Sales Outreach Tools: How to Choose the Right One & Our Top 5 Picks

Originally published January 23, 2025, updated February 14, 2025

Learn what matters when choosing sales outreach tools and check our top 5 picks.

Good old sales outreach – reaching out to potential customers on social media and via email – isn’t going anywhere, no matter how popular inbound marketing becomes. When done right, it’s key to winning big accounts, along with raising brand recognition and building long-lasting customer relationships.

You’d think that sales pros spend their days chatting with potential customers, but the reality is far from it. Sellers spend only two hours a day actively selling. The rest of the day is spent on administrative tasks, data entry, and other tedious activities.

That doesn’t seem like a great return on your investment in hiring sales pros, right? 😉 Well, sales outreach tools are here to optimize your outreach workflows — we’ll show you how by using NetHunt CRM as an example.

But first, what are sales outreach tools?

Sales outreach tools are software solutions built to assist sales teams in managing and automating their sales outreach workflows. For example, they can automate cold email campaigns and follow-ups or connection requests.

Sales outreach tools can be cloud-based (accessible via any browser) or available as browser extensions or desktop apps.

Sales outreach software helps you:

• Automate routine tasks like adding prospect information to the CRM database
• Improve the sales team’s productivity and performance as its members can focus on more value-adding tasks like building relationships with prospects
• Scale and personalize communication with potential customers
• Speed up the sales process (28% of sales pros say prospects back out of deals because the process is too long!)
• Reduce costs with automation and sales outreach optimization
• Gain better visibility into what works and what doesn’t in your sales process with comprehensive analytics

What makes sales outreach tools good? 5 must-have features

Here are the five most value-adding features your sales outreach tool should include:

• Email automation. Follow-up and reminder scheduling + cold email campaigns
• Personalization and templates. Custom fields for personalizing messaging + template builder for creating custom templates
• Analytics and performance tracking. Open, click, and response rate tracking for evaluating campaign performance and A/B test results + data visualization and customizable analytics dashboards
• CRM integration. Optimized prospect data syncing with the CRM of your choice (e.g., name, email address, last contacted) or built-in CRM features
• Multi-channel capabilities. Sales outreach automation and integration across email services (e.g., Gmail), social media platforms, and messengers

Why is CRM crucial for effective sales outreach?

A CRM system is your centralized hub for all interactions with potential customers during outreach and beyond. As part of the sales outreach process, CRM systems:

• Serve as a single source of truth for all prospect information (e.g., email address) and history of interactions across all channels
• Provide the data necessary for automating personalized email campaigns, follow-ups, and reminders (e.g., prospect name, job title)
• Give you better visibility into the target audience’s segmentation via analytics
• Track how outreach efforts are progressing through the sales pipeline, including the deals generated from these efforts and their movement toward closure

How NetHunt CRM optimizes sales outreach workflows

Integrations with external CRMs can be clunky, but there’s no way you can nail your sales outreach without dependable CRM features. That’s why we built NetHunt CRM. 😉

NetHunt CRM is a system with both CRM and sales outreach capabilities. Here’s how our two-in-one outreach sales engagement platform improves sales outreach with its eight features.

Outreach list building

Thanks to NetHunt, you can automate outreach list building, bringing the number of hours wasted on manual data entry to zero.

Just set up the parameters for your ideal customer profile – and NetHunt will filter all potential leads and extract information from their Professional Network pages (name, job title, company, industry) to your database. No more browsing Professional Network for hours on end and painstakingly copy-pasting lead info to your CRM!

Advanced data enrichment

With automated data enrichment, you don’t have to manually find and enter contact info into NetHunt CRM. Thanks to NetHunt CRM integrations with Apollo and Hunter, your sales team can focus on nurturing leads and outreach sales engagement instead of hunting down and verifying contact information.

All NetHunt CRM needs is the prospect’s name and company – and Apollo or Hunter will add a verified email address to the record. Yes, it can be that easy!

