18 Best Lead Generation Software to Ramp Up Your Sales

Lead generation software, as the name implies, is a specific type of software used to generate leads for your business. Leads are defined as potential customers who have shown interest in buying your products or services.

No matter the size of your business, finding consistent, high-quality leads can be a time-consuming exercise.

Lead generation software helps you automate the process of attracting leads and collecting information so you can later reach out and help them along their buyer journey.

But to say that that’s all lead generation software can do is to seriously limit its scope. Today, lead generation software is extremely sophisticated and there’s a lot more you can do with it to lead potential customers to a sale.

(Or skip straight to the lead generation software below.)

What is lead generation software?

Before digital marketing campaigns became a thing, salespeople would often use a few tested methods to find leads: scouring directories, networking, or asking for customer referrals. Businesses had to manually track, record, and manage their leads.

But with everyone going online, lead generation software can be the key differentiator that sets you apart from the competition.

Today’s best lead generation software is highly sophisticated. It helps you collect leads, using any variety of chatbots, pop-ups, sticky bars, or even full landing pages to draw in potential customers.

But lead generation software doesn’t stop there. It also automatically qualifies and sends the best leads to the right team members to facilitate their purchase.

You can then track where leads are at different stages of your sales funnel. And in most cases, the software can be easily integrated with existing tools in your tech stack (e.g., survey platforms, landing page software, email marketing tools).

Use cases for lead generation software

With so much potential for using lead generation software, it can be a bit intimidating to get started. To better see how this type of software works, here are two examples of when a business might turn to lead generation software:

Use case 1: Company X has been experiencing a growth spurt in the last quarter. Because of the increased traffic to their site, they are unsure about how to prioritize and measure the quality of leads at scale. They are also struggling with managing and tracking all these new leads. One solution would be to consider using a lead generation software tool to help the company deal with the new influx of leads.

Use case 2: Company Y wants to generate leads, but also wants to know more context about the leads they’re getting – the type of business, the total revenue, any recent partnerships, etc. Since many of its leads actually start as website visitors, the company also wants a way to track the landing page and other site data. A lead generation tool can be used to collect all this important information, and bring it all together in one place for the team to see.

Benefits of lead generation software

The ability to attract leads is the backbone of any business. Lead generation software helps you do exactly that – consistently, automatically, and at scale.

There are many benefits to using lead generation software, but here are some of the most important ones worth noting:

• Qualify leads based on data that matters most to your business: Capture accurate client information from the first point of contact on your website, and personalize the sales journey based on each individual’s specific behavior.
• Automate routine sales tasks: Keep your sales funnel on schedule with automatic reminders, email campaigns, meeting notifications, and more. .
• Measure, adjust, and streamline sales activity: Use the in-depth analytics available in most lead generation software to streamline your sales pipeline.
• Easily scale your lead generation efforts: Set your tracking points, sales funnel steps, and other metrics, then let the software run on its own and scale to accommodate any fluctuations in incoming leads.
• Expand your lead generation channels: Automate routine tasks and free up your team to explore other possible sources of new leads.
• Increase focus on relationship-building: Spend more time building lasting relationships with your existing customers, who might then start referring others and become an added source of lead generation.
• Integrate with CRM and other sales tools: Effortlessly combine the expertise of all of your most important systems and workflows.

Is lead generation software right for you?

By now, you’re probably thinking lead generation software is a must-have for any type of business. After all, more leads = more sales = more profit.

However, there are certain cases where lead generation software provides the most benefit. In a nutshell, lead generation software helps optimize and scale your lead generation. But you should already have a solid foundation in place.

Lead generation software can greatly help your sales team, but is by no means a complete replacement.

Before considering lead generation software, map out and analyze your current process. Where does your team spend an unnecessary amount of time? What routine steps can easily be automated?

These answers only come from having first-hand knowledge of how your leads become your customers – for your business. You should have a basic understanding of what factors make a qualified lead, what are the best steps to nurture those leads, and how you want to lead them along your sales funnel.

Lead generation software is also most useful if your entire sales funnel can be completed online, as it’s much easier to track actions, data, and integrate with other platforms.

With your lead generation strategy in tow, the right software can help you easily collect data, align your marketers and sales teams, and view all key data to turn those leads into customers.

