There’s no way around it… You and every other business on the face of the planet need leads – unless you’re Amazon. But let’s face it, you’re not Amazon and Jeff Besos isn’t reading this article. Or, are you, Jeff… In all seriousness though, just about every company needs quality leads if they want to continue to grow.
While there are manual ways to generate leads. That’s not the only way. For most companies, a mix of both manual prospecting and tool-adjacent prospecting is best. That’s why we dedicated this blog post to lead generation tools we’re using (and loving). And, yes, we update this! Just for you, Jeff (get the callback?).
What Does B2B Lead Generation Mean?
We should start by covering what we’re talking about when we say B2B lead generation (lead-gen for short).
B2B lead generation is the process of attracting and drawing in people in your target audience (called leads or prospects).
Let’s say you’re cutting the grass, since that’s a pretty universal activity for most people. Except maybe you, Jeff Besos (again, sorry if you’re still reading this, Jeff). So, you’re cutting the grass. And it’s huge, by the way—like 10 acres. Oh, and did we mention that you’re also using scissors to cut the grass?
That’s what manual lead generation is like – slowly interacting with each qualified lead. On the other hand, using a lead generation tool is like using an automatic mower. Way quicker, yes, and they also do a darn good job. Sure, they’re not always as precise as scissors, but they’re also 10x times efficient.
Besides efficiency, lead generation tools can improve your prospecting in all sorts of ways. Here are some examples:
Boost Website Traffic: Inbound lead generation tools will drive traffic directly to your website – bringing leads with them.
Build Connections with Leads: Outbound lead generation tools focus on finding you leads via email, calls, social media, and more.
Help Collecting Prospects Info: On-page SEO tools help you set up lead capture forms – collecting the email of the prospect for you to use in your next campaign.
CRO Tools to Increase Leads: These magic wands optimize your conversion rates, transforming leads into sales-qualified prospects. They’re all about turning potential into profitability.
Organize and Analyze Data: Marketing management tools help you organize and analyze the data from your marketing and lead generation efforts. This is where you’ll be able to visualize your data.
Reach out to Prospects: Email marketing/automation tools help you make email campaigns. Oftentimes, this is the lifeblood of a prospecting strategy, so this is a key feature in a product.
Boost Paid and Organic Search: Search marketing tools help you get more leads from your paid and organic searches.
Don’t worry, you don’t need an individual tool for each of these. The best lead generation tools have their specialties but can also perform a wide range of actions for your marketing efforts.
The Best Lead-Gen Tools for B2B Companies
Here are the tools that we recommend you try out. We’ve tried to include a wide variety of options for you to cover all your bases.
HubSpot - Best Overall Lead-Gen Tool
HubSpot is one of the most popular lead-gen tools on the market. It offers a comprehensive suite of marketing and sales tools that are designed to help you build and nurture relationships with customers. Some of its key features include lead capture forms, automated workflows, email campaigns, personalized customer experiences, drag-and-drop builders, and more.
HubSpot’s inbound marketing automation can help you create content that educates potential customers about your product, track the performance of your campaigns, and identify leads so you can nurture them into paying customers.
It also enables you to personalize customer experiences across channels with its segmentation and targeting capabilities. Additionally, it provides detailed analytics and reporting to help you measure the success of your lead-generation campaign.
Most importantly Hubspot also offers a completely free customer relationship management (CRM) platform. All this makes HubSpot one of the top lead-generation platforms.
Leadfuze – Second Best Overall Lead-Gen Tool
LeadFuze is another popular lead-gen tool that helps businesses find potential customers or leads through automated research and outreach. Here are a few reasons why LeadFuze is a popular option:
Time-saving: LeadFuze automates the research process for finding leads, saving businesses a considerable amount of time. Instead of manually searching for potential leads, businesses can use LeadFuze to create targeted lists of leads based on criteria such as job title, industry, and location.
Targeted outreach: Once a list of leads is generated, LeadFuze can automate the outreach process by sending personalized emails to each potential lead — which increases your conversion rate.
Data accuracy: LeadFuze can gather up-to-date data, contact information, and location services for potential customers. This prevents your sales team from wasting time and effort on leads that are no longer relevant or accurate.
Cost-effective: LeadFuze offers various pricing plans, making it an affordable option for businesses of all sizes. The tool also offers a free trial – so you can try it before you buy.
Overall, LeadFuze is a helpful tool to streamline your lead generation process and improve your outreach efforts. By automating the research and outreach process, LeadFuze can save businesses time and effort, while also providing accurate and targeted leads.
