Businesses of all size rely on lead generation software today. A good lead management system can increase the productivity of your sales team and define your company’s identity in the modern business world. Lead generation systems can collect data from various sources, analyze it, and determine the most potential leads for your business. Free lead generation software is abundant these days, but not all are as good as you might think. With our list of three best free lead generation software you will learn what you should look for to choose a system that will benefit your company’s growth.
It’s pretty easy to generate leads on the internet using your own website, but some will tell you that you don’t need any software at all. However, that’s not always the case. For example, if you run a sales team with an inside sales team and an outside sales team, you could benefit from using a CRM that allows your entire team to access the contact database in real time. The same goes for any other sales roles in your company. Another great thing about some lead generation software is the automation features they offer. Some email marketing platforms come with out-of-the-box templates and sales ready message content, which means you can generate leads and send follow up emails in less than 5 minutes. This is something that could save you hours or even days of work each week.
Most lead generation software programs are like paid versions of the free lead generation websites and services I am going to discuss later in the article. The free lead generation websites and services will help you generate leads for your business or nonprofit organization at no cost. On the other hand, if you decide to switch to a professional lead generation software program, it will cost you hundreds of dollars per month as they’re not free.A decent free lead management software should have built in email auto responders, so that when someone signs up for your newsletter or clicks on a link to your site (maybe after seeing one of your ads), their email address automatically gets added to your email marketing list. You can set up one or multiple auto responders to go out after different amounts of time from the signup or click event took place. Most also show stats
What is Lead Generation Software? Lead generation is the process of converting leads or exporting data from company database into sales qualified leads and eventually into active customers. Now lead generation has been made easy with many new tools and technologies that help you to manage your leads effectively. This software helps you to convert your atabase into potential consumer of your product or service, convert leads into opportunities, and manage them through follow ups and ultimately turn them into a sale
What is Lead Management?
Demand constitutes to leads and nurturing your leads efficiently converts them as your users.
Lead Management accounts tracking and managing prospective customers. It is sometimes also referred to as customer acquisition management or contact management and generally encompasses the following process:
- Lead Generation
- Customer Enquiry and Capture
- Filtering, Grading, Distribution, and Contact
- Lead Nurturing
Nurturing leads is as important as acquiring them in the first place. Effective lead management strategies can significantly help the companies to improve their sales pipeline and these strategies cover a wide range of activities like lead scoring, nurturing and marketing automation.
Lead Management Software
Aberdeen Study reveals that 71% of surveyed businesses agreed that they had utilized lead management technology in some way. They have used automated lead management tools to monitor prospects behavior and timely engagement.
The sheer volume is the biggest reason behind leveraging the power of technology to manage leads. Software-driven automated programs are quite capable of processing leads at the lightening speed by introducing new practices of winning opportunities.
Lead management software allows businesses to merge their sales assignments and processes. From lead generation to conversion, all tasks are perfectly handled by the automated lead management solution using advanced reporting methods and comprehensive competitor analysis. They bring together important sales information within minutes. Much better than the traditional spreadsheets, the lead management solutions help users in analyzing critical data such as conversion rates, lead time, and win-loss ratio. They also provide you an insight into the performance of your sales team for various products, services, locations, and customers.
What are the types of Lead Management Software Programs?
Varying from basic and free tool suites to accurate and ultra costly – different types of lead management software solutions are available in the market these days. Features can also come under the categorization criteria. However, certain specific programs just summarize leads; whereas, others are more robust and allow the users to track the entire sales cycle, monitor lead behavior, and perform some custom branding. Deployment is also an important criterion that divides software into the following categories:
- SaaS or Software-as-a-Service Lead Management Software: It is a paid software (on a monthly basis) hosted on the vendor’s server. Software installation, update, and maintenance jobs are not the responsibility of the business owner now. This kind of software handles such kind of jobs well.
- On-Premise Lead Management Software: It is a single-licensed and client server hosted-software. They are expensive and need a complicated setup. They occasionally require some hardware installation.
- Cloud-hosted Lead Management Software: It is an affordable and easily accessible software solution with free basic plans. Some of them also come as free and open source lead management software solutions that users do not even need to update or pay for the maintenance.
What are the critical features of Lead Management Software Programs?
The detailed comparisons given below will throw light on the main features of typical lead management software:
- Lead Storage and Distribution – It includes handling leads gained through email, web forms, etc. Then such leads can be stored in a database, evaluated, and sent to the right sales representative.
- Lead Scoring and Nurturing – It includes identifying promising leads based on online behavior, job title, demography and buying behavior. Nurturing tools are used to automate lead follow-ups to bolster the relationship with prospects until they are ready to buy the product.
- Lead Analytics and Reporting – It includes generating lead reports to obtain sales and marketing results. The reports brief you about the most prominent business leads and successful sales campaigns.
What are the benefits of Lead Management Software Solutions?
Here is a list of benefits that users or businesses can experience by utilizing a reliable lead management system:
- Lead management software streamlines the lead lifecycle until conversion.
- Lead prioritization becomes possible with the lead scoring and nurturing features and with proper follow up until it closes.
- Efficient software-based operation that saves your time and unnecessary paper work.
