Top CRE Sales Prospecting Tools

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 they aren't always the most efficient ways 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

What are sales intelligence tools? Sales intelligence tools provide the data and insights sales teams need to identify and prioritize prospects. They typically deliver contact information, company details, and relevant metrics, and they can automate data collection, score leads based on set criteria, and trigger alerts when key changes occur, such as a leadership change or a shift in company focus.

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

• Trigger notifications for company changes (new key decision maker, change in funding, etc.)

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 volumes of data for more efficient data analysis. In short, Biscred performs two important roles in your CRE business growth strategy:

1. Data discovery: Biscred helps you discover untapped companies and individuals working in the commercial real estate space. It grows your marketing and sales pipeline.

2. 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 customer relationship management platforms (CRMs) including Microsoft Dynamics, 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 B2B sales intelligence tools include Cognism, Datanyze (acquired by Zoominfo in 2018), and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. 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

What defines sales engagement tools? Sales engagement tools are the execution layer on top of your sales intelligence data. They automate and manage outreach across multiple channels — email, phone, social — and provide performance insights to help teams prioritize follow-up and refine their approach. Most integrate directly with sales intelligence tools and CRM platforms to keep prospect data and communication history in one place. 

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:

• ZoomInfo is a business data platform that helps with digital advertising and setting up sales flow campaigns (automated prospect contacting based on criteria that you specify). It is both a sales intelligence and a sales engagement platform.

• 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.

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 

What is Pipedrive? It is a CRM and sales management platform designed around pipeline visibility. It's built for sales teams that want a clear view of where every deal stands and what actions are needed to move prospects forward.

How does Pipedrive help sales development teams? SDRs (sales development reps) can build and visualize their sales pipelines based on how their businesses operate. They can use an existing template or map out their 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 teams are on track. They can even automate a certain number of tasks using artificial intelligence.

Salesforce

What is Salesforce? Salesforce is the most widely used CRM platform in the world. It manages contacts, leads, and customer relationships across the entire sales cycle, with tools for activity tracking, reporting, pipeline management, and workflow automation. It's highly customizable and integrates with a broad range of third-party platforms.

How does Salesforce support sales teams? 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 

What is HubSpot? HubSpot encompasses both sales engagement and management. It 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.

What About AI Tools for CRE Prospecting?

The rapid advancement of AI technology is changing CRE prospecting just as much as other industries. Most, if not all, of the tools we’ve already mentioned have built-in AI features, but there are more specific AI plugins and services designed specifically for CRE. AI is a cutting-edge field and continues to improve and change, so the advice and use cases for AI in this article may change by the time you read it!

How Biscred uses AI for CRE prospecting

AI is used in CRE prospecting to streamline and automate certain segments of your sales pipeline. For example, for database queries, Biscred’s team built an AI agent into our query builder so you can use natural language to search for CRE customer segments. As an example, instead of clicking through a bunch of checkboxes for your search criteria, you can type: 

Find CEOs at multifamily companies in California with email addresses.

And Biscred will automatically query the database to find contacts based on that criteria. 

How other platforms use AI 

At the outreach stage of your sales pipeline, one of the greatest challenges is balancing personalized outreach with scalability, as you’re sometimes reaching out to hundreds, if not thousands, of prospects. AI changes this by writing and formatting emails with minimal oversight required. Tools like Instantly.AI outreach take targeting criteria like the recipient’s location, industry, and a few keywords to write and format an email. 

Tools like HubSpot’s Breeze are integrated into sales tools to help you move your customer data around and manage your outreach schedule.  

For AI data management, a context-aware AI like Clay is designed to help you build an AI agent that connects to your CRM data, formats it, and uses it for marketing campaigns. 

Apollo is a similar AI platform that has solutions for outbound prospecting and inbound traffic. For example, it can sort inbound leads with key insights into who they are and schedule follow-up messaging and even meetings. 

How These Tools Work Together

The tools that we’ve reviewed do work together, which not only means that your automation options are broad, but also that you don’t have to integrate AI into every part of your sales pipeline. If you work with one sales intelligence tool, for example, you can integrate the data that you collect and enrich it with an engagement tool like Clay. 

These tools are not always designed to act entirely independently as a total sales solution. Biscred, for example, not only helps you find new prospects, but also helps you update and enrich any existing lead data you have. This is especially useful if you’ve got purchased lead lists. We’ve designed Biscred so you can export the enriched data that you’ve collected for integration into a platform like HubSpot or Apollo, so you can use our data for your outbound sales. 

There’s always going to be some overlap between the tools that you use. A good tool won’t force you to use every feature that it offers. For example, Apollo does have data enrichment with a database of contacts that it uses to sort and enrich inbound leads that you may have collected from website or advertisement conversions. However, you don’t necessarily have to use this data, as it may not have CRE-specific information, as Biscred does!

How you build your sales pipeline will depend on your business and sales goals. If you’re interested in a CRE-specific data enrichment tool like Biscred, or want to learn how Biscred will work for your company, contact us today to set up a demo!