The 12 best B2B sales tools to use in 2023 (+ Belkins toolkit)
Author
Jenny Romanchuk
Jenny is a freelance B2B writer with over 6 years of hands-on experience in content marketing & sales for B2B SaaS. Besides Belkins, she writes for HubSpot, MarTech, Smartlook, and Userpilot.
Reviewed by
Yuriy Boyko
Head of AM at Belkins. Yuriy has been working in the B2B sales sector for more than a decade. His approach is the integration of scientific methods combined with thinking out of the box, allowing to achieve the highest results in any industry.
Updated:2023-07-27
Reading time:16 m
We at Belkins have 12 software in our sales toolkit. Many of them have been used since the company’s foundation, and some of them we switched to in 2020. As a new sales tool emerges and creates buzz, we have our revenue teams test it out. Sometimes it displaces a tool in our arsenal; other times it goes to alternatives.
So, we opened our knowledge base to see which tools we currently use and put together this exhaustive guide on the best B2B software in 2023–2024.
Read on to learn about why we prefer different tools over others, use cases, secret tips, and alternatives.
When we choose B2B sales prospecting tools, they have to meet the following criteria:
Accurate and comprehensive prospect data with regular updates (monthly, biweekly, daily).
Intuitive UX and UI for easy navigation and saved time.
Seamless integration with existing sales workflows (e.g., LinkedIn Sales Navigator integrated with HubSpot for creating new opportunities or enriching current lead records).
Advanced filters that allow building a lead list by numerous criteria and custom parameters (i.e., a prospect meets X and Y, and Z and doesn’t meet R).
A fair question you might ask yourself when choosing prospecting tools is: Can you get by with only a single one? Unfortunately, you can’t. We use a complex of tools with unique features that enhance the efficiency of the research process. That’s how we get substantial amounts of leads as fast as possible.
At Belkins, 9 out of 10 outreach campaigns begin with lead research via LinkedIn Sales Navigator. No other tool can match its database of 63 million companies and business-related data for every person and organization.
Namely, we look for the data like:
People who engage with/posts content around the problem you’re solving.
Headcount, industry, company revenue, seniority level, and other criteria attributed to your ICP.
Followers of particular LinkedIn Groups in your niche.
Important alerts in our prospects’ profiles, like updated job statuses, posts with certain keywords, company news, and more.
Use cases
1. Use advanced filters to make your lead research as targeted as possible. Start your search with a keyword or phrase, title, or job. Narrow your search with over 20 advanced LinkedIn Sales Navigator filters:
Fortune (a company listed on Fortune 50/100/500)
Company type (public, private, non-profit)
Leads with shared experiences/commonalities
Number of followers
Hiring on LinkedIn
Location by postal code radius
Posted content keyword
TeamLink connections
Years in current position
Once we have a client’s ICP, we are ready to start our search in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The numerous filters, from persona’s location to their seniority level, make prospecting fast and precise.
2. Explore LinkedIn advanced profile analytics to see your profile viewers in the past 90 days (your potential leads). The free LinkedIn is limited to only 5 viewers. Check out new viewers to connect proactively and explore their needs.
Core features:
Buyer interest alerts
Data validation and contact creation for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
SNAP, Outlook web integration, and Sales Navigator mobile app
Access to employees from 63 million companies
Advanced filters
What we like: The new-lead alert feature for all your searches. Save your custom filters and get notified every time a new prospect is added to your search
Pricing:
Professional — starting at $79.99 user/month
Team — starting at $134.99 user/month
Enterprise — price available upon request
📌 Belkins tip: Use the Boolean search to classify your results using “and,” “or,” and “not” words. For example, you can search for “[your keyword] AND Chief Revenue Officer NOT VP of Sales” to find results for only the CRO profiles.
Hunter.io
We use Hunter.io, a tool for lead generation and verification, to find the contact information of a person in several clicks without violating GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). In fact, it saved us 25 hours per month per person.
The tool finds data like verified emails, prospects’ social media, and titles and highlights an email format of a company. It also comes with a built-in email sender so you can instantly move found leads into the campaigns for outreach. But we use another tool (see the next chapter).
