Prospecting in real estate is about efficiency. Traditional prospecting methods include cold calls, referrals, print advertising, and attending conferences/events with the hope of drumming up sales. You’re putting information about your business out into the world to connect with potential customers. Traditional methodologies are still possible to do today, and still effective in some instances, but it isn’t the most efficient way to generate sales for your business.
B2B prospecting tools assist in automating and streamlining this process by connecting you more directly with leads that have a higher chance of doing business with you (high-quality leads). You’ll find that the best CRE prospecting tools also help you engage more directly with your prospects and prioritize the leads with the most potential.
In this article, we’ll explore the different types of CRE prospecting tools on the market. We’ll also walk through the different categories of prospecting tools so you can better understand what each tool is intended to be used for and how you can use certain tools most effectively.
In short: Sales prospecting tools include three types of functions. Sales intelligence tools use data to enhance contact information and help sales teams understand their prospects better, offering contact information, company details and relevant metrics. Sales engagement tools facilitate communication between prospects and sales teams through multiple channels. Sales management tools track prospects, leads and customers through the pipeline.
Sales Intelligence Tools
Sales intelligence tools are about hard data and sales insights to improve your company's lead generation, nurturing, and conversion processes. As you search for prospects, sales intelligence tools give data-driven insights based on data that is relevant to your business’s target audience. Here are some quick hits about what sales intelligence tools can do:
Automate the data collection process on leads by crawling the web for relevant information about leads
Score leads based on criteria that you set
Track potential leads
Trigger notifications for company changes (new key decision maker, change in funding, etc.)
Connect with your CRM to enhance your sales strategy
You’ll find that most mainstream general sales intelligence tools allow you to do all of this. However, outside of CRE, the search criteria, filters, and key trigger events about businesses will be very general. This is because most sales intelligence tools don’t have CRE specifically in mind.
In commercial real estate prospecting, Biscred is a sales intelligence tool built with only CRE in mind. You can search leads by industry, asset class, property count, and other company keywords specific to CRE. You’ll find that Biscred also lets you analyze and process large swathes of data for more efficient data analysis. In short, Biscred performs two important roles in your CRE business growth strategy:
Data discovery: Biscred helps you discover untapped companies and individuals working in the commercial real estate space. It grows your marketing and sales pipeline.
Data enhancement: Biscred's vast datasets enhance your existing contacts, providing insights about the companies and individuals with whom your marketing and sales teams have identified or interacted with.
Biscred's API connects with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce. Once you’ve collected data through Biscred, you can download CSV files and import them into your other tools for an easy, streamlined, and efficient workflow.
Outside CRE, other sales intelligence tools like Cognism, Datanyze, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are potential options. But if you’re in the commercial real estate industry, Biscred is the best tool for finding relevant data and data enhancement.
Sales Engagement Tools
A sales engagement tool or platform is about executing sales with the prospects that you identify. This is the second layer on top of your sales intelligence tools, and, usually, these tools speak directly to one another. Some features that sales engagement tools have are:
Tools for sales representatives to regularly use to execute campaigns
Integrate with customer interaction tools (emails, social media posts, cold call templates, etc.) for direct planning
Sales performance insights and data
Marketing automation to all of your potential leads
Sales engagement tools launch and automate sales campaigns using the data that you collect through the sales intelligence tool. A few examples of sales engagement tools are:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator: A people-focused platform that connects your business with key decision makers at a business.
Salesforce: Part of the tech giant's CRM includes AI-powered tools for sales reps to directly automate simple tasks.
ZoomInfo: Business data platform that helps with digital advertising and setting up sales flow campaigns (automated prospect contacting based on criteria that you specify).
HubSpot: HubSpot's marketing and sales ecosystem also has a sales engagement tool that assists with managing your contacts, referrals, and managing all leads and customers.
Apollo.io: Sorts companies by custom analytics and allows you to contact leads directly through the platform.
A good sales engagement tool automates the process of engaging with your leads in a way that feels personalized and natural. This is the area that artificial intelligence is changing the most, as emails and other communication channels can be enhanced and automated with AI. If you need to process data about potential leads and communicate with prospects more efficiently, make sure your sales engagement tool is compatible with your sales intelligence tool.
Sales Management Tools
Sales management tools are supervision platforms used by sales managers to oversee the sales development team throughout the sales pipeline. They include customer relations management (CRM) platforms, which offer features for managing all the different types of customers that a business has and nurturing prospective leads.
However, sales management tools differ in that they’re meant to be used to give an overview of an organization’s sales and track the team’s activity, a single sales representative’s performance, and other management tools. Some features that sales management software has are:
Built-in, automated prospect communication
Supervision tools for the entire sales department
Sales activity tracking throughout the pipeline
Integration with other communication software and sales intelligence tools
Here are a few larger sales management tools and how they’re used:
Pipedrive
Build and visualize your sales pipeline based on how your business operates. You can use an existing template or chart out your prospecting tools like calls, emails, in-person meetings, and more to build a pipeline that works best for your organization. Pipedrive will also monitor the performance of campaigns to make sure your team is on track. You can even automate a certain number of tasks using artificial intelligence.
Salesforce
This software assists with the sales management process by managing contacts, leads, and customers, and tracking them across a multitude of data points. Salesforce provides templates for managers to use when managing their sales team, analyzing customer activity and history, and automating the contact management process for a more efficient use of time. Salesforce is all about building and executing on a sales strategy.
HubSpot
We mentioned HubSpot before, as this software is also all-encompassing for both sales engagement and management. HubSpot allows you to visualize your entire sales pipeline and access detailed reports on all the activities within your department. It is one of the larger sales management softwares, and Biscred connects directly with it, making it one of the best options for a CRE firm.
Sales engagement tools will often have sales management tools built into them for your managers to use for tracking the campaign process. However, not all sales management tools will have access to the relevant statistics and data that you need for CRE. This is why sales engagement and management tools are commonly connected to a sales intelligence tool to augment their capabilities. Sales intelligence tools allow you to collect high-value CRE prospects, and sales engagement/management tools let you build and execute campaigns.