Showing 1 - 25 of 476 products
Sort by
Audience Studio is a data management platform (DMP) designed to help businesses deliver personalized marketing experiences by capturing and storing data signals from multiple sources. Advertisers can utilize machine learning technologies to define audience...Read more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud
recommendations
Established in 2008, Act-On is a comprehensive marketing automation tool designed to offer a complete suite of applications, including email marketing, website visitor tracking, lead management, social media management, reporting and analytics, as well as ...Read more about Act-On
recommendations
HubSpot is a leading growth platform. Over 52,000 total customers in more than 100 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. Marketing Hub helps companies of all ...Read more about HubSpot Marketing Hub
recommendations
Zoho Social is a holistic social media management tool that lets you effortlessly expand and grow your social media presence from one platform. Zoho Social supports major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, GMB...Read more about Zoho Social
Trusted by 100k+ ecommerce businesses, Omnisend’s all-in-one email marketing & SMS tool automates your marketing across the entire customer journey—reaching the right audience, with the right message at the right time. Capture and grow subscriber lists wit...Read more about Omnisend
Referrizer is a marketing automation solution designed to help businesses acquire new customers and manage recurring purchases, communication, referral, reputation and more. The platform enables organizations to run email marketing and drip campaigns using...Read more about Referrizer
Typeform is an interactive data collection tool that lets you create forms, surveys, and quizzes that people enjoy answering. By asking questions one at a time, you get more thoughtful responses and higher completion rates. Plus, Typeform’s conditional log...Read more about Typeform
EngageBay is an integrated marketing, sales, support and CRM solution designed to help small to midsize enterprises acquire, engage and convert website visitors into customers. The cloud-based platform lets businesses use marketing tools to build relations...Read more about EngageBay CRM
Linked Helper 2 is the safest LinkedIn automation solution with a built-in CRM system. It is a standalone application that can be downloaded to Windows, MacOS or Ubuntu devices and allows users to quickly build connections on LinkedIn and automate their Li...Read more about Linked Helper 2
VBOUT is an AI-Enabled Marketing Platform that helps agencies and marketers grow with 12+ powerful marketing tools, integrated AI features, powerful automations, deep e-commerce tracking, and more. A simple and user-friendly system, it is designed to help...Read more about VBOUT
Creatio is a global vendor of a no-code platform to automate workflows and CRM with a maximum degree of freedom. Creatio offering includes a no-code platform (Studio Creatio), CRM applications (Marketing, Sales and Service), industry workflows for 20 verti...Read more about Creatio CRM
Pipeliner has revolutionized CRM with our unique visual interface, no-code workflow automation engine, and instant, dynamic insights and reporting. This CRM provides both salespeople and sales management with many ways of displaying and analyzing sales ...Read more about Pipeliner CRM
Revetize is a cloud-based business marketing solution that helps organizations streamline processes related to lead generation, reputation management and customer interactions. It allows users to collect and view reviews or feedback on a centralized dashbo...Read more about Revetize
ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must-have platform for intelligent marketing automation. Customers from over 170 countries depend on ActiveCampaign’s mix of pre-built automations and integrations (including Facebook, Google, ...Read more about ActiveCampaign
Salesflare is an intelligent CRM and email outreach platform used by thousands of small and medium-sized B2B businesses, who want to sell more with less work. It automates the data entry user would normally have in a CRM by gathering data from social ...Read more about Salesflare
At Constant Contact, we deliver for small businesses with powerful tools to simplify and amplify digital marketing. Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring) is a marketing and sales platform developed to help businesses build their pipeline, ...Read more about Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)
Pipedrive is a web-based Sales CRM and pipeline management solution that enables businesses to plan their sales activities and monitor deals. Built using activity-based selling methodology, Pipedrive streamlines every action involved in converting a potent...Read more about Pipedrive
