Solopreneurs already wear too many hats. You’re dealing with onboarding, day-to-day tasks from clients, sales calls, and the whole nine yards.
Unfortunately, dealing with everything yourself has a significant opportunity cost—time.
Why prospecting tools are a solopreneur's essential
Manual prospecting, like scrolling through LinkedIn or digging through websites and directories, takes more time than you realize.
It’s slow, repetitive, and pulls you away from the work that grows your business. Prospecting tools let you automate the entire process.
You can build targeted lists, verify contacts, and automate follow-ups in less time than it takes to send a few manual DMs.
Some tools let you prospect on autopilot with the proper parameters. So, without further ado, let’s look into five of the best prospecting tools for solopreneurs.
Best prospecting tools every solopreneur needs to try
Below are three of the best tools designed to save you time at every stage of the prospecting process.
These tools help you streamline lead generation, enrichment, validation, and outreach, so you can spend less time searching and more time closing.
Instantly B2B lead finder
If you’re looking for the best bang for the buck, we can’t recommend Instantly B2B Lead Finder enough.
You get access to 450 million pre-verified leads and advanced features in their starter plan that’ll cost you less than $40 monthly.
Nothing is gated in higher plans. You’d only want to go higher if you’re ready to add more leads to your campaigns.
And when you’re ready to scale, you can set up B2B Lead Finder to run on autopilot based on specific lead criteria using the Evergreen feature.
Here’s how the Evergreen feature works:
- You set the frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly) Lead Finder adds new contacts
- Specify the number of verified leads to import based on search criteria and filters
- Choose which campaign to add the leads to
Another thing that makes Instantly stand out is how easily you can add real context to your outreach, thanks to the enrichment tools available.
Instantly B2B Lead Finder Data Enrichment gives you the following:
- Full profile enrichment: company descriptions, employee headcount, industry tags, and more.
- Job posting, news, technology, and funding enrichment: pulls recent company updates to help you reference what’s timely and relevant.
- Web researcher agent: scrapes websites for extra data points you won’t find in standard lead lists.
- AI and scraping integration: connects with major AI models like OpenAI or Anthropic to generate personalized email content.
- Waterfall work email enrichment: verifies emails using five different providers to maximize accuracy.
Phantom buster
LinkedIn is one of the best places to find prospects. But for specific use cases or niches, consider alternative platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
If you’re in that position, PhantomBuster might just be the tool for you.
But it does come with a learning curve. But if you’re willing to put in the time, you’ll get access to a library of ready-to-use automations.
You can even build custom scripts if you know a little Node.js.
For example, you can run a Phantom to scrape 500 leads from LinkedIn, then follow it up with another Phantom that sends connection requests with a custom message.
Each task uses time from your monthly allowance, which resets every month.
Key features:
- Multi-platform automation: Automate data collection and actions across LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Reddit, GitHub, Google Maps, and more.
- Prebuilt phantoms: Access over 100 ready-to-use automation scripts for tasks like extracting leads, sending connection requests, and scraping profile data.
- Custom flows: Chain multiple Phantoms to create multi-step workflows, such as collecting leads and sending personalized messages sequentially.
- AI-powered enrichment: Enhance lead profiles with AI-generated insights, including job changes, company news, and personalized outreach messages.
- Data export options: You can export collected data in various formats, including CSV and JSON, for easy analysis and integration with other tools.
Pricing:
- Starter plan: $69/month. 5 phantoms, 20h execution times, and 10k AI enrichments
- Pro plan: $159/month. 15 phantoms, 80h execution times, and 30k AI enrichments
- Team plan: $439/month. 50 phantoms, 300h execution times, and 30k AI enrichments
Clay
Clay isn’t your typical lead generation tool with a built-in contact database.
It’s designed to help you research, enrich, and build workflows using data you already have or data you pull from other tools like LinkedIn, Google Maps, or Clearbit.
It works like a smart spreadsheet that automates manual research. You can enrich your lists with company size, tech stack, funding rounds, and more.
You can also bring in data from other tools or APIs. Once your list is ready, you can push it straight to your CRM or outreach platform.
Clay also comes with Claygent, an AI-powered web research agent that helps you find extra context from the web.
You can run custom prompts to gather data like company updates, competitor insights, or market research.
Key features:
- Lead list builder: Build lists using LinkedIn URLs, Google Maps, or your data
- Data enrichment: add company details like funding, tech stack, and recent news
- Data source connections: Pull data from LinkedIn, Clearbit, Google Maps, and APIs
- Claygent web research agent: run AI-powered research to gather web insights
- Custom workflow automation: automate research tasks based on your process
Pricing:
- Free plan: 1,200 credits per year, up to 100 results per search
- Starter plan: $134/month, 24,000 credits per year, up to 5,000 results per search
- Explorer plan: $314/month, 120,000 credits per year, up to 10,000 results per search
- Pro plan: $720/month, 600,000 credits per year, up to 25,000 results per search
- Enterprise plan: Custom pricing and credits, up to 50,000 results per search
Key takeaways
Prospecting doesn’t have to eat up your entire day.
To recap, here are three of the best tools that make it easy to automate the entire prospecting process from lead generation to data enrichment:
- Instantly B2B lead finder: Best overall in terms of price, performance, and features
- PhantomBuster: Great if you’re looking to automate prospecting outside LinkedIn
- Clay: Enrich lead lists without lifting a finger using Claygents and automated scraping