The great thing about B2B lead generation today is that there is a lot of different software available to make your work easier. There are various tools for different tasks, which ensure that you have everything covered when it comes to generating the critical B2B leads to grow your business. In the end, you want to make sure you are using the simplest tools to automate your work partially, so you can get more done in less time.
It’s exciting to work in the world of B2B lead generation today. The Internet provides us with unlimited sources to find and capture leads and to create an automated process to reach out to these companies. This creates opportunities to generate dozens of leads every day, which you can directly send to your sales team to follow up and sign new deals.
As the person in charge of these B2B leads, you want to make sure you can show off your work. Lots of tools provide comprehensive reports that analyze your results that you can share with your team. At the core, generating B2B leads is one of the most critical aspects of the entire business. An organization can only thrive when there are enough potential customers in the pipeline to sign new deals and to quickly expand the company's total customer base.
Whether your resources are limited or you can tap into a bigger budget, you want to make sure to pick the right tools. The right tools can help you deal with the more difficult tasks in a simple way. Here at Anyleads, we know the importance of generating the right leads and generating them quickly. Hence, this article dives into all the types of B2B lead generation software tools, to give you the right know-how to reach your monthly target of generated leads.
Best B2B Lead Generation Software
When it comes to picking the right B2B lead generation software, you want to make sure to pay attention to several aspects. Some of those aspects can include the features of the software, the monthly pricing, and additional personal preferences. For example, some B2B Lead Generation tools will allow you to share progress with your team, allowing everybody to be on the same page rather than having to share Excel files with the team and make the process even less manageable.
The monthly cost will mainly be applicable when you are on a budget. However, it is also important when you want to make sure that the total cost of all the software you are using isn’t exceeding that budget. Not every B2B lead generation tool will allow you to do all the work you want to do, while others cover the whole process from front to back. Note that, when you are using different software for different tasks, you will need to make sure these can be connected and automated to a certain degree. You could, for example, use tools like Zapier to combine lead generation software to a CRM, allowing you to move the generated verified leads to the sales team quickly.
In the world of B2B lead generation software, we speak of different types of software that cover specific tasks. Here’s a short list of examples of the different kinds of software that are currently available in the world of online lead generation:
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B2B Lead Capture Software Tools
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B2B Email Marketing Software
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B2B Lead Tracking Solutions
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B2B Sales Lead Validation Software
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B2B Lead Generation and Prospecting Software
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Sales Chatbots for B2B Lead Generation
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Social Proof for B2B Sales Leads
Software type | Purpose | Who is it for? | Advantages | Disadvantages |
B2B Lead Capture Software Tools | Creating landing pages or page pop-ups to collect visitor information | If you are in charge of generating new leads on your own website, by providing additional resources such as whitepapers |
| Some types of Lead Capture Software Tools require you to upload the data from the tool to your email marketing software, making it more difficult to fully automate the process |
B2B Email Marketing Software | Focused on marketing automation, this type of software can send cold emails or automated follow-ups to your leads - like Anyleads’ Emailing software | If you want to reach out to new leads automatically (even if they haven’t heard from you yet) or want to set up an email drip campaign, B2B Email Marketing Software is the right choice |
| If you are reaching out to customers in the European Union, it’s hard to fully qualify to the new GDPR guidelines when sending out cold outreach emails |
B2B Lead Tracking Solutions | Track all the visitor behavior through your visitor’s IP address or cookies | When you want to learn more about what pages your new leads are visiting, the B2B Lead Tracking Solutions can give you valuable information |
| Hard to implement when your website contains a limited number of pages. Some types of B2B Lead Tracking Solutions are hard to connect to your existing software, or it can be tricky to implement this solution in your regular workflow |
B2B Sales Lead Validation Software | Make sure that the leads you are generating belong to your target audience | When you want to make sure the leads you have captured and generated so far are within your preferred target audience, B2B Sales Lead Validation Software will help you out with specific filters and other personal criteria |
| In some cases, the B2B Sales Lead Validation Software uses outdated information, resulting in details about leads that aren’t accurate today |
B2B Lead Generation and Prospecting Software | Search through big databases of leads based on your own filters and criteria | When you want to find more leads based on filters and criteria of your current customers, B2B Lead Generation Prospecting Software will give you big lists of potential customers |
| Some platforms that allow you to generate and prospect B2B leads can be very expensive or use outdated company information |
Sales Chatbots for B2B Lead Generation | Set up a bot focused on generating new leads through your website or platforms like Facebook and Whatsapp | If you are in charge of validating leads and want to automatically generate them through your website, Sales Chatbots for B2B Lead Generation are a fantastic addition |
| Hard to set up properly as it requires some technical experience |
Social Proof for B2B Sales Leads | Provide additional proof and trust to new visitors on your website by showcasing current customers | When you feel like visitors to your website could use a nudge to take action and sign up for a trial or demo, Social Proof for B2B Sales Leads can be extremely valuable |
| If you are new to the market, it can be hard to use social proof as you might not have any social proof at all due to the limited number of customers |
B2B Lead Capture Software Tools
When it comes to Lead Capture Software Tools, you want to make sure that you are using software for different purposes. This allows you to do everything from a single dashboard, rather than having to sync new leads from one software to the other continuously.
