< This article was originally posted on LinkedIn here >

Sales is the life-line of any company and every minute saved by an individual in your sales team will reap rich rewards for you. Gone are the days where we use excel or reminder apps to keep us informed of our follow-ups or important to-do’s.

If you are a fan of cold emailing or mailing in general to reach out and interact with potential clients, this article will definitely be helpful for you.

There are a lot of tools that aim to save time for your sales team in making them more productive. So let me cut the chase and start listing out the same.

1. Rapportive

Rapportive is an amazing tool from LinkedIn that brings out the best of your contacts inside your inbox. It has got a plugin for Gmail and it acts like a social CRM.

Using rapportive, you can find out the email address of the prospective lead in a few minutes. For e.g if you need to send an email to me. You know my name, you know my company.

Press Compose and start entering the possible combinations for the email id ( Old school trial and error will help you here). If your combination is right, my details will appear on the right side.

You will also get to see the prospect’s latest tweet or an update from his social profile provided he has linked his email id with his account.

This works most of the time and the joy in getting the email id right is priceless. You can know more about the same here

2. SalesLoft

If you are not a big fan of trial and error methods and you need that guessing part of the email id to be automated, do not worry. There is SalesLoft for you.

Simply install the SalesLoft plugin for Chrome. Go to Linkedin, identify a lead for your business and on the right side, you will see a button that reads ” Add to SalesLoft “.

The lead gets added to your SalesLoft profile and the software does all the guessing, searches for possible matches from the same company, arrives at the needed email id and shows it to you.

The match with the highest percentage is normally the right one. One other way is to find a email id using SalesLoft and double check it using Rapportive.

You get limited credits in free version and information about the strength of the company also would be available for your view. You can check about the same here

3. Contactually

This is the tool you will totally love. It is more like a CRM but it has some great features that makes your sales life easier. For starters, you will need to add all your email accounts and social networking accounts with this tool.

This will automatically bring in all the contacts that you have in your email into the dashboard. You can drag and drop these contacts into Buckets – Warm Leads, Cold Leads, Hot Leads, Family, Friends etc. You can also add custom buckets as per your style of working.

Say you have 1000 contacts, dragging and dropping them into buckets will definitely bore you but that’s where they gamify the experience. You can use Buckets game to add 50 contacts on a timed challenge on a daily basis. Do this for 20 days, you are done.

The best part about this tool is to configure the time for follow-up or touch-base for each and every bucket. For e.g You may need to mail your hot lead once in 4 days atleast but you may need to mail a warm lead once in a fortnight or may vary according to your business.

Let us take a use case here

Your referral partners – the people who pass across leads may feel really good to work with you when you send across an email to them once in a month updating them about your latest works or strengths acquired. Based on your previous interaction through email or even facebook chats, it will remind you that one month has passed and time to send a email.

You can check out Contactually here

To conclude, these tools will save your time in identifying the right email ids of your target leads, give you an update on what they are upto recently and will also help you to organize the way you stay in touch with them.

Good luck. Would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

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