Lead generation—the process of attracting and engaging with your target audience so that they are willing to share their contact information with your company—is a challenge for business-to-business (B2B) marketers and sales representatives alike. It may be a useful way to find high-quality prospects, but it’s difficult to reach the right buyers at the right time, every time.
Fortunately, help is on the way.
Using a sales lead generation tool will put your B2B company ahead of the competition. These tools are designed to help organizations automate their lead generation strategy, optimize every step in the nurturing process, and increase their conversion rates.
Let’s get started.
You’ve spent time and resources creating a clear, data-driven lead generation strategy. You know your target audience, you’ve researched their pain points, and you know exactly what to offer so they are willing to enter your company’s sales pipeline.
That’s good news—because figuring out what you want to do is the first step in creating a successful lead generation campaign. Now, it’s time to decide how you’re going to execute that well-developed strategy.
B2B lead generation tools are software platforms designed to automatically identify potential leads, capture their contact information, and store and analyze data. These tools are essential to implementing your organization’s lead generation campaign and offer several benefits for B2B companies.
Sales lead generation tools automate the lead generation process. These tools capture contact information from leads, create a pool of potential customers, and analyze data for later use—all without requiring any ongoing manual work on your end.
. . . which, of course, means your sales representatives can focus on building relationships with your customers and selling your products or services instead of spending time manually entering data.
Capturing customer data isn’t enough; you need to capture useful customer data. And lead generation tools can help you do so.
These tools do more than save email addresses and phone numbers to a database. Some can enhance your data by adding more industry- and company-specific information to your contacts, and others use artificial intelligence (AI) to help you get a better understanding of why the lead expressed interest in your organization. With this useful data, you can create personalized campaigns and better nurture high-value prospects.
Lead scoring is the key to finding the needle in a haystack. Sales lead generation tools use lead scoring to evaluate each lead, identify which prospects are most likely to convert, track their interactions with your company, and alert you when your reps need to reach out.
With higher-quality leads, your sales team will be able to focus their time on customers with stronger purchasing intentions, increasing their conversion rates (and your revenue).
The tracking, reporting, and analytics features of sales lead generation software make it easy to see the results of your lead generation campaigns. At a glance, you can see which campaigns are working, which ones aren’t, and why—and then you can use that data to optimize your lead generation strategy.
You can use these tools to build new campaigns, revamp existing ones, increase conversion rates, and improve your overall lead generation strategy from start to finish.
READ: Account-Based Marketing vs. Lead Generation: Which One Is Right for B2B Companies?
There are lots of tools that your sales team can use to manage or improve their lead generation strategy—too many to count. So we’ve created a list of our favorites to help you get started.
Sales prospecting tools are essential to finding new leads, nurturing prospects, and converting contacts into loyal customers.
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool for any B2B company using LinkedIn to generate sales leads. This tool helps you target specific companies (as well as important stakeholders at those companies), engage with prospects, find high-quality leads, and build custom lists of relevant prospects.
Outreach is, as its name suggests, all about reaching out to potential leads and customers. The tool is designed to ensure you make a good first impression by creating automated outreach sequences, personalizing outreach messages at scale, managing your account-based marketing efforts, and making suggestions for improvement at every level.
Apollo streamlines the process of discovering, contacting, and managing prospect information. Use the database to filter leads, find email addresses for key decision-makers at target companies, access contact information for your LinkedIn connections, and get alerts for major funding news or hiring decisions associated with your ideal customers.
Crunchbase collects information on private and public companies, including investors, funding data, latest news, and key financial insights to help organizations identify industry trends and see what companies are ready to make a purchase. You can use Crunchbase to access verified contact data, get recommendations on new leads, and filter prospects based on key data points.
Get valuable marketing and sales insights as well as a closer look at prospect data with these sales insights tools.
The HubSpot Sales Hub—part of HubSpot’s suite of tools—includes features that help sales teams generate new leads, engage with prospective customers, conduct outreach, and follow-up with promising prospects. It also includes a sales management platform with powerful tracking and analytical abilities.
READ: The HubSpot Marketing Hub vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Debate
Formerly Prospect.io, Overloop offers several different ways to find contact information for leads, build robust contact lists, manage multi-channel lead generation campaigns, and personalize communication at scale.
Clearbit helps capture robust contact information from leads. Once they offer an email address, Clearbit will fill in other important data, like the size of the prospect’s company, the industry in which they work, and where they are located—which means you don’t have to ask leads for every single piece of information right away. Instead, you can get Clearbit do some of the heavy lifting.
6sense uses AI to help your sales team determine when it’s time to reach out to potential customers. This tool looks for buying intent signals, prioritizes lead nurturing actions, and triggers automatic campaigns so promising leads aren’t overlooked.