B2B Lead Capture Software Tools are great at turning the traffic (like traffic from your digital marketing campaigns) on your homepage, blog, or about us page into actual leads. By providing them with offers such as a free whitepaper with best practices for doing their work better, you are giving the right incentive for them to leave their email address and other personal information. You can then use this personal information in your own lead dashboard to create a customer profile and send them over to your automated email drip campaign, allowing you to get more data about this specific lead.
It really depends on your own goals whether you should go very in-depth with this type of software. For example, you can just ask for an email address in exchange for the whitepaper. But you can also go as far as asking for:
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Their first name
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Last name
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Email address
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Company details
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Phone number
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Their role within the company.
By requesting more, you will have a lot more background information about this lead. Do take into account that asking for a lot of personal data might also result in a lower conversion rate, as people are usually less likely to fill in all the required information if there are multiple fields with information.
B2B Email Marketing Software
The world of B2B Email Marketing Software has two sides:
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the cold outreach type
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the drip type
Most cold outreach email marketing software can be used to send cold emails to companies that aren’t familiar with you. However, when running cold outreach campaigns, tread carefully. Do not use purchased lists full of contacts who really have nothing to do with the solution you are offering.
Instead, you should focus on getting a list of companies and email addresses of companies that are already somewhat familiar with your brand or company. With the cold outreach email marketing software, you can create a template including parameters (inputs for additional information you have about the lead), and the software will send out these emails automatically, every day. You can even include a small sequence, through which you will send a new email to the same lead three days later based on their behavior with the first email (such as unopened, opened, clicked, replied, etc.).
The drip email marketing software allows you to reach out to B2B leads who have signed up through a landing page (by downloading a whitepaper), filled out a contact form or used any other medium where they signed up for their email address. It allows you to, for example, send an email drip sequence to leads that recently signed up for a trial of your product or service. Drip email marketing campaigns are especially useful in giving insights and tips on how to use your product or service and can push the lead into scheduling a demo call - which means you can automatically forward it to your demo or sales team.
With B2B Email Marketing Software, you want to make sure you look for software that allows you to connect it to your lead database, along with your CRM. All the information, including the tracking of opens, clicks, and replies, will be synced between your different types of software. This will ensure a better way of tracking leads and validating them before you send them over to your sales team.
Some well-known examples of B2B Email Marketing Software Tools are:
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Anyleads
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SendInBlue
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MailChimp
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GetResponse
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Campaign Monitor
Anyleads
Anyleads’ email marketing software allows you to upload a list of new addresses (or directly load them from the Prospecting tool) to reach out to by using your own templates. It includes parameters, which means that you can use additional information about a lead within the email.
For example, if you have the first name and company name of the lead, you can automatically replace the parameter in the email with that lead’s information. Anyleads also allows you to assign different criteria to when the next email will be sent out, like directly when an email is opened, or wait for 72 before sending a follow-up email. It also comes with a Tracking tool, which allows you to set up rules regarding sending out emails when someone visits a specific page on your website.
SendInBlue
Initially a bulk email software, SendInBlue also offers personalized email outreach. You can create groups of leads and assign specific templates to go out at certain points in time. This is especially useful when you want to reach out to hundreds of leads at the same time.
MailChimp
Through MailChimp, you can send personalized emails to incoming leads or leads from a list you uploaded to MailChimp. Most features in MailChimp are focused on newsletters. However, through their personalized email software, you can create drip campaigns to send out to single leads or a whole list of leads.
GetResponse
When you want to send emails to new leads or leads that could use a bit of a reminder about your company, GetResponse is quite a solid choice. It allows you to upload a bulk list of leads or to send out personalized emails to single leads. Just like most other email marketing software tools, they will enable you to upload additional information to use it within the email itself.
CampaignMonitor
Though most companies use CampaignMonitor to send out newsletters to big lists of customers, you can also use the software to reach out with personalized emails. You can also set up drip campaigns based on specific criteria, such as visiting pages on your website. Within these drip campaigns, you can assign specific rules like sending a follow up after a certain amount of time or if your lead hasn’t opened the initial email yet.