Use cases
1. Use the Bulks feature to find up to 50,000 email addresses at once from your list of websites, names, or companies. For every email on the list, Hunter will also add complementary information, such as:
The deliverability score of an email
Verification status
Position
Twitter URL
LinkedIn URL
Phone number
Company
Hunter also finds information on a company — its site, social media, YouTube, industry, and address. With Hunter TechLookup, you’ll automatically get a report on technologies used by a researched company.
2. Install two Hunter add-ons to speed up lead research and extract contact information while browsing sites with the Chrome extension. Likewise, utilize the Google Sheets add-on to fetch email addresses and send them directly to your spreadsheets.
Core features:
Domain Search to get all contacts from a company
Email Finder to find an email of an exact person
Bulks finders
Email Verifier
What we like: Unlike any other B2B lead generation tools, Hunter provides you with public sources where the email was spotted. This way, you can safely add contacts to your cold email campaigns or upload that data to Google/Facebook/LinkedIn ad campaign managers and launch personalized ad campaigns.
📌 Belkins tip: Explore Hunter integrations to automatically sync the leads you save with Hunter to your CRM account and save your team’s time on mundane and humdrum work.
Apollo.io
Apollo is an all-in-one intelligent sales platform with features for prospecting and a 265+ million database of B2B contacts. It also has a built-in email sender with email templates. Our team uses Apollo mostly for sourcing leads and exporting their contacts.
What I love the most about Apollo is that it allows downloading whole lists of companies, which makes our work easier. After a few setups of filters, we can immediately export the sheet that includes the necessary data. Also, Apollo has an extension that pulls leads’ corporate emails from their LinkedIn profiles.
Marharyta Trembovelska, Research Team Lead at Belkins.
Use cases
1. The “buying intent” feature gleans data from public web sources and social media, indicating the lead’s interest in a specific product or service at the chosen time period (with 98% accuracy). What’s more, Apollo captures an intent signal if someone at a company shows interest in Windows developers, architectural rendering software, or tax service providers.
Choose as many topics as you want from 1600+ intent topics.
Weekly intent updates.
Email alerts when a new lead displays a buying intent.
Thus, the feature allows for crafting personalized pitches and sending them at the precise moment at scale.
2. Get started with the Apollo AI email assistant and let the robot craft compelling emails based on Apollo’s information about a prospect and your offer. It generates subject lines, openers, and body text. It also suggests variables for granular personalization and offers several options to choose from.
Core features:
End-to-end workflows
Automatically sync and enrich lead data to your CRM
Analyze messaging effectiveness, rep activity, team performance, ROI, and more
What we’d like to improve:
Occasionally we stumble upon invalid data using Apollo. The most widespread inaccuracies are companies’ data regarding rebranding, mergers and acquisitions, shutdowns, etc.
Vadym Fedotov, Research Team Captain at Belkins.
Pricing:
A 14-day trial period limited to 50 lead credits.
Free — 600 email credits/year.
Basic — Starting at $39 user/month
Professional — Starting at $69 user/month
Organization — Starting at $79 user/month (min 5 users)
📌 Belkins tip: Use Apollo’s lead search by keywords to find leads in complex B2B niches across the United States. Specify your search by looking for keywords on social media profiles or in a company’s SEO description. This way, you can broaden the lead list even though Apollo says the search may not be accurate.
BuiltWith
The platform reports on any technology companies use for their sites. It reports on tools for analytics tracking, email hosting providers, content management systems, verified CDN, and many more. This is a great source of lead data if we need to target companies with specific tech. It’s also pretty accurate, as BuiltWith identified the right toolkit for Belkins.
Use cases
1. The Net new leads feature captures only leads that have started using new technology since you last viewed the report. This helps maintain your pipeline hygiene and never miss out on an opportunity.
2. LeadsEye helps SDRs to upload a list of websites and visually eyeball those you want to explore further. It pulls out the homepage of a website and its technologies. This feature massively saves time on manual and mundane lead vetting.
Core features:
LeadsDiscovery — Find new leads based on existing customers you have and technology spending.