A successful lead generation strategy involves a lot of moving pieces. Customer relationship management (CRM) software tools help your team organize customer data, keep track of prospects, and engage with leads throughout the buyer’s journey.
HubSpot is one of the world’s most popular CRM platforms, and it includes pretty much everything a B2B organization might need to manage marketing and sales activities. The easy-to-use platform offers a wide variety of tools, including several that are designed to optimize your lead generation process.
Salesforce, another top CRM option, offers a diverse range of sales and marketing tools that can help you generate leads, nurture prospects, manage customer data, deliver better service, and more. As a leading CRM, it also integrates with a substantial portion of existing marketing and sales software on today’s market, so you can easily add it to your existing tools.
Overloop is a CRM platform that lets you see your entire sales pipeline at a glance. You can automate your sales prospecting and lead generation activities, integrate with various other tools, and optimize your workflows to create a strong lead generation approach.
Zoho can manage your entire lead generation process. It offers powerful features that make it easy for you to capture and engage with incoming leads from multiple touchpoints, identify high-value prospects from within the larger pool of leads, and engage with ideal leads across different channels.
With the right sales enablement tools at their fingertips, your sales representatives will have the resources they need to enhance every part of their performance.
MindTickle simplifies the sales training process. It makes it easy to publish short, accessible training sessions for sales reps that reinforce knowledge and processes. Then, MindTickle displays the results of the training on an internal dashboard so admins can analyze team performance.
Showpad is a sales enablement tool that aligns content marketing with your sales pipeline. It ensures your sales reps have relevant content on hand when they need it, offers content recommendations to assist with lead nurturing, and allows marketing and sales to share valuable data regarding customer insights.
Highspot uses AI-powered search to make sure your sales reps can access the documentation they need to succeed. Throughout the sales pipeline, Highspot recommends product-related content and solutions that your sales team can share with prospects—providing them with the information they need at the right time.
Seismic offers all the resources your sales team might need in one centralized location. Whatever content, information, or resources they may need to effectively nurture and convert a prospect is available through Seismic. You can also set up version control to keep track of content as well as content suggestions to increase conversion rates.
The sales lead generation tools we’ve described above may be a perfect fit for your B2B organization. They’ll save time, streamline your lead generation process, and make it easier for you to focus on more productive tasks.
But these tools are all so different. How do you determine which lead generation tool is right for your sales team?
While our recommended tools serve different purposes, they share some key features. As you sort through your options, consider how the tool stands up to the rest when it comes to these features.
A good lead generation tool automates the process for you (as much as possible). It should streamline the data analysis process, the lead collection and scoring process, and more so your sales team can spend time selling instead of manually organizing contact data.
Ask: Does this tool have automation options?
Look for user-friendly, intuitive, easy-to-use lead generation tools. Although some platforms will have a bit of a learning curve, they should make it relatively simple to get your lead generation campaigns up and running.
Ask: Are there resources for you to access if you have questions on how to use this tool?
A powerful feature of the best lead generation tools is the ability to target and track high-value leads. You should be able to see their interactions with your company—ideally from multiple channels—on one dashboard.
Ask: How does this tool track data from prospects?
Many lead generation tools offer data analysis and reporting features that will help you determine which of your campaigns are successful and what campaigns need to be refined. With the data these tools provide, you should be able to make informed decisions about how to improve your lead generation process.
Ask: Does this tool analyze data in a way that helps streamline your lead generation campaigns?
READ: 10 Best B2B Marketing Analytics Tools You Need to Know
Your marketing and sales teams are already using many different types of software. Your lead generation tool needs to integrate with those other platforms so you can easily share prospect data across teams and tools.
Ask: Does this tool integrate with the other marketing and sales tools your teams use?
Creating a successful lead generation strategy is challenging. With the right sales lead generation tools in place, you can optimize and improve the efficiency of your lead generation efforts.
But that’s only the beginning. To truly transform your lead generation process into one that sets you up for success and helps you convert leads into customers, consider partnering with an experienced lead generation agency.
At OneIMS, our lead generation experts help B2B companies like yours streamline the lead generation process, help your sales team work more efficiently, and ensure you are engaging with the right prospects at the right time. We have the strategies, solutions, and experience you need to launch a B2B lead generation strategy that connects your organization with your target market.
We have a long history of working with companies in a variety of industries to develop innovative and data-driven marketing and solutions. We pride ourselves on producing measurable and sustainable results.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. View testimonials from our clients and read our blog to get an idea of our training, experience, and track record of success.
Are you ready to take the next step and optimize your lead generation strategy? Schedule a consultation with us today to get started.