Alternatives to lead generation software

After reading through the previous sections, maybe you realize lead generation software isn’t a good fit for you. There are a lot of other good alternatives that can help you grow your customer base. Here are a few to look into:

• Affiliate marketing software programs to accelerate growth
• Best referral program software services you can try
• Top customer engagement software to choose from
• Digital marketing software: Landscape of the top tools

The evaluation criteria

Our team has researched and compiled the best lead generation software tools. Read how we evaluated our list, and then browse through the reviews below:

18 best lead generation software tools

Now that you know the basics of lead generation software, let’s dive into the actual tools. We’ve rounded up the top 18 lead generation software tools (which includes some free lead generation software, too) to consider for your business.

Below, you’ll find a quick overview for each tool, complete with their best features and pricing structures.

Note: The software is not listed in any order of rank or recommendation. Our aim is to put together a selected source of online community solutions, and give a clear picture of all the available options.

HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot’s Sales Hub software is an all-in-one platform that helps you close more sales and efficiently manage your pipeline. It offers an exhaustive list of marketing features, including a CRM, engagement tools, quote functionality, analytics, and reporting – all which can be seamlessly integrated with HubSpot’s App Marketplace. HubSpot’s Sales Hub solution simplifies the lead generation process and makes it entirely friction-free.

Key features

• Email templates and tracking: Convert your best-performing sales emails into templates that can be customized and shared across your team.
• Conversation intelligence: Instantly capture all details during a call, and then use AI-powered insights to track progress and identify opportunities.
• Track emails, calls, and documents: Track the exact second a lead opens your message, log all calls directly from your browser, and build a library of useful sales content.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is primarily an email marketing services provider, but its additional ecommerce, website, and social marketing features can help online businesses also generate leads. The software gives you enhanced marketing features from within the context of an email solution, aiming to help amplify your lead generation ROI.

Key features

• Smart email marketing automation: Engage customers in the best way, with welcome emails, triggered email series, contact segmentation, automated resending, and powerful list-building tools to engage and generate leads.
• Easy contact list management: Upload contact lists from Excel, Salesforce, or any other platform you use – even via website or social media. Then create custom segments to better engage on a personal level.
• Email Plus options: Go beyond the inbox and connect with your customers through live events, charities, online surveys, and more.

Marketo Engage

Marketo Engage is a product developed by the well-known multimedia and creativity software company, Adobe. Marketo Engage helps simplify your buyer journey and get measurable results by creating customer experiences that engage and attract repeat visits. The robust platform offers lead generation, as well as marketing automation, email marketing, and revenue attribution.

Key features

• Customize the lead’s experience: A combination of AI and consolidated data gives you exhaustive capabilities to segment, refine your customer profiles, and engage leads based on their intent and behavior.
• Access to impact analytics: Use pre-build dashboards and intelligent reports to gain visibility and optimize your customer experience.
• Full sales cycle coordination: Streamline a single workflow that empowers your marketing and sales team, leading to increased productivity and speed to sales.

Pardot

Pardot (part of Salesforce) is a B2B marketing automation tool that helps companies of all sizes create meaningful connections, generate more sales from their pipeline, and empower teams to close more deals. The software is ideal for financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, and media industry verticals. Pardot aims to help businesses exceed their revenue targets, align sales and marketing teams, and efficiently use existing resources.

Key features

• Streamlined lead management: Reach the right customers at the right time with intelligent lead nurturing, lead qualification, segmentation and automation, and dynamic content.
• Smarter lead generation: Keep your pipeline flowing by launching beautiful branded landing pages and smart forms – all with easy-to-use templates and builders.
• Seamless sales alignment: Align the sales and marketing teams with real-time alerts, in-depth B2B lead activity tracking, and easy third-party integrations.

Intercom

Intercom helps you build relationships with potential customers through conversational business messaging. While it offers customizable chatbots, apps, and product tours, the platform also extends to other messaging tools, like email lists and help center development. Intercom caters to mid-market , enterprise, small business, early-stage, financial services, ecommerce, and education verticals.

Key features

• Conversational marketing: Intelligent bots are deployed to generate smart routing and lead qualifications, shortening the time between intent and purchase.
• Conversational support: Make use of a whole host of messaging tools to create personalized customer experiences through business messenger, inbox, or even self-service support tickets.
• Conversational engagement: Amazing engagement features bring new customers onboard, with announcements and other messages sent from inside the product itself.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive describes itself as “the first CRM platform made for salespeople, by salespeople.” Born out of a market gap identified by its founders, the platform is a great CRM and lead generation software that helps prioritize your deals, track performance, and predict revenue. It’s designed to focus your team’s efforts where it matters – on selling to the right deals.

