Critical attributes of a good B2B prospecting tool

In TOPO’s 2019 Sales Development Benchmark report, 88 percent of the participants cited outbound sales development representatives as essential to their success. Since outbound reps typically perform prospecting, it is therefore essential that your reps have excellent B2B prospecting tools in order to make them more efficient and effective.

During prospecting, development reps have to make more attempts in order to reach prospects, which means they must do more work to achieve the same result. The Bridge Group found that today, SDRs make an average of 9.1 attempts per prospect before actually connecting with them. That’s an increase over the previous average of 7 to 8 attempts to reach leads. Since prospecting is critical to pipeline growth and the health of your company’s bottom line, it must be optimized.

SDRs have so much on their plates each day, you’re probably looking for ways to help boost their prospecting performance with automation, especially if you’re currently scaling your sales operations. With various options available, it’s important to know how to identify the best one. To make it easier, here’s a review of the critical attributes of a good B2B prospecting tool.

Streamline Prospecting Processes

To improve prospecting performance, select an application that integrates seamlessly with or even streamlines the process of using your CRM, since that’s where your reps spend most of their day. Not only that, but the functionality needs to be accessible in a single screen – no toggling from tab to tab or application to application. Key call features of a good prospecting tool include:

• The ability to click to call – saving time over dialing complete phone numbers for each call.
• Local presence dialing – known to increase connection rates by up to 400%!
• The ability to quickly dial down prioritized lists with a single click – allowing reps to complete more dials.
• Call disposition prompts making it as simple as selecting the best option on a list to log this important information.
• Automated call, email, and SMS activity logging in your CRM – so your records are always complete and up to date without cutting into valuable selling time.
• Automated task schedule and prompts ensuring leads and opportunities never get dropped and follow up calls or activities happen on schedule.
• Delivery of real-time contextual prospect data from Salesforce, marketing automation platforms and around the web – so reps are always prepared to properly engage prospects without the need for manual research and save valuable selling time.
• Voicemail drop – the ability to leave pre-recorded voice messages with one click, ensuring a quality message every time and saving reps hours each week.

These are the attributes that will help you help your reps, but an excellent B2B prospecting tool should also take some pressure off sales management as well.

Improved coaching capabilities

SDRs aren’t the only ones who have non-stop days! In fact, sales managers are equally as busy, if not more, which makes it challenging to perform the desired amount of coaching needed for success. The best prospecting tools should make the sales managers or coaches life easier with these highly-useful attributes:

• Call recording gives you the ability to listen to rep calls when it’s convenient and provide actionable feedback they can read after the fact. Plus, you can develop call libraries to use in various ways.
• Call monitoring enables you to listen in on live calls without sitting next to the rep and you’re able to send actionable feedback in real-time.
• Outbound call analytics in customizable dashboards making it easy to track your team members’ progress in real-time.
• Predictive call analytics to easily determine which reps are on pace to hit revenue goals.
• A sales cadence tool to automatically determine and manage contact schedules – so your reps know what’s next, making it a win for both you and your reps.

Now that you’re armed with a checklist, finding a B2B prospecting tool with these critical attributes should be much easier.