- Easy to eliminate or filter out the non-promising leads that are not going to work for your business.
- The software lets the users understand the buying patterns of the promising prospects.
What are the targeted businesses that use Lead Management Software Solutions?
Lead management software can be a useful tool for every company’s marketing and sales strategy. There are still two scenarios where a lead management system can have the most significant impact on the overall business revenue:
- B2B Businesses – They are engaged in more extended sales interaction lifecycles and hence, these buyers should have a strong hands-on lead scoring and nurturing features.
- B2C Businesses – They use lead tracking features for organizing a large amount of customer data. They also utilize analytics to identify consumer segments for boosting their sales strategies.
Zendesk Sell
Zendesk Sell offers built-in sales engagement tools including lead gen, prospecting, and enrichment solutions. These features let your sales people ditch the tedious tasks and bet back to crushing their quotas. Sell lets you create targeted prospect lists for multiple channels and build custom templates so you can create a surplus of leads and engage contacts with a personalized touch.
Features
- Lead qualification
- Sales pipeline
- Custom templates
- Lead capture
- Lead distribution
Unbounce
Unbounce is a lead landing page platform for ecommerce, SaaS, and agencies, with features for building landing pages, pop-ups, and sticky bars.
Features
- Customizable templates
- Form builder
- Real-time editing
- Reporting/analytics
- SEO management
Leadpages
Leadpages is a landing page builder program for small businesses that hosts features for creating landing pages, pop-ups, alert bars, and includes 40+ integrations.
Features
- Form builder
- Pre-built templates
- SEO management
- AB testing
- Data import/export
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a lead management and CRM platform for sales teams that included pipeline management and code-free development.
Features
- Call recording
- Lead capture
- Content delivery
- Customer segmentation
- Calendar/reminder system
OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the best lead generation tool that makes it easy to convert your visitors into leads and customers.
It doesn’t matter what kind of website you run and what kind of leads you’re looking for. OptinMonster comes with the right solution for building campaigns to collect quality leads for your unique needs.
OptinMonster gives you the creative control to create eye-catching on-site lead generation campaigns like popups, slide-in windows, and gamified spin-to-win wheels. Even better? You can do it with a beginner-friendly and easy-to-use builder.
Plus, OptinMonster’s powerful personalization and targeting display rules put your campaigns in front of the right people at the right time.
In fact, OptinMonster is how AtHoc increased sales qualified leads by 141% and how SnackNation adds 1200 segmented leads every week.
Key Features:
- Reduce cart abandonment: Offer abandoning visitors a custom-tailored offer before they leave your site with Exit-Intent® Technology.
- Increase conversions and sales: Create upsell, downsell, and cross-sell offers to boost your customers’ average order value (AOV).
- Show targeted promotions: Show free shipping bars, share discount codes, promote flash sales, and more based on referral source, geo-location, previous on-site behavior, user’s device, etc.
- Targeted offers: Use what you already know about your visitors to run OnSite Retargeting® campaigns and improve conversions.
- Grow your email list: Integrate with your favorite email marketing, content management, and CRM platforms to automate your business.
Pricing: OptinMonster pricing starts at $9/month for our Basic plan, $19/month for Plus, $29/month for Pro (our most popular plan), and $49/month for Growth.
TrustPulse
TrustPulse is the market’s best social proof notification plugin.
Wait, social proof? Weren’t we talking about lead generation? Yes. But without trust, you will never collect leads. Social proof builds that trust.
In fact, adding social proof notifications is one of the most effective lead generation marketing tactics requiring the least amount of effort. TrustPulse will show notifications of activities taken by real people on your site, like viewing or buying products, signing up for newsletters, and more.
By displaying actual activity from real people, you will build trust with visitors.
Key Features:
- Real-time event tracking
- Smart targeting to boost conversions using advanced targeting rules and timing control
- Flexible design options to match your site’s branding
- Actionable analytics to get the stats you need to boost conversions
- Easy setup on any website with no coding needed
Pricing: The pricing plans start at $5/month for up to 2,500 sessions!
What are the critical features of Lead Management Software Programs?
The detailed comparisons given below will throw light on the main features of typical lead management software:
- Lead Storage and Distribution – It includes handling leads gained through email, web forms, etc. Then such leads can be stored in a database, evaluated, and sent to the right sales representative.
- Lead Scoring and Nurturing – It includes identifying promising leads based on online behavior, job title, demography and buying behavior. Nurturing tools are used to automate lead follow-ups to bolster the relationship with prospects until they are ready to buy the product.
- Lead Analytics and Reporting – It includes generating lead reports to obtain sales and marketing results. The reports brief you about the most prominent business leads and successful sales campaigns.
Conclusion
Lead generation has always been an essential tactic in business. However, it can be often very costly and time-consuming. The need of a more effective and cheaper way to generate leads in this respect has been the fuel behind the development and appearance of lead generation software.
You’ll make money only when you start to sell. And while the technology of the Internet allows us to do business around the globe, we must understand that many people who are looking for what we offer may be located far from our place, and a large distance gap can separate us from them. Therefore, you’ll need an effective way to get in touch with potential customers as close as possible to them, and this is exactly what lead consolidation software does.