12 Must-Have Lead Generation Tools for B2B Companies

In a recent Gartner survey, nearly 60% of business leaders admitted that lead generation is their biggest challenge. Finding quality leads remains to be particularly challenging for many B2B marketers.

With the digital space littered with tailored content that consumers barely have to struggle to find, and rife content syndication, B2B marketers find it hard to make their content generate quality leads.

However, being challenging doesn’t make lead generation any less important to the success of B2B companies. The right approach to solve this perennial problem lies in finding ways to make content useful for generating leads. One proven approach is using powerful automated tools that will help your business bring in leads through multiple marketing channels.

This article talks about lead generation for B2Bs and gives a list of a dozen tools that will turn around your lead generation story.

What Is Lead Generation?

A lead is any person that shows interest in your business. Lead generation is a marketing process that marketers use to attract and engage leads, with the intention of putting them in a sales funnel and nurturing them through it to the end where they take action. This could mean sharing contact information or making a purchase.

As such, lead generation is the first step in building a relationship that converts your leads into customers so you can make sales. It’s an essential part of forming a successful sales strategy.

Why Is Lead Generation Important in the B2B Space?

One thing is clear. Without a lead generation strategy, you’ll just be playing guessing games with prospects and hoping they’ll come on board.

Lead generation allows you to cast your net wide by increasing the visibility of your business. This way, you stand higher chances of invoking interest, building trust and credibility, and thereby achieving growth.

LinkedIn is an example of how lead generation can help you make sales. Statistics show that 80% of B2B companies use lead generation for growth and 45% of them say they have converted their leads to customers. 

In addition to growth, your lead gen strategy helps you cure some of the following costly yet common problems for your B2B business:

• Little or no brand awareness. This is common for newbies in the B2B space. Lead generation will increase your brand awareness, and start you off on the way to making sales.
• Having a high lead volume but struggling with quality leads. High-quality leads are leads that are more likely to make a purchase. When your sales team is barely making any sales, it means the marketing team is giving them low-quality leads. A lead generation program can help both teams to decide what makes a quality lead and solve this problem.
• Having difficulty demonstrating how marketing adds to the business’s ROI. A lead generation program involves metrics that can help you show that your marketing efforts are bringing in money to the business by delivering quality leads and promoting faster sales.
• An exhausted lead generation program. With modern lead generation tools, you can revive your lead generation and enjoy increased visibility which connects you to new and old leads.

Why Do You Need Lead Generation?

Apart from being a marketing process, lead generation is also a stage in inbound marketing. Ideally, inbound marketing has four stages that relate to moving a prospect from a stranger to a satisfied customer who recommends you to others These stages are as follows: attract, convert, close, and delight.

Prospects go through the stranger, visitor, lead, customer, and promoter stages. Lead generation occurs in the convert stage and converts a prospect in the visitor stage into a lead. It’s a critical stage in a buyer’s journey that takes them closer to being a happy customer who promotes your business. Here are more benefits:

• Your content helps you attract and build engagement with prospects who were not initially in your target audience scope, thus expanding your market.
• High-quality content positions you as an industry expert, which creates a growing following.
• A following will much likely attract quality leads and when that happens, your revenue increases.
• Just like with growing revenue, reaching more people increases the chances for new business opportunities in your field.
• With quality content, you can say goodbye to awkward cold calling or emailing.

Why You Need Lead Generation Tools

A good lead generation tool is basically software that allows you to acquire qualified leads without having to learn complex coding.

Essentially, these tools work by automating the lead generation process and collecting info about prospects for follow-up. Some tools work with your existing CRM, while others have features that allow them to work independently.

80% of marketers use both types of these tools with nearly a hundred percent of them reporting an increase in conversion after using them.

