Sales prospecting isn’t for the faint of heart. Shopping for a SaaS solution these days feels less like popping into your local bodega and a little more like gearing up for a trip to Jungle Jim’s International Market. You need the right tool for the job, and identifying that is half the battle. Are you leveraging your social media contacts? Do you need a giant contact database? Are you looking for richer insights? Is seamless CRM integration your main goal?
It’s a maze out there, and your shopping list needs to be on point. Here are three companies that could put a pep in your prospecting step.
Lusha leans into data
Lusha CEO and co-founder Yoni Tserruya feels his company provides the most value through its data-driven recommendations, or as previously referred to, “prospecting on autoplay.” Think of it as AI-powered sales leads in the form of a playlist or Spotify for sellers. Tserruya says having to manually search for data poses a major barrier for sales teams. He uses the analogy of the music industry, where you once had to download individual songs to build a playlist.
“Today you have Spotify, and it knows you, and it knows your taste,” he said.
As AI takes over administrative duties, Tserruya thinks manual prospecting will soon become extinct. That’s where he sees Lusha stepping in.“What makes us unique is the fact we are investing the most in data, and in learning you as a user…we are investing less in features that might be disrupted next year,” said Tserruya.
Tserruya said Lusha’s edge comes down to the best mix of data aggregation that can provide value for Lusha’s users.
“We have unique technology that allows us to identify trends and identify similarities and those two together, which are not easy to build.”
Apollo.io embraces AI
Max Angell is head of sales at Apollo.io, which is helping sales teams evolve their outreach and get hyperspecific with AI by marrying a vast B2B dataset with powerful AI workflows.
“AI workflows are really only as powerful as the data that’s supporting them, and in turn, data is really stagnant without any sort of powerful workflow,” he said. The result is delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
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Angell gave an example of an Apollo customer in the security space, which sells a product that when paired with System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 compliance creates value for customers.
“Using the Apollo dataset, we can layer in AI and we can ask Apollo to take that account list and then go and scour all of the websites of all of the accounts and identify where SOC 2 exists,” he said. Angell says the quality of the datasets is paramount, and after that it comes down to the specificity of the “unique differentiators on the workflows themselves.”
As for the industries Angell thinks Apollo is best integrated with and used for? “Tech is definitely our sweet spot,” he said.
RocketReach wants to perfect the basics
RocketReach CEO Scott Kim says the platform is the “simplest and most intuitive AI-powered” GTM tool. He joins the chorus of business leaders focusing on the importance of quality data but adds that ease of onboarding, and general use, is key for his platform. Kim says the sheer volume of platform usage allows the team to incrementally hone the product.
“We get to take a more science-oriented approach in usability,” he said. “Not all 300 [to] 500,000 people watch a webinar or a video, so we pride ourselves on the ability for our customers to figure it out.”
Integration is also a huge plus for Kim, and the ability to integrate across a host of platforms is critical to RocketReach’s value proposition.
“We have to be able to fit our puzzle piece into that larger workflow in an easy and seamless way,” Kim said. “We actually integrate where you want us to integrate into your workflow.”
Zooming out to the bigger picture, he suggests staying in your lane, doing what you do best, and letting “other companies do the thing they do really well.” The priority: making sure “our thing integrates with their thing,” he said.