SKU Product Count — Get a lead list based on the number of products detected on an e-commerce website.
Business Location Data — Access the physical address information of your leads for a granular search.
Data from 673+ million websites and 68,412 different web technologies.
What we like: BuiltWith is our go-to tool for analyzing website technologies, web technology spending, and publicly listed contacts with shocking accuracy and always-fresh data, as it updates on a weekly basis.
Pricing:
Free — 10 detailed lookups/day
Basic — Starting at $295/monthly
Pro — Starting at $495/monthly
Team — Starting at $995/monthly
📌 Belkins tip: Use BuiltWith to find companies that use competitors or similar technologies to your customers for highly targeted outreach.
Alternatives
Lusha — for finding leads with the highest privacy standards. Lusha is CCPA-compliant, GDPR-compliant, and ISO 27701-certified. Google is among Lusha’s customers.
GetProspect — for email prospecting in bulk for Europe and the United States. It’s notable for its great UX and affordable price.
Dealfront (ex-Leedfeader) — solely for capturing B2B buyer intent data.
Best B2B mass cold emailing tools
We recommend having several tools for mass send-outs that operate with different daily limits. That’s why we chose GMass for huge email campaigns, like reaching 1000+ emails in a day. In turn, Reply.io helps us craft highly personalized outreach sequences.
Also, it includes select tools with detailed analytics on outreach campaigns and over 90% deliverability rates.
GMass
GMass is a classic cold outreach tool with no limits on how many emails you can reach per day. Though it sounds spammy, the tool comes in handy for simple, non-personalized one-email campaigns.
Use cases
1. Verify your list of emails with GMass, sending no more than 1,000 emails per day from a separate email (not connected to your business). For example, when you’ve found only a handful of emails of your ICP, “create” emails by yourself in Google Sheets by merging an email pattern of a company with a username of a prospect.
After creating these emails, your next step is to verify them. Simply send “Hello” with GMass and analyze deliverability reports — who has received/opened the email and which are bounced.
Though we use advanced lead research tools and vast databases, we can’t rely on them 100%. So when we export the contacts from Apollo and Hunter, we always verify them via GMass emailing.
Vadym Fedotov, Research Team Captain at Belkins.
2. Embed one-question surveys directly into your emails and collect statistics in GMass with Email Polling. Once the survey is closed, export the results to Google Sheets. Style your poll links — either with the Gmail formatting bar or by editing the HTML of your email. Also, follow up with non-voters to get more responses.
Core features:
Mass email service.
A/B testing
Unsubscribe management
What we like:
Although GMass comes with limitations, such as how you cannot move leads forward to the next campaign step or move it from one sequence to another, it’s helpful for sending over 1,000 emails in one day.
As the rule of thumb, we don’t recommend sending out 2–10K emails per day. Even though GMass claims you won’t jeopardize your email account, first-hand experience proves the opposite. With bloated, spammy campaigns, you have higher chances of landing in Spam or even ending up with a blocked email account. So use GMass sparingly.
Alla Ivanova, Head of SDR at Belkins.
Reply.io
Reply is a world-renowned outreach automation tool. Although dozens of almost-identical tools are available on the market, we chose Reply for both client projects and Belkins’ internal use due to its good cost-to-value ratio.
Use case
I use Reply for both cold outreach of new leads and re-engagement campaigns. When reaching out to prospects, I leverage personalization variables to customize my emails, which helps increase open and response rates. For re-engagement campaigns, Reply allows me to identify prospects who have opened my initial emails but haven’t responded or clicked on the provided links to case studies and materials. This way, I can prioritize prospects who already have shown an understanding of our services.
One useful feature I discovered is the Outbox page, where I can view the number of emails scheduled to be sent from all connected email accounts in my Reply account. It proves valuable when I have multiple campaigns running simultaneously, as it helps me ensure that I don’t exceed the daily email limit.
