What is the best sales prospecting tool?

The one that has your buyers in it. For B2B buyers with LinkedIn profiles, [Apollo](/vs/apollo)'s free plan is the easiest place to start. For small local businesses, a tool built on Google Maps listings will find far more of them. Either way, test with five customers you already know before paying.

Are there free sales prospecting tools?

Apollo's free plan includes 900 credits a year, Lusha gives 40 credits a month, Hunter 50 credits a month, and [ZipLead](/pricing) 5 ZIP code searches a month. None of them stay free at real volume, but all are enough to check coverage.

Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator worth it?

If your buyers are active on LinkedIn and you'll reach out there, usually. Core is $119.99 a month. It doesn't give you email addresses, so budget for a contact tool next to it.

Do I need a prospecting tool and a CRM?

They do different jobs. A prospecting tool finds who to contact. A CRM tracks the conversations once they start. Most prospecting tools can export to a CRM, so it's rarely one or the other.

Sales Prospecting Tools, Sorted by Who You Sell To

Most roundups rank prospecting tools against each other. Wrong comparison. A tool built to find a VP of Finance at a 400-person company is close to useless for reaching the owner of a plumbing company, and it works the other way too. So this one is sorted by who you're trying to get on the phone.

QUICK ANSWER

If your buyer has a job title on LinkedIn, use Sales Navigator to find them and Apollo to get their email. Already have the names and need phone numbers? Lusha. Know the company and just need an address? Hunter. Selling to small local businesses where the owner picks up? ZipLead. ZoomInfo makes sense when a whole sales team will use it and someone else is signing a five-figure contract.

Prospecting is two jobs, and most tools only do one

Finding the right people is one job. Getting a way to reach them is another. Sales Navigator is great at the first and stingy on the second: you get InMail messages, not email addresses. Hunter is the reverse. Give it a domain and it finds the addresses, but it won't tell you which company to look at.

Figure out which half you're stuck on and the list gets short fast.

Side by side

Tool	Built for reaching	Free option	Cheapest paid plan
LinkedIn Sales Navigator	People with job titles at companies that live on LinkedIn	Free trial, if you haven't had a LinkedIn trial in the past 365 days	Core, $119.99/mo or $1,079.88/yr
Apollo	The same buyers, when you need their email too	Free plan, 900 credits a year	Basic, $49 per user per month
Lusha	Named people you need a phone number for	40 credits a month	Starter, $49.90/mo for 400 credits
Hunter	A company you already picked, when you need the email	50 credits a month	Starter, $49/mo, or $34/mo billed yearly
ZoomInfo	Mid-market and enterprise accounts, worked by a team	Free trial	Not published. You get a quote from sales
ZipLead	Small local businesses, the kind you find on Google Maps	5 searches a month, ZIP codes only, no card	Operator, $59/mo for 100 searches

Your buyer has a LinkedIn title

Sales Navigator is where the targeting lives, because the people you want are already on LinkedIn. Core is $119.99 a month, or $1,079.88 if you pay for the year. Advanced is $159.99 a month. Every plan includes 50 InMail messages a month.

What you won't get is an email address or a direct dial. That's why so many reps pair it with a contact tool.

Apollo covers both halves in one place. Its own comparison page puts the database at 240M+ people and 30M+ companies. The free plan has 900 credits a year, Basic is $49 per user per month, Professional $79, and Organization $119 with a three-user minimum. If you sell to companies with real org charts, this is probably the first thing to try, and the free plan is enough to see whether your buyers are in it.

You have the names and need phone numbers

Lusha is priced around exactly this. Revealing an email costs 1 credit, a phone number costs 5. Starter is $49.90 a month for 400 credits, or $37.45 a month on annual billing. Pro is $69.90 for 600.

Do the phone math before you buy. At 5 credits a number, 400 credits is 80 phone numbers a month, and the free plan's 40 credits is 8.

You picked the company and need an email

Hunter finds the email addresses tied to a domain. One credit per email found, half a credit per verification. Free is 50 credits a month. Starter is $49 a month, or $34 a month billed yearly, for 2,000 credits a month.

Cheap, and it doesn't pretend to be more than it is. Handy when you already know who you want and a LinkedIn tool would be overkill.

You sell to small local businesses

This is where the big contact databases struggle, and it's not really their fault. The owner of a family HVAC company or an independent dental practice often has no reason to keep a LinkedIn profile current, so a database built from professional profiles has little to index. What that business does have is a Google listing: phone number, website, reviews, rating.

ZipLead starts from those listings. Search a ZIP code (or a city or state on paid plans) and the businesses Google and Foursquare list there come back scored 0-99, sorted, and tiered Hot, Warm, Cold or Skip. Enrich the ones you care about and it reads their own website for contact emails, extra phone numbers, and owner or manager names where the site lists them. It also checks whether they run ads (a yes or no, from ad tags on their site) and estimates how fast new reviews are coming in.

It suits anyone whose customers are small businesses: insurance agents, payment and POS reps, bookkeepers, IT providers, software vendors, suppliers, marketers. Free is 5 searches a month on ZIP codes, no card. Operator is $59 a month for 100 searches and 100 enrichment credits, with CSV export and send to HubSpot. Command is $179 a month for 200 searches, 500 credits and API access.

When ZipLead is the wrong pick

If your buyer has a title and a LinkedIn profile, skip it. There's no job-title search, no org chart, and no revenue or headcount for any business. It's US only. And Google caps results at 60 per business type on a narrow search, or 20 per type once you search five or more types at once, so a big metro gets worked ZIP by ZIP rather than in one pull.

When ZoomInfo makes sense

ZoomInfo doesn't publish prices. The pricing page asks for your phone number, and the FAQ says cost depends on features, number of licenses and credit usage. Vendr, which negotiates software contracts for buyers, puts the median ZoomInfo contract at $33,500 a year across 1,571 purchases.

That's a team tool with a team budget. If you're weighing it against cheaper options, the ZoomInfo alternatives post on this blog goes through them by reason for leaving.

Test before you pay

Write down five real customers, or five you'd love to land.
Look each one up on the free plan or trial of the tool you're considering.
Count how many come back with a contact you could actually use. One out of five means the tool doesn't cover your market, however good the demo was.

Every tool here has a free plan or a trial, so this costs you an afternoon. Demos always search for a company that's in the database. Your own five won't be so kind.