Software | Automated emails | Track lead interaction | Score leads based on events | Add new leads easily | Forward leads to your CRM |
Anyleads | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
SendInBlue | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
MailChimp | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
GetReponse | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Campaign Monitor | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
B2B Lead Tracking Solutions
Your website is a goldmine when it comes to learning more about your leads. It’s the equivalent of tracking people in a store: you know the exact places your lead went, how long they were there, and what they found interesting.
As you can imagine, these tracking solutions will allow you to get a lot more insight into what your leads find valuable. These insights can then be used to send them more information by email, or it can directly be sent to the sales team. If a lead spends a lot of time on a specific feature page but visits the pricing page for less than a minute, it might mean your solution is interesting to them but too expensive right now.
Lead Tracking allows you to turn these events into more details about your lead. Then, your sales team can reach out to them to see if you can set up a call to discuss a discounted alternative.
There are different solutions for lead tracking. They all work with the same technology: they track the visitor behavior based on IP address or through cookies. By using a solution in your email marketing campaigns, you can identify every lead that visits your website. The dashboard of the Lead Tracking Software will then show you all the pages they have visited. You can even assign scores to specific pages internally, so a lead will receive an email or a call once they’ve visited enough pages to reach a specific score threshold.
B2B Sales Lead Validation Software
When obtaining new leads and reaching out to them, you want to make sure that you can ensure the quality of the leads. It’s great to reach out to 100 leads, but if 90 of these leads are not your perfect future customer, then you’re just wasting time.
When it comes to B2B lead generation, validating the leads is essential. You want to dedicate your most valuable resources to picking the right leads and signing new deals within this group of leads. Studies show that about half of website visits, that can be mistaken for leads, come from:
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Spam
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Sales solicitations
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Scoping out the competition
One way of validating leads is to find out whether their company details are fulfilling the criteria. For example, if you want to make sure that they have a big enough budget to buy your product or service, you should look at their annual revenue. Or, when someone signs up with an email address, you want to make sure that this email address is valid by using an email verifier.
B2B Lead Generation and Prospecting Software
Back in the day, most companies would buy a massive list of potential leads from a lead generation company. But these leads were often not qualified, or the company details were outdated. Today, several solutions allow you to upgrade your B2B lead generation to a professional level by using prospecting software yourself. Companies such as Anyleads provide a big list of potential leads with company details that are updated regularly. This means companies you are prospecting will always meet the criteria that you’ve set yourself.
Prospecting leads is easy and requires only a few clicks. You filter based on specific criteria, such as the company size, department, role, location, revenue, and tons of other details. This narrows down your list, so you only get the leads that you want. You can then download the personal or company details to reach out to the right person within the company.
Sales Chatbots for B2B Lead Generation
Though sales chatbots for B2B lead generation require some work, they can be a substantial additional asset in turning your visitors into actual leads. Most companies have a contact page with a contact form. This isn’t very interactive or unique.
By using a sales chatbot instead, you can get more information from your visitor while providing an interactive contact form. They can answer questions related to:
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The company size
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Their role in the company
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Personal information
Then, you can reach out to them and even forward visitors to the FAQ section on your website.
The primary purpose of sales chatbots within B2B lead generation is to filter the leads that are looking for someone to talk to. You can even forward them to specific customer success managers within your company, based on the criteria they give you in the chat. Anyleads’ Sales Chatbot can help you generate more B2B leads by embedding a simple chat widget on your website with only a few lines of code and some adjustments in the back-end.
Social Proof for B2B Sales Leads
When it comes to persuading visitors on your website, one of the essential elements is to show how other people are interacting with your company. If someone recently signed up for a trial, it must be something interesting, right?
Until a few years ago, it was hard to show this social proof, as most websites couldn’t give an up-to-date feed of interactions of the events happening on their website. Today, it’s just a matter of pasting a few lines of code and setting up events on your website.
This allows you to show that someone near your visitors signed up for a trial a few hours ago. Or you can show your visitors that company X just upgraded to the Platinum plan of your service or product. For example, Anyleads’ small social proof widgets pop up on the website, persuading new visitors to do the same.
Social proof is powerful when it comes to generating B2B leads, as people are more likely to leave personal information when they see other people doing it as well. It’s like seeing ten people walking around with Starbucks cups, making it more likely for you to want to visit the Starbucks location closest to you.
Software | Automate notifications | Use localization based on user’s location | Set up multiple events to display | Fully customize the look of the widget | Unlimited notifications |
Anyleads | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
FOMO | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
ProofFactor | Yes | No | Yes | No | No |
ProveSource | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Provely | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |