Top 10 Tools For Automating Lead Generation
In marketing, lead generation is the initiation of consumer interest or enquiry into products or services of a business. Leads can be created for purposes such as list building, e-newsletter list acquisition or for sales leads. — Wikipedia
Let’s put down the textbooks and define leads more simply as “people who give a shit.”
Finding people who care, and converting that care into action, is in my not so humble opinion the bed-rock of all sales and marketing.
Marketing is a numbers game. Out of 100 people, 20 might be somewhat interested.
These 20 prospects progress to the next stage of your funnel. You think you’ve got them, but along comes a competitor with a feature you didn’t offer, a price you couldn’t match, or maybe the prospect just lost interest.
When all is said and done, you make 2 sales.
Hey! ‘2 out of ever 100 is a good conversion rate”.
Say you want to improve this conversion rate. My advice to you is to forget about the 2 and focus on the 100.
Improve the quality of your leads. Spend more time qualifying your leads. Do more research, heat up those cold-emails / cold-calls, and the 2 will take care of itself.
Top 10 Tools For Automating Lead Generation
Since the beginning of time, sales and marketing teams have been turning to software to improve their efforts. Algorithms never rest. They can crunch data at an inhuman speed, and do what would take you a year, in 20 minutes.
Once they can think for themselves we will all be out of a job.
In the meantime, we’ll use them to optimise our efficiency. Here are some tools you should seriously consider including in your workflow.
1. Powrbot
Any marketers who’s spent a day, or seven, populating Excel spreadsheets with public company information will immediately understand the value of Powrbot.
Typing endless keyword variations into Google is not worthy of the human mind. It’s a chore, realising this, the good people at PowrBot, built software that automates the task.
If you give Powrbot an Excel spreadsheet, with a list of companies you are interested in, Powrbot will return a myriad of information on each and every company in your list.
Furthermore, you can integrate Powrbot with a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce, use Powrbot data to personalise email campaigns with a MailChimp integration or connect Powrbot to any one of 1000+ other apps through Zappier. No developing required.
2. Lead Forensics
Lead Forensics will find the leads you didn’t even know you had. Every day, prospects anonymously browse your website. Imagine if you could retarget all these anonymous users.
By monitoring IP addresses this is exactly what Lead Forensics does. Even if the prospect doesn’t fill out a single form, Lead Forensics can often identify exactly who they are. Then using some other tools in this post, it’s possible to track that lead down. You are also qualifying better leads as they are already familiar with your business.
3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn sales navigator is a phenomenal tool for lead generation. The power of LinkedIn is that everyone is on LinkedIn.
The network effect is a phenomenon whereby a good or service becomes more valuable when it is used by more people.
In recent times LinkedIn has monetized their network by gradually restricting its benefits and making people pay to have access. LinkedIn’s sales navigator has many benefits. Based on the information you give them, they will suggest leads. This can be valuable but by far the biggest benefit is that it lets you create a custom feed of only your leads, and you can interact with anything that they post.
With LinkedIn sales navigator, you can message anyone on the platform directly with inMail. You can also see who has viewed your profile. You know what? Rather than going through all the features, let me just put a list of all the features here.
Professional features include:
✓ 20 InMail messages per month
✓ 1,500 saved leads
✓ Who’s viewed your profile
✓ Extended LinkedIn network access
✓ Advanced lead and company search
✓ Lead and account recommendations
✓ Custom Lists
✓ Territory preferences
✓ Lead and Account Alerts
✓ Email integrations (Gmail, Outlook Web)
✓ Notes and tags
✓ Sales Navigator Learning Center
✓ Includes LinkedIn Learning and Premium Career**
✓ Sales Navigator Mobile App
And that is just the Professional subscription. The team and enterprise plans have all these features and more.
4. HubSpot Marketing
HubSpot has a range of free tools, for lead generation, that link back into the free HubSpot CRM. That isn’t to say you have to use them with HubSpot CRM. HubSpot's lead generation tools will connect to your existing CRM, customer data platform, or you can just throw them onto a website and build your own integration.
