Lead generation tools are software or other business solutions that help companies collect and analyze information on potential leads in a very easy and efficient way. With these tools, companies can find out more about their leads and convert them into customers. These leads are not necessarily people – they can link to other businesses as well.
Many businesses, whether large or small, don’t have a clear understanding of the value of a great lead generation strategy. A lead generation is an automated process of creating leads for sales teams. The more effective the lead generation process, the more conversion and success your business will have.
Lead generation is one of the most important things that companies need to focus on to increase their sales and revenue. And buying leads is an option. But, there’s so many options online, you don’t know where to start. Well look no further, because in this article I discuss lead generation tools for businesses
Lead generation is an important step when it comes to B2B marketing. What does lead generation mean? It’s the process of collecting business contacts (information about companies and their owners in our “online” trading marketplace platform) as well as nurturing these leads until they become qualified sales leads (ready to buy at the required time).
What is a Lead Generation Tool
Lead generation tool is an application that automates the process of lead generation to provide you quality leads. These tools can generate leads from different sources like social media, landing pages, websites, and so on. Based on the sources and channels, different lead-generating software works differently.
Each tool has a unique set of features and functionalities to capture quality leads for your business. You can then nurture these leads to boost conversions and sales via different sales/marketing campaigns. Let’s check out the importance of lead generation tools below.
Salesforce
Best For Lead management software
Suited For: Small to big businesses
Integrations: Yes
If you are into marketing, then it is highly unlikely that you haven’t heard or worked on Salesforce. It is one of the best sales and lead management software in the world. It lets you manage customer relationships, automate workflows, track your sales pipelines, identify sales opportunities, and much more.
What Makes Salesforce One of the Best Lead Management Software?
- It includes tools to manage leads, sales teams, customers, workflows, and much more.
- You can track all your sales activities, social insights, key contacts, and interactions within Salesforce.
- It offers opportunity management and sales insights. You can automate the sales process, get real-time insights, view dashboard updates, track sales pipelines, see important deals, analyze rep performance, analyze reports, and much more to boost productivity.
- Integrate all the communication channels to the single easy-to-use console and manage all the interactions with prospects and customers in one place to eliminate miscommunication.
- You can also create automatic email alerts, auto-assign tasks, and automate discount deal approvals.
- Salesforce also provides AI-Einstein to help you dig through the data, find winning interaction patterns across all channels, auto-run predictive analysis, and automate workflows to make the sales process easier.
- It easily integrates with several applications, such as Slack, Quickbooks, etc., so you can easily maintain data continuity across all your tools.
Pros
- One of the most popular and trusted CRM in the world.
- You can scale features up and down based on your requirements by using their add-ons. You can add/remove features.
- It’s much more than just a CRM. You can use the applications to include customer support and marketing features to make the most out of it.
Cons
- The setup and configuration are quite complex and may require a Salesforce specialist to get it running.
- The pricing is based on users, and the cost of add ons makes it an expensive tool.
Price: Pricing may vary with the type of solution needed. Starts at $25/month
Overloop CRM
Best For: CRM, pipeline management, lead prospecting
Suited For: Small to medium businesses
Integrations: Yes
With Overloop, you get an all-in-one CRM, pipeline management, and campaign builder platform to keep everything in one place. You can bring in new leads via web forms and live chat widgets and nurture the prospects with an advanced CRM to earn new customers without any communication gaps.
Here’s Why Overloop Is One of the Best Lead Generation & Management Tools
Build automated drip mail campaigns to engage with prospects.
- Find & verify your prospects’ email addresses using first name, last name, and company domain.
- Provides a Chrome extension to get email addresses from social pages, websites, and professional networks.
- Create automated workflows to target and nurture leads at specific points in the sales funnel.
- Manage all outbound and inbound conversations directly from the Overloop inbox.
- Create and assign tasks for your team, set deadlines, and monitor progress to improve productivity.
- Provides native apps for both iOS and Android to manage leads on the go.
- Offers a live chat widget for your website to engage with visitors and generate leads.
- Create and embed web forms to capture visitors’ contact information.
Pros
- Offers both inbound and outbound lead generation features in the same tool.
- The automation features for your emails, marketing campaigns, and funnel makes the job easier.
Cons
- The UI and UX can be improved to make it more user-friendly.
Price: Starts at 24/month, billed annually
HubSpot
Best For: Lead management, email marketing, website builder, social media tracking, customer service options
Suited For: Small to big businesses
Integrations: Yes
Calling HubSpot a CRM tool undermines its potential as the one-stop lead generation system. It’s a cloud-based solution that provides a complete suite of marketing, automation, lead management, customer service, and content marketing tools.
You can use each tool independently or work on them together to bring in new customers and nurture the leads as they move along the sales funnel.
Here’s Why HubSpot Makes the List for the Best Lead Generation Tools:
- Design and publish beautiful landing pages and web forms using the visual builder to improve website traffic and gain quality leads.
- Create, post, and manage content on social media from Hubspot’s dashboard.
- You can also create and publish a full-blown SEO-friendly website.
- Use targeted drip email campaigns to target your prospects and nurture the leads.
- Track the performance of your email campaigns to schedule follow-ups.
- Automate workflows across HubSpot’s tools to streamline the sales process.
- Assign tasks to teams, score leads, schedule meetings, track communications, bulk manage the data, and more.