Multichannel sequences — Personal emails, calls, tasks, SMS, WhatsApp, social outreach on LinkedIn, and Zapier steps
Cloud calls
Meeting booking
Email validation
Reply data — 140 million contacts in the database
What we like:
My favorite feature is its variables that go way beyond the usual {{FirstName}}. With Reply, you can set up conditional variables, i.e., ask the recipient for their phone number if there is no existing record. Or you can insert dynamic info depending on the moment the email is sent — for example, “Have a nice {{day_of_week}}.
Anastasia Belokopitova, Business Development Lead at Belkins
Pricing:
Free — 1K data credits/month
Starter — Starting at $60 user/month
Professional — Starting at $34 user/month
Custom — Pricing available per request
📌 Belkins tip: While the default delay between emails in Reply is 65 seconds, we suggest increasing the delay for 200 emails to 200 seconds. This way, you lower the chance of appearing in the Junk folder.
Alternatives
Lemlist — best for crafting super customized outreach emails with personalized landing pages and image, text, and video variables. Lemlist also pairs with Lemwarm, a tool for email warmup.
Woodpecker — best for companies who want to combine cold email software and sales assistants.
Best B2B email validation tools
Key criteria for email verification tools are high accuracy, reaching 95-99% of correctly validated emails. Also, it has to be a cost-effective solution because you’ll likely verify emails in vast numbers. Given that, we prefer a standalone solution with a sole focus on developing and fine-tuning B2B email verification algorithms.
QuickEmailVerification
The tool is excellent for bulk email verification, ensuring 96–99% email deliverability based on our 5-year experience working with it. Moreover, it’s super simple to use, like in 3 steps — upload your list of emails, verify, and download it back.
Core features:
Anti-Greylisting technology.
Super fast list cleaning — verify 100,000 emails in about an hour.
Encrypted data storage.
What we like: A super user-friendly and simple workflow and clear reporting.
Pricing:
100 free credits daily on the free tier.
One-time payment based on the number of emails you want to verify. From $4 to $3,500/daily; from 500 to 5M credits accordingly.
Monthly payment based on daily email verification volume. From $25 to $900/month; from 100 to 50,000 credits accordingly.
📌 Belkins tip: Monthly subscription with added extra credits is the best option for companies who verify emails in large volumes, as extra credits never expire.
Alternatives
VoilaNorbert — a dirt-cheap lead verification tool. Starts at $.003/email up to 500K and $.001/email above that. $2 minimum. Best for small and mid-sized businesses.
Best B2B email deliverability tools
Choose tools with testimonials from reputable companies and lots of case studies. This is important because all deliverability tools promote the idea of inbox warm-up, but only a handful can boast good results.
Folderly
To improve email deliverability and recover mailboxes labeled as Spam, we at Belkins developed Folderly in 2019, initially for internal use. To date, Folderly is used monthly by over 150+ companies, primarily in the United States. The success is dictated by the combination of technology, direct API integrations, and a dedicated email deliverability team that helps customers maintain healthy emails.
Belkins’ case study: How to boost open rates from 10% to 70%.
In the spring of 2019, Belkins faced an unexpected issue: recipients stopped responding to their emails. This was a potential breaking point for the company since Belkins is a B2B lead generation and appointment setting agency. So, Belkins searched for potential customers for different businesses and attracted them with the help of email marketing. One of the company’s primary metrics is the open rate — and at that moment, it dropped sharply from 80% to 10% for one of the clients.
The remedy came in the form of a Folderly email deliverability test that uncovered technical issues with DNS settings, namely, a critical SPF issue. Belkins employed Folderly’s SPF Record Maker tool to rework the SPF record into its shorter yet indefinitely effective version.
Also, Folderly suggested removing HTML elements from an outreach email’s body text that were putting email service providers on high alert.
The result: open rates recovered to a steady 70%.
Core features:
Email Spam Checker
SPF Record Generator
Email deliverability test
Active domain and IP monitoring
Spam triggers
Pricing:
The Cold Email package for cold outbound campaigns starts at $200/month for 1 inbox monthly. Here’s what you’ll get:
Template analysis
Deliverability maintenance
Integration with any ESP
Technical setup of DNS and authentication
Content analysis and recommendations, and more.
The Email Marketing package for warm customer engagement is non-disclosed. Contact Folderly’s sales team to get a personal quote.