Components of Lead Generation

Lead generation doesn’t start and stop at generating leads. It also involves these additional aspects:

• Leads database: With each lead you get, you need to access important info about them — such as source — so you can group them appropriately to begin nudging them toward the end of the sales funnel.
• Content and appropriate channels: Content is a key component and a driver of your lead generation programs. This includes content tailored to different channels such as email, social media, website homepage, etc., and how much you’re investing in each of them.
• Analytics: This is about measuring your lead generation efforts using different metrics. The lead generation rate for example is measured by dividing the number of leads by the number of visitors who used a certain platform.
• MarTech (Marketing Technology) tools: Basically, when looking for lead generation tools, look for a tool that is efficient — allowing you to do much more than possible manually — and that significantly cuts down on your spending.

Why You Need Lead Generation Software

Lead generation software has versatile applications that are helpful for your B2B business marketing strategy. First, it allows you to segment your audience appropriately which allows you to widen the scope of your audience and identify new markets you can explore.

Secondly, most software provides lead scoring management — a feature that helps you track quality leads.

Thirdly, you get to be more accurate as far as your data on old and new accounts is concerned.

12 Must-Have Lead Generation Tools

To get the most out of lead generation, here’s a list of 12 of the most efficient tools you should know about.

1. Clearbit Enrichment

Clearbit Enrichment‘s biggest perks are sales intelligence and data enrichment, which are vital for virtually any business. It makes it easy to access new and credible data and you only need to provide your business domain name and email address to get started.

Except for sales intelligence, it integrates easily with other marketing software like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Pardot. It’s also extremely easy to use.

Pricing: The segment and enrichment API plans cost between $99.00 and $199.00 monthly with other plans falling between $12,000.00 and $24,000.00 annually.

Reviewer says: “Valuable data and a great time-saving product.”

2. TrenDemon

This tool was made for Fortune 500 companies and businesses in the finance and IT fields. It makes engagement, content, and account management easy using AI-based web personalization and content insights — including insights on content marketing ROI, customer journeys, and traffic sources to help you strategize your content.

You can also see customer journeys in real time which makes it easy to optimize content according to where a customer is at in the buyer’s journey.

Pricing: TrenDemon starter price is $400 per user and doesn’t offer free trials.

Reviewer says: “Everyone talks about the customer journey — Trendemon delivers.”

3. Hubspot Marketing Hub

Since lead generation has many moving parts, Hubspot Marketing Hub is celebrated for offering a central location for managing them — especially for companies with a wide customer base — while being very easy to use and navigate.

Beyond that, it has excellent customer support, a great interface, and offers custom solutions for different business requirements.

It’s an insightful resource too, with valuable recommendations for measuring and improving your campaigns. It is optimized to help you attract the right audience and convert visitors to customers. 

Pricing: The most expensive plan for Hubspot Marketing Hub is the enterprise Hub which costs $3,200 monthly. Marketing Hub Professional goes for $800 each month, while the Marketing Hub Starter costs $50 per month. It also has a free version.

Reviewer says: “An integrated platform that understands all your business’s requirements.”

4. Turnstile

Turnstile allows you to collect email addresses and names from website visitors who watch your videos. It’s a simple form that may display at any point in your video and is compatible with virtually all devices.

You can control the viewing experience for the user by pausing the video or letting your contact forms hover around for the users to fill them at their pleasure. It integrates with Hubspot and Mailchimp.

Pricing: It has a free starter plan and offers a pro plan at $99 monthly.

Reviewer says: No reviews.

5. Discover.ly

Discover.ly is a Chrome browser extension that’s designed for networking that is especially helpful for startups as well as small to medium-sized businesses. It reveals and saves complete social media contact information as you browse which you can use later for marketing. It offers online support and works best for government organizations, nonprofits, small to medium-sized businesses, and freelancers.

Pricing: No credible pricing information.

Reviewer says: “Awesome extension that does what it says. Great tool for building contacts.”

6. Mobile Monkey

Chat has never been used this much to connect businesses and prospects across different platforms on a single chatbox. You can use the chatbox for sending messages through SMS, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and website chat. This is ideal for businesses that do lots of customer support such as the hotel industry, e-commerce sites, and the automobile sector.