These free tools include forms, popups, and even a live chat. Once you start using them, you will realise that you have seen these tools a hundred times before, all over the web, however, that only speaks to their effectiveness. Everyone can’t be wrong, right?
HubSpot’s complete suite of free tools is more than enough to manage an entire marketing campaign. Throw some content into the mix, and your forms will be pulling in the email address in no time.
5. Qualaroo
Qualaroo automates user research. It will conduct user surveys, assess sentiment, and provide actional feedback about your marketing funnel and UI/UX, so you can improve it.
This software uses Watson by IBM, which is an Ai that can sort through unstructured data, and come to meaningful conclusions. Qualaroo has used Watson to provide sentiment analysis.
All these features might sound a little over the top for software that surveys users, but it can be hard to get users to even fill out a survey, let alone know which users are best to ask and when to ask them. If you get it right, you have some really powerful data to optimize your funnel.
6. Growbots
Growbots boldly claims that it is The Only Platform You Need to Fully
Automate Outbound Sales.
After using this platform for a while, you just might start to believe it. Growbots uses a clever Ai to deliver a personalised list of leads that match your target market. You have to tell it about your target market. Once you have these leads, set up and automate your email campaigns. Then that’s when the magic starts.
Growbots can analyse the sentiment of your responses. Depending on the positivity of your response, the Ai will decide what action to take. For eager responses, a human will be contacted and the email passed on. A negative response will probably be archived or put in the get to it later pile.
Growbot will save you a tonne of time by prioritising your leads, so you can respond quickly to warmer leads.
7. HotJar
Hotjar is a tool for visualising how users interact with your site. Through a combination of heat-maps, cursor recording, click and action tracking, Hotjar is an effective tool for optimising your page for conversion.
If there is one thing internet marketers can agree on, it is that users are lazy. Maybe lazy is the wrong word, we value our time, and unless your product is the only option — unlikely — then users will click away if you make it too difficult for them. Heat maps and action tracking can help identify where users are getting hung up and exiting your funnel.
In addition to all the useful tools I have mentioned so far, Hotjar will also collect feedback from users through survey and polls.
8. Turnstile
Turnstile is a great way to identify high-quality leads with video. Connect your account to your favourite email provider, then add an email capture gate to any point.
The concept of a lead magnet is you have to offer something that a lead wants in exchange for their email address. To catch a lead you need bait. Typically this bait is an ebook or subscription. These content forms can be a hard sell.
You have to convince the lead they need this ebook or there is value in the subscription. Compared to a video, a book is a commitment. To catch more leads, you need better bait.
51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.- wordstream
The demand for video is higher than any other form of content.
Turnstile places an email capture gate between the lead and video content that will only continue if they surrender their email address.
9. Clearbit
Clearbit is the marketing data engine for all of your customer interactions. Deeply understand your customers, identify future prospects, and personalize every single marketing and sales interaction.- Clearbit
Clearbit offers a variety of data providers to help with all stages of your funnel. Automatically updates your sales records with accurate, verified company and contact data. Enrich your marketing database, identify prospects, and find contact information for accounts within an organisation.
Clearbit has a widget called connect that you can add to Gmail or Outlook to quickly find email addresses. Connect will also look at your existing contacts and create complete profiles for all of them.
The Reveal feature is another powerful tool that’s part of Clearbit. It can turn anonymous website traffic into full company profiles to power targeted campaigns.
10. Jumplead
Jumplead is lead automation software designed to be leaner than other offerings.
Add dynamic embedded lead generation forms into any page on your website, overlay offers, and trigger follow-ups and automation, and add chat functionality to a website. Jumplead is a conclusive suite of tools for managing your on-page marketing efforts and linking an email campaign.
Once you start generating leads, you need to nurture them into sales. Based on the forms that they have filled out and how they interacted with the site, leads will be grouped into lists. Then Jumplead can send targeted emails to these different types of leads.