Build journeys that drive revenue. Your customer data, marketing automation & analytics, together. Since 2015, Ortto has empowered over 10,000 companies with their software. Ortto allows online businesses to unify their customer data with their CDP, segm...Read more about Ortto
Lead411 is a B2B data platform offering highly accurate and verified email/direct cell dials all backed by triggered company event data. This data includes event like recent funding, IPOs, Hiring Trends, Recent Awards, New Locations, Internal Promotions, ...Read more about Lead411
Pathmonk is a lead generation solution that helps businesses analyze the actions of website visitors to deliver personalized micro-moments that further optimizes visitor conversion rates. Intent data and micro-moments allow businesses to power up the websi...Read more about Pathmonk
OptiMonk enables ecommerce businesses to transform basic popups into powerful sales tools. You can create highly engaging, personalized popups that capture attention and increase revenue. With a drag-and-drop editor, personalization options, and A/B testin...Read more about OptiMonk
Who are we? Gold-Vision is a user-intuitive customer relationship management (CRM) solution that includes modules for sales, marketing, support, projects, portal and events. Suitable for organizations of all sizes, it can be installed both on-premise and...Read more about Gold-Vision CRM
Terminus is an account-based software for efficient marketing and sales purposes that provides an end-to-end solution for prioritizing and identifying target accounts, activation of sales for targeted search, multi-channel engagement and reporting to the e...Read more about Terminus
CoPilot AI is a lead generation solution that helps businesses streamline processes related to sales prospecting, opportunity targeting, campaign generation and more. It evaluates and suggests improvements for an organization's social media profiles, facil...Read more about CoPilot AI
Factors.ai is an account intelligence, analytics & attribution platform that helps sales & marketing teams at high-growth B2Bs to build pipeline by tapping into intent signals on your website, CRM, LinkedIn, & G2. Score & prioritize high-intent accounts ...Read more about Factors.ai
Software Advice uses reviews from real software users to highlight the top-rated Lead Generation products in North America.
Learn how products are chosen“Usability” includes user ratings for Functionality and Ease of Use.
“Customer Satisfaction” includes user ratings for Customer Support, Likelihood to Recommend and Value for Money.
Reviews analysis period: The reviews analysis period spans two years and ends the 15th of the month prior to publication.
This detailed guide will help you find and buy the right lead generation software for you and your business.
Last Updated on November 21, 2023Lead generation software allows companies to automate the capture, segmentation and assignment of leads to improve targeted marketing communications and shorten sales cycles. Meanwhile, lead nurturing software allows companies to stay in contact with those generated leads until they are ready to commit to a purchase. A number of customer relationship management (CRM) systems provide lead generation and nurturing capabilities, and some vendors offer solutions developed specifically for these tasks.
This guide explains features commonly found within these systems, the types of buyers who will get the most use out of this software and other considerations to help buyers narrow down their choices.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
What Is Lead Generation Software?
Common Features of Lead Generation Systems
Best Tactics to Select Lead Generation Software
A lead is any contact—either an individual or a business—that has the potential to be converted to a customer. Leads can be collected through a variety of online and offline channels, including:
Website forms
Virtual events
Trade shows
Direct mail
Phone calls
Lead generation software automates the capture and distribution of lead data from online channels. For example, a website visitor may enter their name and email address in a Web form to gain access to a piece of content. Their information is then recorded in the CRM database, and distributed to the appropriate salesperson to manage.
Screenshot of Silverpop’s Web form and landing page design tool
Lead nurturing software automates and streamlines the process of maintaining contact with prospective customers. If lead generation gets prospective customers into the sales funnel, lead nurturing helps guide those who aren't yet ready to buy through the funnel toward a purchase decision. Lead nurturing software enables companies to remain in touch with their leads, keeping them engaged (e.g., through the delivery of relevant content) until they're ready to buy.
Lead data can be very basic—name, title, phone number, company name and number of employees, for example. When visitor tracking and analytics is used, more in-depth data can be added to the lead’s profile, such as the referring website, pages viewed by the lead and other behavioral information.