Intercom – Best For Keeping in Contact with Customers
Intercom is a lead-gen tool that has features such as live chat, messaging, and a customer service tool that enables your company to communicate with website visitors in real-time – allowing them to respond instantly and build relationships with potential customers.
Intercom allows businesses to communicate with leads and customers through various channels, including chat, email, social media, and SMS. This can help your business reach customers on their preferred platforms and improve response rates. Additionally, these channels can be moderated by automated chatbots. With its AI-powered technology, it can quickly respond to frequently asked questions – saving time for your sales and marketing teams.
You can also build product tours and email campaigns with targeted messages to keep your prospects and customers engaged. It allows you to easily collect leads from website visitors and collect customer feedback – making it a great choice to target cold leads.
Outreach – Best AI Automated Lead-Gen Tool
Outreach is a powerful sales execution platform tool that leverages AI to give your sales team the power they need for success. Whether it’s automating and accelerating pipeline development, managing deals more effectively, or taking the guesswork out of forecasting – this platform has you covered!
Its capabilities include sales management, deal management, conversation intelligence, rep coaching, deal insights, pipeline management, and sales forecasting. It offers integrations with a bunch of other marketing automation and lead-generation platforms.
Jasper – Best for Content Marketers
Content marketing is a highly effective strategy for any business looking to generate leads organically. With Jasper’s AI-backed content creation, you can create an engaging variety of materials like blog posts, infographics, SEO copy, emails, web content, video scripts, ad copies, and more in a short amount of time – giving your organization the edge it needs to succeed!
Its AI technology helps you create highly converting marketing content in a matter of minutes. That means you can scale your content production, create content in 26 languages, and also collaborate seamlessly with the rest of your team. You can also create art and images in seconds for your content.
However, thanks to the release of ChatGPT and other AI tools, Jasper is running behind in the ranks. However, it’s still a powerful and effective tool for content marketers.
Lemlist – Best To Enhance Your Sales Process
Streamline your sales process with Lemlist’s intuitive lead-gen tool. Quickly build an ideal customer profile (ICP) from any LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator search, automatically find your contact’s emails, and start hyper-personalized outreach campaigns for a more effective communication strategy.
Lemlist key features help you avoid spam with powerful warmup and boost tools that improve email reputation deliverability. That means you can directly reach out to leads in real time – all within one platform. Lemlist also offers a 14-day free trial.
Mailshake – Best Email Marketing Lead-Gen Tool
Mailshake is one of the top-rated email marketing tools. It helps you get more qualified leads in the sales process. By increasing your reply rate by twofold and ensuring emails land into prospect inboxes, you can expect to see more demos and meetings booked– resulting in higher revenue potential.
Its key features help you automate your email marketing campaigns, gain visibility to lead activity, track lead status, and also make cold calls with its power dialler. You can use any of the email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, and SMPT.
Additionally, Mailshake’s comprehensive analytics helps you measure the success of your campaigns.
If your prospects hang out on LinkedIn, meet We-Connect, the premier LinkedIn automation lead-gen tool. This lead generation software helps you take your LinkedIn prospecting game to a new level with automated features that you can start in as quick as 15-minutes.
We-Connect is designed to help you generate high-quality leads quickly and easily. Its platform unlocks features like automated connection invites, personalized messaging options, profile visits, endorsements, sending free InMails to Open Profiles, message group members, and also automates the process of sending greetings for birthdays, job anniversaries, and congratulations on a new role. We-Connect works with a free LinkedIn account, Sales Navigator, and Recruiter accounts.
Woorise is a comprehensive lead generation and marketing platform that allows you to create a wide range of interactive campaigns such as landing pages, forms, surveys, quizzes, and viral giveaways or contests. It gives you all the tools you need to hit your sales and business goals.
With features like a modern landing page and form builder, 40+ field types, thousands of social actions, 100+ interactive templates, real-time email notifications, multi-language support, and built-in analytics – it’s an essential tool for any business looking to generate leads.
Surfer – Best SEO Lead-Gen Tool
Improve your SEO success with Surfer. It helps you take charge of your organic traffic and have the confidence that you’re optimizing every detail for maximum reach and performance.
While Jasper helps you write engaging content, Surfer helps you with relevant, keywords, topics, and how to instantly optimize your content. It shows you relevant content, including competitors’ content. Frankly, the two of these platforms work hand-in-hand.
