The 10 Tools Our SDR Team Uses Every Day

There has never been a better time to be an SDR. With so many great solutions to help the SDR be more efficient and make the most of every day, SDRs have a pretty vast arsenal of tools to open up more conversations and help them get more opportunities in the pipeline. It can be difficult to sort through all of these tools to figure out which ones are going to be of the most use to your SDRs. No matter how many you evaluate, find on the Chrome Store or read about on blogs, it seems like there is a new, great tool coming out on a monthly basis. With that in mind, I thought I would point out some of the tools that our team uses every day:

1. Outreach
We had evaluated and used a number of email tracking/engagement tools and found Outreach to be the best for us. Our team is very collaborative and loves to share templates and Outreach makes that very easy. The SDR can also set-up a series of follow-up tasks to help them keep on top of the large number of prospects they are reaching out to in any given week/month. You can also coordinate send times, which is great for SDRs working different time zones or testing different send days/times. From a manager’s point of view, the reporting is great and will let you track things like sends and opens, so that you can determine SDRs are sending the best emails and have the rest of the team replicate their outreach.

2. Demandbase Hotlist, Analytics and Sales Accelerator
We definitely drink our own champagne at Demandbase. Everyday we get a Top 25 Hotlist of the most engaged companies on our site. Each SDR will also receive an email every morning with their company’s site activity and engagement. This information is also presented in our Sales Accelerator tool, which links directly to Salesforce and allows you to build custom reports on activity from your top accounts. All of these tools give the SDR a view of whether or not their prospects are coming to our site, and when they do come to our site, gives us insights into the pages they are viewing so that we know when to reach out.

3. Datanyze Insider/BuiltWith/Ghostery
For most companies working in Tech, you need to know which technologies a prospect has on their site. Free tools like Datanyze Insider, BuiltWith and Ghostery are great for doing just that. I find Datanyze to be the best tool because of the breadth of technologies it tracks and its ability to give you company information like employee count, revenue range, Alexa rank and links to the company’s social pages and info on Crunchbase.

4. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a great tool for finding out more about a company’s web traffic— what drove that web traffic and which companies are similar. For us it is important to understand web traffic, so this tool is a must. Also, if you find an opportunity with a company it will be important to know who they compete with and try to sell into them as well.

5. Owler
Provides news and company info on prospects and allows you to see who their closest competitors are. Owler makes it easy for SDRs to identify the companies that compete with their best prospects.

6. Sales Navigator
Social Selling is a necessity in the day-to-day of a successful SDR, and LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator allows SDRs to do that more effectively. Whether it be accessing their vast network to research accounts and individuals, join groups, post insights, send Inmails or save Searches/Leads/Accounts, SN really allows the SDR to take on Social Selling and better engage prospects. This is one that no SDR should live without.

7. Dynamic Signal
This employee advocacy platform makes it easy for SDRs to find content and then share it directly on LinkedIn or Twitter. You can plan out your social selling posts throughout the week, which can make off-hour prospecting times much more effective. We’ve also seen a big uptick in Social Selling not only through the ease-of-use of this solution but also its gamified dashboard.

8. SalesLoft & RainKing
We use tools like SalesLoft and RainKing to help us find contact’s emails and phone numbers. One of the great things about these tools is the ease of exporting this information into your CRM. It’s a significant time-saver to be able to easily look-up contact info after you have verified the contacts on LinkedIn. Both of these tools have other uses, but for us, contact info verification is the main one.

9. Task/Time Management Tools
SDRs are busy people, who work a lot of accounts with a number of different sales reps, so time management plays a major role in achieving success. We don’t have a singular tool for this, but across the team we use free tools like HiTask, Trello and EverNote to help keep SDRs on track of daily high priority activities and tasks.

10. Meme Generator
Meme Generator by no means will help you get more opportunities and is not used on the daily, but is a fun way to send congrats on monthly/quarterly accomplishments. We feel it is necessary to grind it out during the month, but take time to have a little fun.

So there you have it. There are a ton of other solutions out there and the tools you use will depend on who you are targeting, the industry you work in, the structure of your team and the budget you have to spend on tools, but we have seen a significant increase in conversations and opportunities using this mix. I hope they can work similarly for you!