One of the worst things that you can do in sales is enter a sales call without knowing anything about your prospect. This is why it is extremely important to do some lead research before you get in a call or follow up with your prospects.

Yep, lead research takes time..and it’s not easy, but it’s important to do your homework on the prospects ahead of time.

Luckily, we live in a modern digital age where there are a good amount of tools out there that can help you accelerate this process.

First up on this list is Owler. Owler is the community-based competitive insights platform that business professionals use to outsmart their competition and uncover the latest industry news and alerts.

What’s amazing about Owler is that it is totally free. All you need to do is type in a company name and they’ll do the heavy lifting of gathering the lead research data that you need for you.

Owler delivers three email products: Instant Insights, Daily Snapshot, and Weekly Showdown.

Instant Insights delivers funding announcements, acquisitions, and leadership changes directly to a member’s inbox.

Daily Snapshot curates top news stories and blog posts, along with new competitors, to members’ attention.

Weekly Showdown provides performance benchmarks between a member’s employer and their competitors across web traffic, CEO approval ratings, press coverage, social follows, and more.

GrowthOK provides you with highly qualified and targeted sales lead generation that converts at 20% better than their competitors.

But it’s more than just lead gen. You can use GrowthOK to supercharge your lead research process by having pre-researched leads gathered for you.

Let’s say you already have a list of leads and you need to know the last time they were mentioned in a blog post or article. You can use GrowthOK’s data enrichment services to help you research and enrich your current leads.

Maybe you want a list of leads with custom data points like the last school that the prospect went to. GrowthOK can help you come up with that as well.

Sick of trying to figure out what social profiles your buyers are active on?

This is a free tool that will take the time suck out of research and allow sales to stay focused on the one thing that matters with social.

When you download the free Google chrome plug-in you will have instant access to see which social channels your buyers are living on. You can go directly into any of their social profiles and click the Discover.ly icon.

You can see who your mutual connections are on Facebook, any of their latest tweets, influence scores, and multiple other social channels! Use this social data to start the engagement process.

This is more of a tool for those that don’t have too much time and have back to back calls.

It gets the lead research job done.

Nimble is considered to be a “smart CRM”. It’s not necessarily a tool for lead research like the others mentioned, but it has some powerful features that can help you do your lead research.

The Chrome plugin works as a good tool for finding the other social networks your prospect has if you can find one of them.

Plus, it’s free.

I’ve heard about people using it to upload all of their Twitter and email connections, it’s very handy to use the Signals tab to manage your mentions and interactions.

It’s an awesome social selling tool as well.

Alright, you can’t create a list of sales tools without including Linkedin Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the go-to tool for all sales people, it is essential for lead research and social selling.

There is no comparison to any other tool.

It allows your profile extra permissions to look at company pages and their staff and keep updated on their activity, news on the company and their team, new staff and many other sales context building events.

Basically, use sales navigator to find the context you need to reach out to a prospect by monitoring them and their company. It is an excellent tool for discovering who the decision makers are in the company, structural wise and also putting names and faces to your outreach rather than calling the reception desk.

Perfect for any account based sales.

Nudge.ai acts as a dashboard for sales people to keep on top of their network, interaction with prospects and to create tasks for themselves to carry out in order to move prospects down the sales funnel.

The tool focuses on email relationships and Twitter, which is why I use it in tandem with LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a dual dashboard to collect data on prospects before making contact.

You are briefed on the home page about what your connections are doing on social media at the top and as you move through the briefing you are alerted to relationships you have that are weakening, and shown suggestions on who to talk to based on Nudge.ai’s AI technology.

I find this tool extremely useful for lead research.

Conclusion

There are a lot of other tools that you can help you do lead research on the prospects. There isn’t one tool that is better than another. It is important that you do use at least one tool or service to help you with your lead research process especially when you’re doing account based marketing/selling and need to know every little thing about your prospects.

If you’re looking for highly qualified and targeted sales leads that actually convert or you need help with data enrichment, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at GrowthOK