With real-time feedback on article structure and a list of relevant keywords, you can craft content guaranteed to rank high in search engines while attracting quality visitors who convert into valuable leads.
It integrates with tools such as Jasper, SEMrush, WordPress, and Google Docs. It also has an inbuilt free Grammarly feature.
Hotjar – Best Analytical Research Tool
HotJar offers an invaluable platform for customer experience analytics, with helpful tools that are essential to conversion optimization research.
Hotjar allows you to get the insights you need to collect valuable feedback through powerful solutions like form analytics, on-site polls, heat maps, and session replays. That way, your marketing and sales team can double up their efforts as lead generation points while they get reliable data from site visitors.
ProveSource – Best Lead Conversion Tool for Social Proof
Have you ever felt more compelled to try something out because others were doing it? That’s the same concept when you want to convert visitors to customers on your website – building trust is key.
ProveSource helps thousands of businesses accelerate sales and create greater credibility by adding social proof notifications. These include positive reviews from Google, Facebook, and Trustpilot.
Additionally, emphasizing important points for visitors can make them feel comfortable engaging with your brand. We recommend showcasing how many followers and subscribers have already been converted on each platform!
ProveSource is super easy to install. Just copy and paste it to your landing pages, checkout pages, and lead magnets. This will increase trust and convert visitors into customers. It also offers live chat support and a free plan for websites with low traffic.
First Promoter – Best Referral Marketing Tool for SaaS Companies
First Promoter is a leading referral marketing platform for SaaS companies. It provides the tools and resources needed to successfully operate an affiliate program with features such as an all-inclusive design, tracking referrals via personalized links, and providing additional incentives with cash rewards, discounts, or coupon codes.
Furthermore, First Promoter’s robust dashboard allows both referrers and new signups easy access to their performance statistics alongside one-click Paypal payouts. This enhances your customers’ experience while enabling you to track results efficiently.
First Promoter is built for subscription-based businesses. It automatically tracks recurring and one-time charges, upgrades, cancellations, and refunds.
Optin Monster – Best Tool to Monetize Your Website Traffic
Harness the power of OptinMonster and take your website traffic to new heights with a million other users who have already seen success.
With just 3 simple steps, you can easily start creating visually stunning offers that connect directly with potential customers’ needs while utilizing powerful tools for real-time testing and optimization.
Instantly grow your email list by leveraging behavior automation targeting – unlock more leads & increase sales in an instant! Get ready for amazing results from a minimal setup.
With a wide range of customization options, OptinMonster is the perfect solution for marketing agencies, bloggers, eCommerce websites, and all small businesses looking to increase sales and grow their customer base.
Discover.ly – Best Chrome Extension for Lead-Gen
Dig deep into your prospects with Discover.ly – an intuitive lead generation tool designed to help you access valuable social media information about target profiles.
With this handy Chrome extension, get a comprehensive look at your LinkedIn connections and other digital footprints of key decision-makers – making it the perfect addition to your lead generation software tools!
Discover.ly is a Sales Intelligence Software that helps you to find the right contact by creating an aggregated view of social media profiles. You can easily and conveniently save a profile with all its data points, including email addresses, job titles, and more.
It is an ideal tool for entrepreneurs, salespersons, and recruiters who are looking for leads with accurate contact information.
Hunter – Best Cold Email Software For Scaling Lead-Gen
If you are doing outbound lead generation, Hunter is your ally. An all-in-one cold outreach software helps you on every step – from finding the right prospects to automating your cold email campaigns.
Its key features include an email finder and verifier that helps you find and verify email addresses to keep your email deliverability high. Another notable feature is their Campaigns, which offer an intuitive way to craft, organize, automate, and track the performance of your outbound email campaigns. If you have a lead-gen team, you can manage all inboxes from a single dashboard, rotate email accounts to mitigate the risk of deliverability issues, and access detailed reporting to understand how your campaigns perform.
Conclusion
These are just some of the many lead-generation tools available on the market today. By leveraging the right toolset, you can:
Build relationships with customers
Convert leads into paying customers
Measure their success
Optimize their campaigns for maximum ROI
In simple, the best lead-generation tools are the ones that meet your needs. To get started, identity which features are most important for your business and choose the best tool that meets your needs. Take the time to read reviews from other users and check out sample demos of each platform before making a decision. You want to be sure that the platform will meet all of your needs before committing.
Once you have chosen a lead-generation platform, spend some time learning and optimizing the lead-generation system.