- Provides customer service options like Help Center, Knowledge Base, VoIP calling, and live chat.
- Integrate with other workspace tools to set up bidirectional dataflows.
Pros
- Provides a complete set of tools for CRO and lead management in one place.
- HubSpot Academy offers professional courses and certifications to help you learn different marketing strategies.
- Ability to monitor ads performance at each level using custom attributes.
- Supports A/B testing to optimize your pages and campaigns.
Cons
- Reporting and analytics are limited as compared to other tools.
- It can become expensive quickly if you plan to use all the features.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $45/month billed annually
Leadfeeder
Pricing: 14-day free trial, paid plans start at $79/month
Rating: 4.3 stars on G2 (Based on 483 reviews)
Leadfeeder tells you what companies visit your website, even if they never fill out a form or contact you.
Leadfeeder also finds contact information for employees at the company using Leadfeeder Discover. This allows you to follow up with visitors who never inquired about your product or time your outreach to potential leads in your sales pipeline.
To try out Leadeeder, all you need to do is install the Leadfeeder Tracker (it takes less than 5 minutes!).
A 14-day free trial is available with paid plans starting at $63/month.
Prospect.io
Pricing: Paid plans start at $74/month (annually) or $89/month (monthly)
Rating: 4.2 stars out of 5 via Capterra
Prospecti.io is a modern-day sales automation platform that’s fully integrated with Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close.io, and HubSpot. The Prospect.io Chrome extension helps you find prospects in one click and launch cold email campaigns straight from your browser in mere seconds.
Looking for new leads takes time and effort. With Prospect.io, you can focus on what really matters: selling to decision-makers.
Their essential plan starts at $78 per month (if paid annually), while their business plan starts at $129 per month (if paid annually), and prices go up from there based on how many credits you’ll need.
Hoovers
Pricing: Contact for pricing, they offer a free trial
Rating: 3.9/5 stars on G2, based on 380 reviews
Hoovers is a sales acceleration tool that helps businesses leverage data and analytics so you can build your lists and connect with prospects faster. Features include informed conversations, automated workflow software, real-time notifications, and personalized buyer intent data.
Email address lookup tools
These tools help to automate the process of finding someone’s email address.
Outreach.io
Not all lead generation has to stem from inbound marketing efforts. Outreach tactics should definitely be a part of your strategy. You can do this by adding account-based sales to your nurturing campaigns. For example, you can identify target companies based on highly-defined buyer personas.
Outreach.io is a valuable tool you can use to manage the entire account-based sales process. Especially if you integrate it with data-enrichment tools like Hull.io, which provides further insights about your prospects.
This platform comes with a sales dialer, real-time enablement, email sequences, sales engagement, task management, tracking, and AI-driven reports.
To get your hands on it, you’ll need to request a demo and special pricing.
Mailchimp
Email marketing should be a part of every lead generation campaign. But you need a tool to automate it so you can maximize results. Mailchimp is a popular email marketing tool, which you can connect with your landing page tools.
And it does more than send out automated emails. It also comes with its own lead capture forms, which you can design with exit-intent technology. Plus, you can include shareable URL links for your newsletters, so leads can share them with others. It’s also useful for transactional emails for those who’ve already converted into customers.
Mailchimp comes with multiple plans, including a free version with a 2,000 contact limit. The premium plans start at $9.99 for 500 contacts and go up to $299 for 10,000 contacts.
Intercom
Conversational marketing helps generate interest and gather feedback from your core audience. You can take this information and build a knowledge base for prospects. With Intercom, you’re able to chat with leads visiting your site.
You can set up rules of engagement where the message won’t pop up until a visitor is on a pricing page for at least X seconds/minutes. Or if someone visits your site a second time. With this in your toolkit, you can segment messages based on visitor behaviors.
It’s also helpful for collecting information about customers. And uses custom bots to provide quick response times to customer questions. There’s also an email follow-up feature to promote continued engagement.
Intercom has a demo you can request. You’ll have to speak with a sales rep to get special pricing for your business.
Why are Lead Generation Tools Important
From start-ups to global enterprises, millions of businesses are already reaping the benefits of using the best lead generation software. There must be something pretty serious about such tools, right? Here’s what companies find beneficial about lead generation tools:
- The tool helps in identifying new prospects and high-quality leads.
- It finds accurate contact information about the leads.
- From tracking opportunities to strategizing marketing campaigns, lead generation tools can do it all.
- It helps in achieving a great ROI.
- The tool lets you identify up-selling opportunities for existing customers.
- Using reporting, you can easily gain valuable insights on website usage.
- With precise targeting, these tools help in fighting website abandonment.
- It is super easy to convert existing website traffic into leads and customers with a lead generation platform.
- Automatic lead generation & nurturing do the heavy lifting for your teams.
- The tools provide seamless integration with other sales/marketing tools.
Ultimately, lead generation software can help you grow your business smartly. But, you need to choose the right solution for your business, smartly. For that, let’s check out what you should look for before choosing the perfect lead generation tool.
Conclusion
We often hear about lead generation tools for businesses and how they can help a company generate leads. These lead generation tools are essential to understand for digital marketers and companies, as it can help them get more exposure in their industry.
The right lead generation is a top priority for most companies offering products or services to other businesses. The challenge for many is finding the right lead generation tools that are not just easy to use but cost-effective as well. There are number of lead generation tools that can be used but it may not always be easy searching for the best fit.