Key features

• A visual sales pipeline: Easily manage all your leads and deals with a visual, customizable sales pipeline that brings everything together in one place.
• Optimize the lead generation process: Track all key communication, automate any repetitive tasks, and gain insight through in-depth reporting to boost your overall sales.
• AI-powered sales assistant: An AI sales mentor helps boost your performance, with personalized tips, automation recommendations, and notifications to keep you on track.

Keap

Keap provides a full-blown, end-to-end CRM and sales and marketing platform notable for the amount of time it saves you by “eliminating business chaos.” Previously known as Infusionsoft, the platform draws from over 20 years of sales knowledge to help you collect more leads, convert more clients, and create more fans.

Key features

• Sales and marketing automation: An advanced automation builder allows you to design any sales or marketing process automation to fit your exact business needs.
• Valuable insights and analytics: See all your lead sources, sales stage, and other key data points in a visual format that makes it easy to analyze and draw insights.
• Seamless pipeline management: Capture leads and then manage and track all their activity throughout the sales cycle on a central, customizable dashboard.

Drift

Drift was designed to deliver real-time personal customer experiences, with the end-result of increased revenues, shortened sales cycles, and increased brand visibility. The revenue acceleration platform aims to transform the way businesses connect with their customers, and is perfect for “the curious, the determined, the creators, and the problem solvers.”

Key features

• Drift Intel: Instantly uncover qualified leads and accounts (without any messy inbound forms!), so you can deliver personalized experiences from the moment visitors arrive at your site.
• Virtual selling assistants: Make use of patented AI-powered chatbots to engage customers in multiple languages, 24/7/365, no matter where they are across the globe.
• Drift Prospector: Prioritize your target accounts, pool together lead behavior insights from every account, and give your team direct access to follow up – all from a single interface.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is one of the most popular tools in the market for increasing your conversion rates and monetizing your website traffic. It works at three levels – creating a stunning visual offer, targeting and personalizing offers with behavior automation, and then testing and adjusting in real-time. OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation software tool that comes at a very affordable price.

Key features

• Simplified A/B testing: Save yourself the guesswork by testing different headlines, content, and layouts to see what best converts your leads into customers.
• Advanced retargeting and redirection: Fine-tune your funnel with custom cookie retargeting, or even send special offers and promotions to unique returning visitors.
• Exit-intent technology: Don’t let any leads go unnoticed, and maximize conversions and sales based on your visitor’s actions.

D&B Hoovers

D&B Hoovers is a sales acceleration solution that provides a faster path from prospect to profitable relationship. B2B sales professionals can leverage key data and analytics to engage with customers and grow their business faster. Plus, Hoovers helps by enhancing the entire sales process thanks to its intuitive interface and automated workflow features.

Key features

• Identify and focus on the best opportunities: Access over 175 unique search filters and refine your own lead target SmartList, which dynamically updates with new information.
• Target qualified opportunities: Cutting-edge analytic features provide all the necessary information about a company’s financial health, purchasing patterns, credit, and financial activities to identify the best-quality leads.
• Have informed conversations: An intuitive and dynamic user interface enables you to set up alerts, triggers, and profiles that leverage all types of important data.

Prospect

Prospect is a sales automation platform that helps businesses increase the productivity of their outbound sales team. How does it do this? By building prospect lists, automating outbound marketing messages, creating task lists, and analyzing your entire sales process and performance. The company aims to make prospecting less boring, and more effective for your company.

Key features

• Email list building and subscribers: Find your best lead’s email using the platform’s app, Chrome extension, or their own REST API. Then, send a personalized message at the time that’s guaranteed to get a response.
• Optimized workflows: Don’t waste time jumping from tool to tool, or repeating any unnecessary tasks. Instead, use integrations and two-way syncs, and find everything you need to speed up sales on one platform.
• Keep your leads on track: Track every open, click, reply, bounce, and conversion, as well as your own team’s performance, with real-time statistics.

Lusha

Lusha is a free lead generation software made with sales in mind. As a lightweight browser extension, it aims to create a “Waze for salespeople,” where you can identify and engage with your best prospects. By giving you access to company and contact information in seconds, the data-driven platform helps you shorten your sales cycle and close more deals.

Key features

• Convenient browser extension: Use the tool with just a few clicks with its multi-platform browser extension, compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
• Laser-targeted prospecting: Apply advanced search filters to build a highly accurate prospect list, and access 100 million business profiles, 15 million company profiles, and other valuable intel.
• Seamless API integration: Make the most of your data by sharing it with any database, system, or app to share with your team.

