A simple fact of selling is you can’t close deals without leads.
A healthy sales pipeline means you’ll have lots of prospects throughout the stages of your buyer journeys for your reps to work their magic on.
And how do you get new leads into your CRM software’s pipeline? Lead generation of course!
In this guide we’ll be taking a closer look at lead generation; what it is and the advantages of automating it to streamline the process. We’ll also be looking at the software tools our Serchen community has rated as the most helpful for adding quality leads into their pipelines.
What Is Lead Generation?
Let’s start with the basics.
Lead generation is the process through which your sales reps find new leads to add to the first stages of your pipeline.
This can encompass lots of different activities, such as cold-emailing, cold-calling, advertising, web forms, chat bots on your website and even meeting people in person. If your business has a process for finding new prospects to add to your pipeline, then it counts as lead generation.
You can’t expect quality leads to spring up out of the blue without you having to lift a finger, so it’s important to have repeatable and effective lead generation techniques to keep your sales funnel full of prospects.
With 61% of marketers finding lead generation their biggest challenge, it’s crucial to give yourself every advantage to boost your quality lead numbers.
What is Automated Lead Generation?
Whereas normal lead generation techniques require you to manually enter information about your new leads into your CRM, automated lead generation takes care of tasks like data entry, reducing the time reps need to spend on admin tasks that don’t make use of their fulling selling powers.
Moreover, automated tools can find, qualify and segment your leads for you, meaning that once they’re set up you can see new quality leads entering your pipeline without the need for rep input.
Automated vs. Un-automated Lead Generation
80% of companies that utilize automated lead generation techniques have seen an increase in leads entering their pipeline.
Even if you’re not seeing any increase in leads because of automation, your reps will have more time to dedicate to other activities. Part of the advantage of automation technology is the time it saves your selling team from having to perform mundane data entry and admin; software’s great at copying data, whereas your reps are great at making human connections with your leads.
Plus, there’s an excellent selection of software out there to help, so chances are there’s a great tool out there that could be easily amalgamated into your software stack.
The 4 Best Tools for Lead Generation
Now we’ve got an idea of the general advantages of automated lead generation software, let’s take a look at some specific examples of the best-rated software and what they can do for you.
AeroLeads
Price From: $49 per month (Free Trial Available)
AeroLeads is an automated lead generation tool to help you find business and personal email addresses and phone numbers from their huge online profile database.
Designed to significantly speed up the time it takes for reps to gather and verify leads’ contact information, AeroLeads is a stand-alone program that can easily integrate with any CRM in just one click.
With web extensions for lead generation as you go and numerous tools for helping you find contact data for your most promising leads, AeroLeads is a fantastic helper when it comes to boosting your fresh quality prospects.
Highlight Features:
Online profile database — use AeroLead’s profile database to search over 425 million prospects using customizable filters to find the best leads for your business. Plus, with all information validated in real-time, you won’t have to worry about outdated information
Chrome and Firefox extensions — use AeroLead’s browser extensions when online (think LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Aeroleads Search, etc) to gather email addresses and add prospects to your pipeline
Automated prospecting — bulk add prospects from LinkedIn and Sales Navigator to your CRM pipeline with a single click
Email verifier — check your contact information is up to date by using AeroLead’s Email Verifier
Email finder — upload contact information gathered about leads to discover their email addresses
What our community says about AeroLeads:
Anisha — “I have used a lot of email finder tools to look for email addresses but none of them are as good as Aeroleads. It has really become my favorite tool to use in looking for emails. I love the fact that it allows me to search through different databases at once which is great because otherwise, I would need multiple tools to do this one thing. The way it searches through all those databases and gives you an accurate result is just amazing and makes life easier than ever before!”
Gayathri — “I found this software very effective and at the same time very easy to use also. I was facing some problems regarding getting qualified leads, and I found this software online, and it helped me out a lot!”
Interested in more automated integrations? Then check out our guide here for more great software tools to help generate leads and more!
Driftrock
Price From: $89 per month (Free Trial Available)
Driftrock aims to boost your lead generation ability while lowering the cost of lead acquisition by 50%.
By linking with over 20 lead sources, Driftrock brings together all your marketing channels and lets you know the best ways to automate lead capture for your pipeline.
With extra features such as smart forms to capture leads from your landing pages and integrations with over 250 software tools, Driftrock is a powerful tool to aid your lead generation process.
Highlight Features:
20+ channel connection — with the ability to sync with over 20 lead generating sources, such as Facebook ads, Google search, social media and more, Driftrock helps create automated lead generation techniques to capture your best leads from across your marketing channels
Smart forms — let your prospects generate and qualify themselves with Driftrock’s smart forms that auto-fills user data when leads engage with you
Optimized campaigns — track clicks from every part of your buyers’ interactions, validate your leads’ contact information and optimize your campaigns for your particular audience and lead segmentation
Audience nurture automation — keep your prospects in sync with Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, and automatically exclude audience segments from ad campaigns to reduce costs and keep engagement high
Lead qualifying — ensure only the right leads for your business enter the pipeline by making sure your prospects meet your validation criteria
Lead generation reporting — get a breakdown of your lead-generating KPIs with custom dashboards designed to give you oversight of your process
Training — boost your team’s effectiveness with Facebook and Google ads with Driftrock’s training package, designed to help you optimize your digital lead generation techniques
What our community says about Driftrock:
Daniel — “I always wanted to be able to run more custom audiences but for a business of our scale, it was not feasible to download and upload massive lists to several accounts, every day. Driftrock solved all of that and made it possible to run any ad to any audience I can think of.”