The software makes it easy to contact leads, send drip campaigns, schedule messages, share links, and view audience engagement data. It also allows firms to streamline customer service operations by automating follow-up and lead routing tasks.

Pricing: The starting price is $19 for every feature each month and it also has a free trial.

Reviewer says: “Simple and effective chat automation. What’s not to love?”

7. Albacross

Albacross’ best feature is eliminating the guessing and wondering about when prospects are ready to make a purchase. It does this by offering insights from the moment a lead first interacts with you through to their later stages in the buyer’s journey.

Albacross will integrate with other tools, so you don’t waste time you can use nurturing leads to learn a new tool. It is best for medium-sized and large enterprises that want to grow their qualified leads count.

Pricing: Albacross offers a free trial and doesn’t reveal other pricing plans.

Reviewer says: “Great tool for sourcing new leads and acting on intent.”

8. Mailshake

Cold emails are still a staple for B2Bs but Mailshake makes it easy for sales teams by allowing them to send cold emails and schedule tasks for a phone follow-up on a single dashboard. It integrates with Salesforce, Hubspot, and other third-party apps. The customer support is awesome and is easy to use.

Pricing: Mailshake does not reveal its pricing plans.

Reviewer says: “Send marketing email drips to cold contacts without getting into trouble.”

9. Wisepops

The software makes pop-ups seem like a good thing to tons of customers who find them annoying. It creates beautiful pop-ups that work on desktops and mobile devices — which also makes it perfect for e-commerce and large businesses with many customers.

More than that, you can choose when to show the pop-up or create your own event and run a pop-up by timing.

The drag and drop builder is a walk in the park with dozens of templates to choose from.

Wisepops is trusted by more than 2000 businesses as a helpful conversion tool to grow their email list, and promote events.

Pricing: Wisepops comes in three monthly pricing variants. The launch plan costs $29, the grow plan goes for $79, and the rocket plan costs $149.

Reviewer says: “It was a great help to us when we wanted to reduce costs within our company.”

10. Optinmonster

This is a great tool for preventing two things that cause lead leaks — cart abandonment and abandoning visitors. To do this, Optinmonster leverages intelligent targeting such as Exit-Intent and Onsite retargeting. You can also easily conduct A/B tests to help you make data-backed decisions.

Also, it helps you to quickly grow your email subscribers by using pop-ups to convert abandoning visitors into mail subscribers. It integrates with more than 500 integrations including Mailchimp and Hubspot. Ideal businesses for this software are bloggers and e-commerce stores.

Pricing: You can get a custom quote from Optinmonster.

Reviewer says: “Effective lead capture tool with several integrations. Perfect for starting a blog.”

11. Qualaroo

It’s a strong customer feedback tool that can help businesses focusing on user interface design to collect much better feedback than emails could generate. It uses pop-ups called nudges to ask web users on a site important questions at an appropriate time.

Nudge templates help you save time when creating surveys through links or web in-app. It also uses AI to recognize user motivation and emotions from the feedback they give in surveys.

Pricing: Qualaroo pricing starts with a free plan, followed by $25 per month for the essential plan, and the enterprise plan which charges $100 for each feature per month.

12. ReferralCandy

ReferralCandy does just what it sounds like — it seeks to grow your sales through referral marketing and works well for e-commerce businesses that make a minimum of a hundred transactions monthly. It connects seamlessly with these sites but you can still choose to integrate it with API.

Pricing: Pricing starts at $49 per month. It offers free trials but it doesn’t have free plans.

Reviewer says: “Affordable referral solution with great customer service.”

In Conclusion

B2B marketing doesn’t have to be painful and nearly unachievable. With a MarTech stack of lead generation tools that make difficult processes a breeze, startups to large companies can market their businesses effectively and record significant growth.

Trendemon is a tool designed to help you maximize your content’s potential using insights that are easy to implement. We are all about growing your business by ensuring you get the ROI you need to, analyzing your customer journeys, and measuring results so you can improve on them. Request a demo.