Datanyze

Datanyze offers a Google Chrome extension built for B2B businesses that want to collect email addresses directly from websites and Linkedin profiles. The platform currently offers data intelligence for up to 120 million people, which can be exported directly from Chrome. With all this essential information, Datanyze is one of the best free lead generation tools that offers accuracy and convenience without ever leaving your browser.

Key features

• Easy data capture and export: Pull up company and contact data right where you are, whether it’s a business website or LinkedIn account – all in real-time.
• Generate useful data: Easily tag, categorize, and segment each new business and contact so it’s readily available for your sales team.
• Icebreakers to warm up cold calls: Access a number of icebreakers, drawn from social media feeds and current events, that can help lead to meaningful conversations and connections.

Unbounce

Unbounce is a custom landing page builder that’s easy-to-use, but comes with advanced marketing features to get you the best possible conversions.The platform currently offers one of the best lead generation tools, specializing in landing page, popups, and sticky bar conversions. With easy site integrations and click tracking, the solution is ideal for ecommerce, SaaS, and agencies.

Key features

• High-converting landing pages: Build a landing page proven to convert without any development experience, using a drag-and-drop interface, over 100 templates, custom messaging and much more.
• Smart traffic feature: Use AI-powered optimization to automagically route your site visitors to the best landing page for the best conversion, based on their unique attributes.
• Target and trigger options: Present the most relevant sales pitch at the perfect time, with popups and sticky bars that offer more conversion opportunities.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is business intelligence software that helps B2Bs achieve their top objective – profitable growth. The software does this by identifying, engaging, and closing your most ideal buyers. With a 360-degree view of the entire marketing and sales strategy, businesses are able to prospect, generate potential leads, manage data, and hit their sales numbers.

Key features

• Buyer intent engine: Capture consumption patterns and buying signals across your site, allowing you to easily discover prospects who are actively looking for the solution you provide.
• ZoomInfo FormComplete: A special tool that upgrades your lead forms, reduces bounce rates, and converts more website visitors with less fields.
• ZoomInfo WebSights: Learn more about your visitors and turn their intent into action, automating routine actions and prioritizing the outreach that matters most.

Clearbit

Clearbit prioritizes using the best data to power your entire business. That said, they use a combination of machine learning and manual quality assurance to ensure their data is never more than 30 days old. Clearbit strives to provide best-in-class data for the entire customer lifecycle, whether its the perfect outreach campaign or important alerts on potential churn risks.

Key features

• Clearbit Reveal: Learn more about your anonymous traffic so you can truly understand who is going to your site, which content is successfully attracting leads, and deliver a targeted experience to each visitor.
• Clearbit Enrichment: Add up-to-date data about the contacts and companies in your sales funnel, allowing your entire team to access anything they need, anytime they need it.
• Clearbit Prospector: Access 200 million contacts at 20 million companies so you can fill your sales pipeline with fresh leads in minutes.

Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder is specifically designed to identify the companies that visit your site, how they discovered you, and what they’re interested in. Focusing on web analytics and intelligence, the platform captures key information that other lead generation software may be missing out on. Plus, the company also offers a free lead generation software option so you can experience its state-of-the-art tracking scripts first-hand.

Key features

• Identify and track anonymous traffic: Turn anonymous visitors into real companies, with names, contact information, and other key activity information.
• Easily score and qualify leads: Automatically perform lead scoring based on their industry, job title, web activity, and other custom properties so you can focus on high-value decision makers with the greatest intent.
• Automate your lead generation: Send all qualified sales leads to your CRM or other marketing software, and integrate the entire lead generation process into your existing sales process.

Leadfuze

Leadfuze describes itself as “a search engine for leads.” Its AI-driven lead generation software uses sophisticated built-in crawling and third-party partners to deliver highly accurate contact information. Leadfuze currently has access to over 500 million profiles and 10 million companies, and caters specifically to sales, marketing, and recruitment segments.

Key features

• List-building on autopilot: A blend of AI and automation delivers everything you need to generate leads and sales, without any other tools needed. Fuzebot, the platform’s AI assistant, automatically adds leads right into your CRM or other tools.
• Hyper-targeted lead information: Choose from market-based search, which runs general industry queries, or account-based search, for specific individuals or market segments anywhere in the world.
• Lead intelligence that actually matters: Get updates on new partnerships, staff changes, expansions, and other key lead data that helps you seal more deals.

Conclusion

As you can see, lead generation software is a worthwhile addition to any business tech stack. You’ll be able to generate more high-quality leads, manage them much more effectively, and increase the flow of customers through every stage of your sales cycle.