Chris — “We liked Automation with our CRM that captures granular user data, flexible UI, great support service, really helped us acquire and convert leads. Driftrock made themselves available to us whenever we needed help.”
Mark — “It’s super simple to set up. Within minutes I was able to start creating audiences in my Google ads account directly from my CRM. We have a tag-based CRM, so we are able to create a Google audience from anyone that completes a desired task on our site.”
Snov.io
Price From: $33 (Free Trial Available)
Snov.io offers an interesting package for those looking to invest in a CRM with powerful lead generation features built-in.
With an email finder, email verifier, drip campaign manager and Google Chrome extensions built on top of a capable CRM, Snov.io has a great feature set for those looking to boost their lead generation abilities with automation.
And with integrations with over 3,000 other tools, you can bypass Snov.io’s own CRM platform if you already have a CRM in place, and just make use of the lead generation tools. As one of the more affordable tools on this list, you’re still getting great features for a great price!
Highlight Features:
Email finder — use Snov.io’s email finder tool to search for new leads by web domain, or search its database for companies qualified by custom filters. You can also find contact information based on the names of leads you want to follow up on
Email verifier — reduce the chance of your emails bouncing by using Snov.io’s email verifier. You can check emails on the go through the app or via Chrome extension, or upload your email contacts list and have Snov.io verify your list in bulk
Email drip campaigns — create custom workflows using the drag and drop builder for automated email drip campaigns that react to your leads’ behavior
Built-in CRM — bundled in with the Snov.io lead generating software is their own CRM, a tool with an emphasis on simplicity to keep your reps focused on what really matters
What our community says about Snov.io:
Mohammad — “My boss bought the subscription and now I can export and hunt more from my account. The Teams feature is a brilliant idea!
I like how easily we can find the leads of a specific job title from a needed country/City and perform the personalized drip campaigns. BTW, drip campaigns are mindblowing! The best tool for B2B marketing.”
Zack — “This extension for chrome is so handy! I can collect emails directly from any webpage. Plus there’s a verification tool and technology checker – and all this for such low prices!”
Eva — “Snovio is a real time-saving tool. I use it for my business. I like the way I can extract leads from any webpage. The Built-in verifier is pretty accurate. I like it.”
Heyflow (formerly Niro)
Price From: $39 per month (Free Trial Available)
Designed to respond to customer frustrations over costly marketing campaigns that don’t convert, Heyflow builds interactive and engaging flows (think snazzier web forms) to convert your leads at the source.
With a plethora of easy-to-use tools to help you create an amazing flow, Heyflow helps reps capture and qualify their leads and add them to their CRM pipeline.
Highlight Features:
Dynamic flows — build beautiful and engaging flows to keep your audience interested and self-qualifying. With the ability to add conditional logic to your flows, you can build your forms to respond to your leads in the same way you would with an automated email marketing workflow, with your leads’ answers guiding them through different paths of the flow
Integrations — integrate with your software stack by via Google Sheets, Slack, Asana, Pipedrive and Zapier. Plus, if you’re handy with APIs, you can create your own integration
Analysis reporting — get comprehensive data analysis of your flow’s performance over given periods via the Heyflow statistics dashboard, and integrate with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to track your marketing across platforms
What our community says about Heyflow (formerly Niro):
Malte — “We were looking for software that gives us more flexibility in terms of UI/UX design. The problem with other form and quiz builders is that they never feel native to your website. Well, that has changed with Niro. Another big plus: The customer support is very helpful and fast.”
Christoph — “Their design editor enables us to perfectly match our corporate identity – this is not possible with any other tool out there (Yes, I did a lot of research before choosing). Great for lead generation because of straight-forward key features when it comes to design and analytics.”
Alessandro — “A simple and intuitive drag-and-drop builder, high design flexibility, and direct integrations to all relevant analytics tools. Really helped us to build a top-notch user experience without investing engineering resources. There’s really nothing to dislike. The customer support always helped us quickly whenever we were afraid we’d hit a wall. I wish I had found them earlier.”
Should you automate your Lead Generation Process?
Automated lead generation software has two main selling points: saving you time and boosting the number of prospects entering your sales pipeline.
Both of these are valuable upsides. Generally speaking, the more time your reps have to build human relationships with quality leads, the better your chance of selling, and so by removing as much basic admin and data entry from their tasks as possible you’ll be setting them up to succeed.
A pipeline is only as healthy as the number of high-quality leads that fill it, and boosting your prospects is key to achieving higher revenue and growth.
By using these sophisticated lead-generating tools, not only will you see an increase in the number of leads entering your pipeline, but you’ll be making sure they fit the criteria your business needs to see the best chance of converting them into paid customers.
