sales enablement is a multipronged function. It’s about empowering reps with the right content to use for their pitches and conversations.
It’s also about providing the right training and coaching to sales reps throughout their career. It’s also about taking care of the operational elements of sales like evaluating tools, identifying revenue leaks, and reviewing strategies.
We’ve given below a tool that you can use to begin with. But sales enablement tools are not necessarily needed if you’re just starting out with outbound sales. Because you might have a smaller team and smaller sales enablement content library when starting out.
8. Mindtickle
Mindtickle is an outbound sales tool that empowers your sales team to build personalized programs at scale. You can use its centralized platform to onboard and train new reps, track progress, provide targeted coaching, analyze real-world buyer interactions, and align content they can use to personalize their outreach.
Pros:
- User-friendly interface.
- Flexible and scalable.
- Engaging and digestible learning experience.
Cons:
- Does not save the training progression.
Price: On request
G2 Rating: 4.7
Conversation Intelligence Tool
Conversation intelligence tools have the superpower to analyze your sales conversations—every word, pause, and tone. As an outbound sales rep, these tools can be your holy grail to uncover the secrets of successful conversations, understand prospect sentiments, and create killer strategies that close deals quickly.
9. Enthu.AI
Enthu.AI offers conversation monitoring and AI-based coaching to its users. It helps optimize the inbound and outbound SDR’s calling behavior and patterns and improves conversation and customer satisfaction.
Pros:
- High accuracy for multiple English dialects.
- Keeps track of all the call transcriptions in chat format for your reference.
Cons:
- Glitches in telephone integration.
- No provision for built-in Learning Management System.
Price: $49 per month
G2 Rating: 4.9
Cold Email AI Writing Tool
Cold emailing is an art. You must:
- draft the perfect cold email
- ace your subject lines
- write a compelling value proposition that grabs the prospect's attention
And a cold email AI writing tool is your personal artist. It helps you craft the perfect cold emails that hit the mark every time. Here's an AI writing tool that you can use to up your email game and leave a lasting impression on your prospects:
10. Kai
Kai is an AI writing tool that helps you write sales emails, improve existing templates, and respond to prospects. If you're looking to improve email structure and readability and your reply rate, Kai is your tool.
Pros:
- Saves significant time in thinking, composing, and editing.
- Removes the chances of human errors.
Cons:
- AI-generated content cannot be relied upon blindly. You’ll have to review the content.
Price: On request.
G2 Rating: 4.6
Tools To Invite Prospects to Book Meetings Quickly
Why go back and forth with the prospect to book a meeting when you can use a tool to let them schedule one themselves? This enhances communication, simplifies the scheduling process, and provides prospects with a seamless booking experience. They can use the tool to view your availability and select a suitable time slot. Our pick?
11. Calendly
Calendly is a comprehensive tool that streamlines the scheduling process, allowing you to address sales cycle issues like email delays, calendar conflicts, and slow responses.
By integrating the tool with your calendar and sharing the link with prospects, they can easily schedule meetings, and you can confirm them. Calendly also features an automatic meeting reminder system that reduces no-shows and cancellations, saving you time and improving efficiency.
Pros:
- Most of the settings are intuitive, saving much time.
- Easy customization and high flexibility.
Cons:
- Configuring individual users and their preferences is difficult.
- Some users found it costly.
Price: $10 per month
G2 Rating: 4.7
Connectivity Tools
These tools help enhance your workflow. These apps enable apps to communicate with each other. That means, say you want a lead to be added to a sales sequence inside your cold email tool immediately after signing up for a downloadable asset on the website.
These connectivity tools will act as a doorway between multiple apps–enabling you to put the grunt work on auto-pilot.
12. Zapier
Zapier is your all-in-one partner that can integrate with over 5000 web apps, eliminating repetitive tasks and speed up workflow. It helps you quickly enter lead data with high accuracy and direct it to the appropriate team member. You can also use it to track leads from various sources, such as social media, ads, and landing pages.
Pros:
- Highly convenient and versatile.
- Saves time by reducing mundane tasks.
Cons:
- High price for the paid plan.
- Difficult to understand for first-time users.
Price: $29.99 per month
G2 Rating: 4.5
Outbound Sales Tools for Remote Sales Teams:
Remote sales teams face unique challenges that require special solutions—establishing and nurturing prospect relationships and managing team collaborations effectively are a few. However, you can make their life (and work) much easier with the right tool.
While there are multiple options available in the market, we give you the best two—one, a more affordable option to create engaging experiences for prospects and close deals, and second, a more comprehensive tool to manage end-to-end sales processes.
13. GetAccept
Sales reps often find themselves stuck in tedious sales processes, unable to focus on building relationships and managing prospect interactions. GetAccept simplifies these processes by providing a digital sales room tool that integrates with CRMs. It helps automate the sales process end-to-end and improves the experience for everyone in the sales cycle.
Pros:
- Effective tool for improving sales processes.
- Easy to customize documents and presentations.
Cons:
- All products need to be uploaded manually.
- Sluggish search engine.
Price: $39 per month
G2 Rating: 4.6
14. Dock
Dock brings everything together with its smart digital sales rooms with embedded content, meaningful analytics, and helpful collaboration tools. It helps you host all the information in one place rather than emailing it with multiple links and attachments. In addition, dock analytics helps account executives identify genuine buyers.
Pros:
- Excellent insight into active and inactive clients.
- Simple user interface.
Cons:
- Less flexibility in the formatting and layout capabilities.
- No API and analytics access yet.
Price: $60 per month
G2 Rating: 4.9
CRM for Sales Teams:
It is a centralized, comprehensive platform that manages customer data, interactions, sales activities, and processes. You can use it to streamline sales operations, organize prospect data, schedule follow-ups, and track interactions.
But not all CRM systems will work for all businesses. So, we've listed two tools for startups that need an agile, cost-effective solution and enterprises with complex sales processes.
15. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a powerful CRM software for startups and small to medium-sized enterprises. It provides a visual pipeline that makes it easier to manage different processes and enhance productivity. You can use it to track deals, automate tasks, manage contacts, generate reports, and monitor progress at each stage of the sales cycle.
Pros:
- Suitable for teams of all sizes.
- Complete sales cycle customization.
Cons:
- Slow navigation when working on multiple leads.
- Can be complicated for new users.
Price: $11.90 per month
G2 Rating: 4.2
16. Salesforce
Salesforce is a comprehensive cloud-based platform that comes with built-in automation features like sales analytics, revenue optimization, sales performance management, and partner relationship management. You can use it to manage client relationships, streamline sales processes, and drive growth.
Pros:
- Highly scalable with extensive features and customizations.
- Low configuration requirements.
- Integrates with existing enterprise systems seamlessly.
Cons:
- Complex user interface.
- Expensive to install and maintain.
Price: $ per month
G2 Rating: 4.3
Crush Sales Quotas Smartly
A successful sales team not only has the right skills but also the tools that support and amplify their capabilities. And when you identify the right outbound sales software for your sales team, nothing can stop them from crushing quotas and achieving remarkable results.
Resources You'll Love
FAQs
How to do SaaS outbound sales?
After booking a meeting, your Account Executives should conduct a discovery call to understand the prospect's needs and determine whether they are a good fit. The AE and pre-sales team can now run demos to showcase the product. If the prospect is interested, the AE should immediately follow up to negotiate and close the deal. Finally, the AE closes the deal by contract signing and payment.
Excellent communication and timely follow-up are critical in the SaaS outbound sales process. Using the best automation tools, you can dramatically improve the whole process and get the desired results.