5 Best Lead Generation Software for Small Businesses

5 Best Lead Generation Software for Small Businesses

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Originally published on May 18, 2022, and updated on August 5, 2022

Lead generation's age-old yin and yang is quantity against quality. When your small business is generating a lot of leads, it is more likely to succeed.

However, having a large number of leads isn't enough; you also need high-quality leads to keep your sales staff from getting stuck. The top lead generation tools combine the two: It maintains the most qualified lead prospects at the top of your sales funnel.

The majority of lead generation tools are integrated into more comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Features that help with customer care, sales, and marketing are found in the top CRM software. Additionally, the information in your CRM database about leads, prospects, and customers powers your income streams.

Casting the widest net when it comes to sales prospecting necessitates using automated processes in your sales approach.

CRM technologies discover, investigate, assign, and nurture leads—among other repetitive lead management tasks—whether they are producing business leads or using a lead scoring model. Your sales team can now concentrate on your most promising leads as a result.

The greatest lead generation resources are not isolated entities. To produce leads, they must instead access data in your current software, which includes applications for marketing, omnichannel communication, customer service, accounting, and support.

Additionally, they must interact with other software with ease; otherwise, target leads may remain hidden and unreachable.

To improve your sales efforts, you must monitor a variety of performance indicators, such as lead nurturing success and prospecting productivity.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) connected to sales, such as average deal size, quote-to-close ratio, and lead conversion rate, show you where you are right now and provide you with useful information to help you reach your goals in the future.

You must evaluate your current capabilities and requirements, including the size of your sales staff, current sales procedures, and budget, before selecting the "best" software to generate sales leads for your small firm. The five choices listed below, however, have something to offer everyone.

1. Flexible Customer Relationship Management

Sales, service, lead management, and marketing are all automated with agile CRM. Its user-friendly platform provides capabilities including two-way emails, online analytics, a support desk, and phone calls. Agile CRM works well for mid-sized organizations, but startups and smaller firms may find its free version appealing.

Purchasing leads in bulk is another helpful option on LinkedIn. LinkedIn company searches frequently yield several contacts for you to store; pick them all, apply filters, or pick individual contacts to import into Agile CRM.

Sort the leads you find on LinkedIn so that Agile CRM only contains the most promising ones. Image sourced by the author

Agile CRM provides phone service from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST and live chat customer support around-the-clock. M-F: You can book calls in advance, as well as email assistance. Webinars, setup instructions, and a knowledge base are examples of self-service solutions.

Agile CRM comes with three subscription options that run from $14.99/month to $79.99/month per user, and a free version that supports up to 10 users. If you pay for one or two years at a time, you can receive significant discounts. Although it lacks some features, the free plan lets you test drive the fundamentals of Agile CRM.

2. A pipe-driver

With intelligent marketing capabilities to help you sell more goods and services, Pipedrive is a simple-to-use CRM. Pipedrive's user-friendly main dashboard, which was created by sales experts, puts lead generation and management front and center by showing the current state of each stage of the sales funnel.

LeadBooster is a helpful Pipedrive add-on that is a configurable chatbot for your website that answers questions and gathers data from users. Make a "playbook" for your chatbot that corresponds with particular business goals, such as increasing leads, scheduling more meetings, qualifying and routing leads, or engaging in live chat with website visitors.

Tailor your chatbot to your sales goals. Image sourced by the author

Support for Pipedrive is available around-the-clock via live chat and self-service tools like user forums, training videos and tutorials, and a knowledge library. The Ascent named Pipedrive the most user-friendly CRM program, so you might not require much assistance.

Pipedrive offers three monthly subscriptions that vary from $15 to $59 per user per month, as well as an annual plan that costs $1,188 per user per year. You may customize your sales pipelines and activities with its entry-level plan, and each tier up provides more lead generation features.

3. The HubSpot Marketing Center

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a comprehensive digital marketing platform that offers lead generating, customer support, and teamwork features. It was HubSpot that first used the term "inbound marketing." Email campaigns are simple to set up, material can be categorized by target audience, and campaign performance can be tracked.

Every employee will have access to the same data and be able to examine the whole history of all communications thanks to unified customer records.

Every possible lead is given a thorough summary on the HubSpot contact dashboard. Image sourced by the author

Depending on your plan, HubSpot Marketing Hub support options include phone, email, and live chat. Alternatively, make advantage of the community forum, training videos, and knowledge base as self-service resources. Have more precise requirements or inquiries? Check out the third-party solution experts who have been approved by HubSpot.

There are three options available for HubSpot Marketing Hub, ranging in price from $480 to $38,400 annually. Although it interacts with HubSpot's CRM, which is free with a finite number of contacts, it is not a CRM application per se. It charges extra to add more contacts to one or both applications.

4. The Bitrix24

You can manage your leads, messages, tasks, calendars, contacts, documents, and more with Bitrix24, a full-service CRM. Utilize technologies for social networking, email marketing, phone management, project management, and lead generation to generate leads, organize data, assign tasks, close sales, and report information.

Over 20 lead collection options are available for email, phone, instant messaging, live chat, and social media in Bitrix24's contact center.

The creation of intelligent web forms to collect lead data is made simple with Bitrix24. Add fields for your own custom fields, company, deal, quote, invoice, and contact information using a form template.

Select the fields that must be filled out and/or double-check the data you entered. In order to make sure that information is recorded and sent appropriately, the form maker also asks you to add any missing fields.

You may create smart forms with guidance from the Bitrix24 form builder. Image sourced by the author

The knowledge library of Bitrix24, which the business claims can respond to 95% of customer inquiries, serves as the primary source of assistance. Write to the customer support team via email if your query falls inside the remaining 5%. Additional choices include of webinars, instructional videos, and support from third-party providers authorized by Bitrix24.

There is an unlimited free plan available for Bitrix24. There are also subscription options with additional storage and functionality that start at $24/month for two users and go up to $199/month for an unlimited number of users.

You can experiment with the Bitrix24 interface and its basic capabilities with the free version, but many of the lead generation tools are restricted to higher-tier plans.

5. The Pardot

Salesforce software users are the target audience for the marketing platform Pardot. Its products are more than just Salesforce add-ons; they create leads for your sales funnel and improve brand positioning through automated marketing. As with all Salesforce offerings, Pardot isn't inexpensive.

Landing page builders, smart forms, organic and sponsored search, social media posting, and profiling are some of the capabilities offered by Pardot Lead Gen.

The lead generation by internet channel is displayed in the lead source report below.

Sort lead source reports according to specific marketing campaigns and industry. Image sourced by the author

Salesforce's basic online help options, phone support for urgent situations, and email support with a two-day response time are all available to Pardot users. A knowledge base, installation and troubleshooting manuals, training courses, and live "office hours" with Pardot specialists are among the Pardot-specific tools available.

The four options offered by Pardot range in price from $15,000 to $180,000 annually. Many small businesses cannot afford this, yet you do get what you pay for: For those who can afford it, Pardot makes use of Salesforce's skills as the undisputed leader in the CRM software market.

Lead prospecting is essential for business success regardless of size. Streamline your sales efforts with lead generating software that lets you concentrate on completing deals by using automation to handle the tedious tasks.

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Technology journalist and workflow specialist Mark Roy Long writes for The Ascent and The Motley Fool.

Because we firmly believe in the Golden Rule, editorial ideas expressed here are our own and have not been reviewed, approved, or endorsed by any of the listed sponsors. Not every offer on the market is covered by The Ascent. The Ascent's editorial material is produced by a different analytical team and is not affiliated with The Motley Fool.

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