5 Best Prospecting Tools to Boost Sales in 2025

2. Enhanced lead qualification to prioritize high-intent buyers

Whether you’re meeting a prospect at a trade show or they’re filling out a form on your website, you want to know as much about that prospect as quickly as possible. This isn’t just so you can understand if they fit your ideal customer profile–but because as many as 50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first.

Your team can use prospecting tools to quickly gather the foundational information they need to score leads, follow up promptly, and understand who the decision makers are.

Keeping tabs on engagement data is also crucial. For example, you can use Vidyard’s video view analytics to track which prospects are watching videos. Your team can then translate individual prospects’ levels of engagement to prioritize the most committed leads.

3. Better understand your ICP to drive insights for smarter selling

Have you ever been in a situation where your team had to close every deal possible, no matter what? After a few months, those customers never fully onboard—and at renewal time, they churn, because ultimately they were never going to be a good customer.

That’s why clearly identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target accounts is so important. It helps ensure long-term revenue growth rather than short-term wins. If the entire company is busy providing customer support to customers who are just going to churn, or focusing product development on features that ultimately won’t move the needle, it’s bad news for the entire organization!

By investing in prospecting tools that leverage artificial intelligence, you can extract deeper insights for smarter selling. This could mean understanding whether prospects really fit your ICP, or crafting the type of message that resonates the most with your desired customer profile. Investing in this area is extra important for startups or companies launching new products.

At this point, you have a list of the top prospecting tools and clearly understand the benefits of investing in these types of tools. But how do you choose the best prospecting tools for your team?

Here’s a 5-step process to help you choose the right tool for your use case.

Step 1: Define your prospecting goals 

Every team can benefit from improving their prospecting efforts—but there are no silver bullets that will magically fix your sales strategies or grow your sales pipeline automatically. What would move the needle the most based on where you are right now? Personalization? Automation? Data-driven insights?

If you’re a small startup, you may not have basic tools in place that could save a ton of time. If you’re at an enterprise company, you likely have those basics covered—so, instead, you should look to extract more insights from the data you have, so you can take those learnings into your prospecting efforts.

So get really, really clear on what you’re trying to solve by adopting a new tool. You might start by writing down your ultimate end goal. Here are a few examples to inspire you:

• Having a 90% accuracy rate on email addresses for cold outreach
• Understanding what content is the most engaging to your perfect prospects
• Reducing certain manual tasks in your team’s sales process

Step 2: Consider key features and functionality 

Once you’ve charted your endgame, your next step is to develop an understanding of the actual features and functionalities you need to achieve your goals. Given the vast number of tools available, it’s important to clearly define what you’re looking for in the next tool your team tests out.

Back in the day, you may have broken things down by categories of prospecting tools, such as tools for company data, outreach, and follow-up.

But many basic sales prospecting tools have been updated with AI advancements. This gives them the ability to cover many of those categories at once.

So what are the features that your dream tool would have? Start by creating a list of requirements, like certain features or integrations. Break those requirements down into “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves”.

Here are a few questions to ask during this process:

• Do you only need prospects’ contact information, or do you need a more comprehensive prospecting solution?
• Are you looking for a platform that can help with specific elements of the prospecting process, such as sending AI-generated personalized emails?
• Which features would actually improve your response rates (or another critical KPI)?

Step 3: Read reviews and compare ratings on G2 or other review websites

How do you usually go about finding new tools? Most folks still go to Google as a first step—but we also suggest seeing what comes up when you ask generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok. Here’s an example AI prompt:

“I work at a [type of company]. We have a sales team with [X] team members. We’re looking for a new prospecting tool that would help us achieve [insert goal from step 1] and has [insert feature requirements from step 2]. What are ten sales prospecting tools that fit this criteria?”

(When asking AI, make sure you’re using a model that works from up-to-date information. Some models’ datasets are only current up to a certain year, like 2021 or 2023.)

From there, take a look at popular review sites like G2 or TrustRadius. People who are already using these products leave honest feedback to help future buyers make informed decisions. You can search the reviews based on certain criteria, such as specific keywords, company size, user roles, or a certain star review. (We suggest searching reviews with 3 and 4 stars, as they tend to be the most helpful!)

At the end of this step, you should have a shortlist of tools that can meet your needs. Make sure you check out each company’s website to get a real feel for their products, as well as double-checking that they have the features and integrations you’re looking for.