Our 6-year practice showed that clients don’t take seriously all the recommendations for improving email deliverability unless they’ve gotten blocked or banned. But when they implement suggestions before the damage, they witness an increase in email marketing performance. So, use B2B email deliverability tools any time you create a new inbox for outreach to eliminate bans.
Lemwarm — an email warm-up tool for improved deliverability for new mailboxes by Lemlist.
Best B2B user behavior tracking tools
Pair user behavior and buyer intent tracking tools for a killer combo for personalization and nurturing B2B leads.
Hotjar — for user behavior tracking
Hotjar is a top-of-mind tool for analyzing user behavior on your site with heatmaps and session recordings. We use Hotjar for marketing and sales purposes alike. For instance, the marketing team A/B tests different CTAs and messaging for landing pages with heatmaps.
But what value does the sales team find in Hotjar?
Use cases
Any sales team can use Hotjar’s heatmaps and scroll depth analysis to pinpoint what content your target audience reads and loves the most and which parts of it. What makes them stop skimming? What nails their attention and prompts them to read till the end or book a meeting?
Next, incorporate converting articles or text blocks into your cold emails, follow-ups, or nurturing campaigns. This way, you’ll enable more sales and increase conversions from visitors to MQLs to SQLs.
Core features:
Session recordings
Heatmaps
Onsite surveys
Feedback widget
Funnel analysis
What we like: Hotjar offers top-notch tools at a super affordable price. We also enjoy its fantastic customer success team that resolves any issues or helps us come up with the solution for our ideas.
Pricing:
Basic — €0/forever. Up to 35 daily sessions
Plus — €39/month. Up to 100 daily sessions
Business — Starting at €99/month. From 500 to 270K daily sessions
Scale — Starting at €213. From 500 to 270K daily sessions
Alternatives
Smartlook — best for user behavior tracking on a site and in mobile applications.
Best B2B meeting scheduling tools
Decent B2B scheduling tools must come with key features, such as calendar integration, intelligent lead routing, time zone management, customizable meeting preferences, and automated reminders and notifications.
Chili Piper has it all and goes beyond. Find out why we prefer Chili Piper over the popular tool Calendly.
Chili Piper
We selected Chili Piper due to its unique features, such as advanced round-robin and disqualification options. On a daily basis, though, I utilize Chili Piper for appointment scheduling for Belkins’ sales team.
The tool allows me to route appointments to specific sales executives (SE) based on my preferred criteria and control the number of appointments booked for each SE. I also recommend Chili Piper for larger BDR teams, as it facilitates scheduling process automation and transparent tracking of call ownership.
For tracking purposes, I rely on the ‘Smart Booking link’ feature, which functions similarly to a round-robin link but also allows me to claim all appointments booked through it and include them in my KPIs.
Anastasia Belokopitova, Business Development Lead at Belkins.
Use cases
1. Automatically identify your prospects. Every Belkins BDR uses an individual link in their signature, allowing prospects to book a meeting with just one click. Chili Piper notifies them of any new meetings booked and marks the respective BDR as the Booker in the system.
2. Lead qualification and routing. For inbound leads, we utilize Chili Piper’s lead-capturing form to prequalify prospects interested in speaking with our sales team. Based on the results, we can route them either to the sales team for the perfect fit or to the BDR team for manual qualification.
Core features:
Form Concierge — Instantly qualify, route, and book from your existing form.
Distro — Route leads quickly to the right rep every time.
Instant Booker — One-click booking through email.
What we like:
An ‘Aha!’ moment I had with Chili Piper was discovering the re-assign feature. It allows me to transfer a sales call to another sales executive in case of emergency without having access to the SE calendar.
Anastasia Belokopitova, Business Development Lead at Belkins.
Pricing: Chili Piper comes with different prices for 4 of its features (see below).
Alternatives
Calendly — best for individual users and companies of any size.
Best CRMs for B2B companies
Your CRM must be versatile and with flexible customization options via API or third-party integrations. These two are chief criteria for a robust CRM. Although new businesses might consider these secondary functions, with growth, you’ll have to connect more and more plugins and widgets and integrate other tools.