After lead information is captured, the use of lead management software enables sales teams to efficiently nurture, score and track leads to increase qualification and conversion rates.
Applications vary from vendor to vendor, but a lead generation system will typically include the following types of features:
Landing page and web form creation | Web forms embedded on landing pages are the most popular method for capturing leads. With this feature, marketers can create custom forms and landing pages—or integrate existing forms—to deploy on websites and collect leads. Some systems also support the creation of promotions, such as contests and surveys, as an additional method for generating leads. |
CRM integration | Lead data is automatically recorded and stored in the CRM database, where it can then be utilized for a variety of marketing campaigns based on leads’ interests and behavior. |
Social media integration | Social media is a vast data source for companies that generate leads across multiple channels. Lead generation tools that collect data from social platforms, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, go beyond a company’s own website to deliver greater insights and increase the number and quality of opportunities for the sales team. |
Lead segmentation | Demographics (e.g., job title and company size), referral source (e.g., organic search and paid advertising) and behavior (e.g., type of content downloaded and website path) information is used to categorize the lead. This allows it to be assigned to the appropriate sales team member for evaluation and lead scoring. |
Lead assignment | This function routes leads to the right employee within a company based on filters users define, and alerts the sales team when a new lead is captured. |
Below is an example on one CRM vendor's landing page and Web form creation tool. Lead generation CRM applications with these types of tools make it easy to design and embed forms on websites to capture lead information.
Screenshot of Infusionsoft’s Web form and landing page design tool
Any industry can benefit from using lead generation software: from student loan providers to restaurants to software vendors to advertising agencies. Generally, however, buyer segments are broken into two categories:
B2C buyers. These buyers sell their products directly to consumers. Typically, B2C sales cycles are short, with leads turning into buyers soon after their first interaction. For example, someone might visit several online retailers shopping for a new pair of sunglasses. When that person finds a retailer offering the style they desire for the right price, they make the purchase immediately. In cases where leads don't turn into buyers right away, lead nurturing software for B2C buyers might serve up content such as discount vouchers or information about special deals to potential buyers.
B2B buyers. These buyers sell their products and services to other businesses, rather than to consumers. Because B2B purchasing decisions are often made by more than one person—or even a formal buying committee—more nurturing is required to convert a lead into a buyer than in the B2C sales cycle. Thus, lead generation and nurturing software tools are often used in conjunction to guide prospective customers through the sales funnel.
There are hundreds of lead generation applications from which to choose. Selecting the best one for your business depends on a variety of factors, including the type of lead generation campaigns you want to run, which channels you use to capture leads and what other software needs to integrate with the solution.
Even after paring down your list based on the above criteria, you’ll likely have many products to evaluate. We recently surveyed software buyers across multiple industries to determine the best tactics for selecting software. Top methods include checking vendor references, having an attorney review agreements and preparing a request for proposal (RFP).
Software Selection Methods
Quadrant indicating where selection tactics fall on the “impact” and “satisfaction” spectrum
After creating a shortlist of products that have the functionality your business requires, you can use the methods above to speed further evaluation to find the product that best meets your needs.
Companies that adopt a lead generation system can experience several benefits:
Shorter sales cycle. Because the sales team is alerted to new leads in real time, reps and managers can contact leads promptly and with the right information to close sales more quickly.
More accurate data. There is less room for data entry errors because lead data collected from online forms is automatically synced with a CRM system, rather than being collected from various mediums and manually entered by an employee.
Improved efficiency. The core benefit of automation is to reduce or eliminate manual tasks, thus saving employees many hours of time evaluating leads and performing data entry.
Companies that fail to see these benefits often do so because of:
Unoptimized landing pages. Poorly designed landing pages and Web forms may fail to motivate potential leads to take action.
Lack of training. Employees who aren’t properly trained to use the software’s complete scope of features may miss out on opportunities to capture leads.
Lack of planning. Businesses that don’t strategically plan for their business’ changing needs and growth may make poor software purchasing decisions.