Step 4: Evaluate pricing and budget

Once you’ve identified your list of top contenders, there’s one last thing to do before you reach out for a demo. You need to understand the costs of the product…and we’re not just talking about the pricing.

Most tools have a cost for access, usually per user per month. But many teams forget the soft costs that are also associated with bringing on a new tool. This includes team training and onboarding, technical setup, process disruptions, and maintenance and support costs.

For example, setting up Salesforce is a pretty big undertaking, especially if teams want to do it right the first time and get the most value out of all their features. But setting up Pipedrive or Copper are much easier endeavors. If those smaller solutions deliver all the features you need, it may be in your team’s best interest to go with the lower-lift option.

You can gather information about ancillary costs by scouring the product’s website, or searching social media sites like Reddit.

Step 5: Request a demo or trial to test the tool

Does the company offer a free tier or trial of their product? Or do they require you to speak to the sales team before testing out the tool?

We recommend always requesting a demo and testing out the product whenever you can. This way you not only get a personalized demonstration tailored to your needs, but also a sense of how the company treats its customers. Are they not following up with the info you requested? Does their team feel a little too pushy? Does their website say one thing but their product, but in reality, it works differently?

If you’re only experimenting with a free tier or trial, certain features and functionality might be limited—meaning that you’re not seeing the platform’s full potential. If you request a demo and are honest about the fact that you’re testing out a few tools, you may be able to get access to a full version of the product so you can really take it for a spin.

And make sure that you have an actual test prepared! You should try to perform the same processes across each of the products you’re testing. Don’t just get in there and click around—have a clear plan to evaluate!

Here’s how you can be sure you’re giving each product a fair shot: Tracking your findings on a scorecard. Here’s an AI prompt to help you craft a unique scorecard:

“We are evaluating several tools to help with [insert goal from step 1]. Each tool has [insert feature requirements from step 2]. But we also need to look at the setup process, training requirements, and customer service. Create an evaluation scorecard we can use to keep track of each company and rate them across the important categories.”

At the end of this testing process ,you may have narrowed the field to one or two top tools. This is where you can take another look at pricing, get your team’s feedback, and negotiate with the vendor to see if they can offer you a deal.

While everyone on the team ultimately benefits from having the best sales prospecting tools, the most direct benefits will be to the team members who are using them daily. However, you shouldn’t sleep on the benefits that these tools can also offer to managers and even company executives.

Sales Representatives (SDRs)

Sale Representatives, also known as SDRs, are the quarterbacks of closing deals. While often the most junior role in the sales team, they’re the frontline of your sales team. Once they get the prospect engaged, they pass it along to the closers. They’re the ones in the weeds trying to identify potential customers, drafting cold emails, and setting up the initial meetings.

SDRs’ opinions matter the most when adopting a new tool—because they’re the ones ultimately using it. If management loves a tool but the SDRs don’t, chances of it getting adopted and integrated into their daily workflow is slim.

Explore our agentic AI playbook for SDRs.

Business Development Representatives (BDRs) and Account Executives

BDRs and Account Executives are the ones in charge of closing the deal. SDRs pass the ball over to these reps in order to move the deal down the funnel while tackling the prospect’s questions and concerns.

These sellers are still pretty active users of prospecting tools, including CRMs, company and contact data tools, and sales video platforms. But they’re also using other tools in the stack throughout their day-to-day, such as sales engagement platforms, meeting schedulers, and AI notetakers. BDRs and Account Executes are focused on getting the manual tasks off their plate so they can spend more time doing what they do best: closing deals.

Dive into our agentic AI playbooks for BDRs and Account Executives.

Sales managers

Sales managers and other leaders are focused on ensuring their teams are as productive as possible and on track to hit their goals. Managers should also be able to identify high-intent leads and help their teams prioritize certain tasks and deals.

They want to have data at their fingertips that can help them accomplish two goals: Helping their team be the best sellers they can be, and translating sales data into insights for company executives. So while managers may have the least direct involvement with these kinds of  tools, they need to be able to extract insights and prove ROI from each prospecting tool their team uses.

Whew, that was quite the guide! We hope you now have a clear action plan on how to pick the best prospecting tool for your business, along with some top options to explore.

And remember, if you want to stand out in a crowded inbox you need to be using video! Vidyard’s personalized video messages are highly effective at engaging prospects – no matter if you’re recording videos manually or using AI to automatically send personalized videos at scale.

Automate personalized video engagement Use agentic AI to generate and send personalized videos to buyers at the perfect time, every time. Learn More