Also, look for detailed reporting and analytics capabilities on sales performance, pipeline analysis, revenue forecasting, and customer behavior. Altogether, this will help your sales team identify bottlenecks and growth opportunities.
HubSpot
After comparing dozens of CRM systems for our own usage and for providing CRM consulting services, we concluded that HubSpot suits us best. Why? HubSpot offers a free start with essential features for aligning sales and marketing funnels, which was a must for Belkins in its early days. It has the best value for money for our needs. HubSpot CRM comes with hundreds of features and scales with your organization.
Belkins’ case study: How HubSpot helped us reach $5M in new revenue.
We used to struggle with establishing a transparent lead acquisition process, from the very first touchpoint to closing the deal. Among critical issues were:
Teams didn’t use our CRM system previous to HubSpot
All these factors led to hundreds or even thousands of lost opportunities. And then we decided to switch to HubSpot and hit the ground running.
In a nutshell, HubSpot helped us:
Clean up a messy pipeline and get a 360-degree, transparent view of our activities.
Create a single storage for all our resources.
Forecast how many SQLs we need to get one opportunity and one customer.
Set up an automatic round-robin workflow.
Finally, HubSpot aligned our revenue and marketing teams and all corresponding lead generation activities, which resulted in a shortened sales cycle by 25%–30%.
Automate reminders for SDRs to perform pre-defined important tasks to move deals down the funnel.
Seamlessly integrates with our sales toolkit — Chili Piper, Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, PandaDoc, and Gmail.
Lead scoring based on their engagement with our content (e.g., whether they read our emails, respond to them, visit our website, or book a call).
What we like:
It works best with the bigger scale when your base is over 1000 leads/month and you have a team of 5+ people working at the same time with those leads.
Ensure your CS tool has customer health monitoring and analytics capabilities, as you need these features for measuring customer satisfaction.
Planhat
We use Planhat to track payments, project health scores, and upsell/cross-sell opportunities. Also, we track crucial business numbers, such as LTV, MRR, churn, retention, etc. Personally, I like Planhat because of its simplicity, flexibility, and broad customization. The problems we face with Planhat are usually related to our specific business model. Sometimes, we do request some complex things that require a bunch of involvement from the development team.
Yuriy Boyko, Head of Account Management at Belkins
Use cases
The combination of automation with smart filtering system allows us to identify potential churn and separate it from confirmed churn. Thus, no unfortunate surprises at the end of a month. Also, proper clientele segmentation with an automated phase change based on the health score comes in handy to identify struggling clients and add some extra resources to the project.
Core features:
Planhat Automation is a no-code way of building everything from simple time-saving triggers and alerts to custom bots & integrations.
Planhat Workflow — Develop connected journeys that combine task management with data-driven conditional sequencing.
Customer Playbooks.
Pricing: Available upon request.
📌 Belkins tip: Utilize automation. It is complicated and might require extra effort to learn, but once you have it, you will turn Planhat into an “Optimus Prime” tool that will allow you to trigger 100 operations with one click.
Alternatives
ChurnZero — best for customer onboarding, expansion, and product adoption.
FAQ
What is the typical yearly spending on B2B sales tools?
Most sales organizations spend $500 to $1,000 per rep on sales tech, but barely more than half boast good technology adoption, according to McKinsey’s Future of B2B sales report.
How many tools do B2B sales professionals use?
On average, sales teams use 10 tools to close deals, as Salesforce discovered thanks to its State of Sales survey.
Share the article:
Subscribe to our blog
Get the ultimate insights on the B2B trends and hands-on tips from sales professionals.
Jenny is a freelance B2B writer with over 6 years of hands-on experience in content marketing & sales for B2B SaaS. Besides Belkins, she writes for HubSpot, MarTech, Smartlook, and Userpilot.
Expert
Yuriy Boyko
Head of Account Management at Belkins
Yuriy has been working in the B2B sales sector for more than a decade. His approach is the integration of scientific methods combined with thinking out of the box, allowing to achieve the highest results in any industry.