Comprehensive email campaign management

NetHunt CRM serves as email outreach software that works directly in Gmail. With NetHunt CRM, you can manage your email outreach campaigns from start to finish – segment your audience, create email templates, track metrics, and automate follow-ups. Our tool also allows you to mass update records based on their reaction to your outreach and view the history of interactions.

Automated outreach sequences

NetHunt CRM’s Workflows enable comprehensive, highly customizable automation of sales workflows. This outreach sales automation feature allows you to build custom automations for a variety of tasks, including email follow-ups.

You can set up triggers based on the time elapsed from the last email or deal activity (e.g., click and open activity).

Personalized messaging

With NetHunt CRM’s macros, you can create personalized messages for hundreds of prospects at once. Macros pull information such as company name, job title, or any other relevant info from your CRM record and insert it directly into your emails. This lets you maintain personalization even in large-scale campaigns.

Multi-channel sequences

NetHunt’s automation capabilities go beyond outreach email automation, significantly increasing the chances of successful engagement. With Workflows, you can create multi-channel automations that combine email and messages from Professional Network, providing a more comprehensive sales approach. Here are some examples of NetHunt CRM’s multi-channel outreach marketing automation:

This multi-channel strategy ensures your outreach reaches prospects through multiple touchpoints, boosting engagement and improving conversion rates.

Robust integrations

Besides NetHunt CRM integration with Gmail, our system natively integrates with many other tools you may be using in your outreach process. Those include:

• Data enrichment: Apollo, Hunter
• Messengers: WhatsApp, Viber, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram
• Social media: Instagram
• Online chats: Slack, Intercom
• Phone solutions: Stream Telecom, Ringostat
• Reports: Looker Studio

Detailed engagement analytics

As a sales outreach platform, NetHunt CRM provides detailed metric tracking for your email campaigns, offering valuable insights into prospect engagement. The platform tracks open rates, when emails were last opened, as well as clicks, replies, and unsubscribes.

5 best sales outreach tools to consider in 2025

Let’s compare our top 5 picks that can rightfully claim the title ‘best outreach tool’:

Before you take your pick, however, consider the tool’s:

• Pricing (as compared to your budget)
• Scalability (messaging, prospect database, the number of users, etc.)
• Automation capabilities, especially for data entry and email sequences
• Personalization at scale features
• Integration with your other tools and communication channels
• CRM integration or built-in features
• Analytics and metric tracking features
• Import/export capabilities to avoid vendor lock-in
• Built-in data protection and cybersecurity measures

3 Tips to Optimize Your Sales Outreach Strategy for Success

While adopting an automated outreach system is definitely a step in the right direction, it’s going to be only as good as your sales outreach strategy. So, besides looking into automation opportunities, optimize your sales outreach with these three tactics.

Proper segmenting

Your target audience isn’t a monolith. Depending on its segment, the most effective value proposition will differ – and so will the preferred communication channel and style. So, adapt your messaging to each segment to leverage the right value proposition that responds to the prospect’s specific pain points.

A/B testing

Never stop A/B testing – test results will inch you closer to the winning sales approach that converts prospects into customers more effectively. You can test everything from your sales pitch for outreach email marketing to the timing and subject line. But make sure your sample size is big enough to produce statistically relevant results.

Data-driven insights

Metrics are everything when it comes to improving your sales outreach strategy. So, track the open and click rates and other campaign performance metrics to have solid data on what works and what doesn’t.

Conclusion

There’s no such thing as a universal ‘best email outreach tool’; ‘the best’ simply means the sales email platform meets your specific needs the best. Choosing a tool that doesn’t meet all of your needs puts you at risk of a poor ROI – and no tangible improvements from adopting it.

So, consider all of your needs, from scalability and pricing to features and data security, before settling on a sales outreach tool.

Looking for a cloud-based CRM with a powerful sales outreach toolkit? NetHunt CRM has all you need to automate routine outreach tasks, personalize messages at scale, and convert across multiple channels. Take NetHunt CRM for a test drive with our 14-day free trial!

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