Sales Tech Tools to Optimize Your Lead Generation Strategy

Lead generation is critical for small and medium enterprises to enable them to grow their businesses. Increasing leads indicate growth in brand awareness and interest in your products or services. However, choosing a reliable lead generation tool is a challenging task. 

Where to Start Your Sales Tech Tool Search

The market is awash with various CRM tools that promise the best results, but they are not created equal. Picking a lead generation tool should not be a matter of trial and error. Instead, develop a strategy for lead generation. This means before you start the process of searching for sales tech tools, you must:

• Identify your business goals, which help you determine why you need to generate more leads. Be sure you have defined what constitutes a good lead for your company. 
• Assess deficiencies by identifying the areas of your lead generation process that need improvement .
• Get feedback from the sales team. What challenges do they face as they try to convert leads into customers, and how can you make it easier for them? Which marketing strategies work best, and how can you improve them?

It's crucial to work on these factors before embarking on a search for the best tech tools.  The next step is to identify the tools you need for each lead generation stage. For example, are you trying to create awareness about your products or services? Do you want to gain valuable data about the visitors to your site? Is your aim to make your leads more engaged with your business? 

Depending on what you want to achieve, there are various tools you can use at each level. In this guide, we classify them as foundational, research, and outreach tools. Let's delve into each category. 

Foundational Lead Generation Tools 

Having a customer relationship management tool is not just an application of technology, but a strategy to understand your customers more deeply. It helps you identify their needs and behaviors, enabling you to create stronger relationships with them. An effective CRM provides the significant benefit of allowing you to develop better relations with new customers, leading to:

• Identification of the profitable customers and those that are not.
• Identification of their needs to better understand their specific requirements.
• Effective targeted marketing communication that meets their particular needs.
• A personalized approach to the development of new or improved products or services. 

Pipedrive

One highly rated and effective CRM tool is Pipedrive. It comes with advanced features to help small businesses achieve efficient reporting. In addition to being a customer relationship management tool, it also works as an account-management tool. It can assist your business with the entire process of marketing and sales. Its ability to visualize the sales process from start to finish is one attractive feature that every small business should leverage in lead generation. 

The tool has a straightforward user interface that is simple to pick up compared to the time and expense other software require for onboarding. Its pricing model comes in three tiers, each with different provisions. 

Other CRMs we think are comparable include:

• Apptivo CRM 
• Insightly CRM 
• Zoho CRM 
• Salesforce CRM

Research Tools in Lead Generation 

Market research is vital as it helps you enact improvements in your lead generation activities. It provides you with the information you need before implementing any business decision. However, acquiring the figures and facts you need is a different story altogether.

This is where marketing tools come in to do all the work of collecting raw market data. They help you determine who is visiting your website and how long they stay on certain pages. This data helps you identify the information that appeals to them the most. Some recommendable market research tools in lead generation include:

Sales Navigator 

This tool from LinkedIn is effective for lead generation. It features Google-like search for leads relevant to your business. It makes your lead generation work easier through the Lead Builder feature. Here, you can enter the criteria for your leads, like job titles and location. The title will create a list of all potential prospects, which you can save for later use. 

By integrating the tool with Salesforce, all the data will easily flow into your CRM for seamless access. You may also use specific keywords to find leads that are not obvious but who might be interested in your products. This information is valuable for creating personalized pitches for your prospects. 

LeadFeeder

LeadFeeder is a B2B website tracking software that shows you the companies that are visiting your site. You'll also learn how they found you, including the search terms they used to get to your website and the pages they liked. It is a lead generation tool that also provides account-based marketing and sales intelligence capabilities rolled into one. The best part is that you can easily integrate it with other tools like:

• Mailchimp
• Google Analytics 
• Pipedrive
• Salesforce
• HubSpot, among others 

Outreach Tools 

Outreach is one tricky part of lead generation, but you can achieve your business goals with ease when using the right tool. Most tools are designed for email outreach campaigns, but others can help with social media outreach. Here are a couple of examples. 

SalesLoft 

SalesLoft is a platform that creates an engine for your sales team to navigate the sales process and communicate with customers for ongoing success. The tool guides and automates the sales process by providing the insights your business needs for exceptional outcomes. 

SalesLoft is not a CRM or marketing tool, but is specifically designed for sales engagement. Use it to orchestrate mail, schedule meetings and calls with potential clients, and interact with them from anywhere. With this tool, you can automatically track and log your tasks and engagement data to your CRM. This way, the sales team can focus on selling, operation teams can focus on strategy, and managers can focus on coaching. 

Sumo

This tool comes with a whole range of useful social media and traffic tools to help you improve your marketing strategy. One of the outstanding features is the social share function that allows visitors to your site to share your content to social media. The tool also keeps track of the number of shares. 

Final Thoughts on Lead Generation

Having the right tech stack for lead generation can help your small business grow in leaps and bounds. Foundational, research, and outreach tools help you reach your prospective customers depending on where they are in their buyer journey. 

However, don't expect tech tools to fix all the deficiencies on your sales team. While they can greatly increase your efficiency, real sales success starts much deeper within an organization. Read one of our recent sales tip posts entitled: "Don't Believe in a Miracle Cure" to learn more about how to bring real change to your sales organization. 

If you'd like more insights on how you can improve the lead generation process, contact us or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources. 

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