What are the best lead generation tools?

I will let you be the judge of the best lead generation tool, but I will help you decide based on some important parameters.

But before that, a little validation so that you don’t end up spending your money on the wrong tool & your time on the wrong approach.

Lead generation for B2B

Lead generation from B2B is different from B2C, the simple reason being the fact that businesses operate differently, there are several decision makers at different levels and a long process before they buy anything from another business.

Since your customers are a business, you will have to knock on a lot of doors before you even get in touch with someone with enough decision power.

Lead generation for B2B is difficult but worth the try.

Lead generation for B2C

Lead generation for B2C is easier when compared to B2B, at least from an execution standpoint. You simply search for the target profession/demographic/ethnicity and get in touch with them one by one. You pitch your product/service and based on your conversation with them, you either learn or make a sale.

The more people you get in touch with, the better will be your conversion rate. On average, any business can expect 3–4 percent conversion from lead generation campaigns. Now you do the math, you want to convert 4 percent of 1000 or 100,000.

Do you really need tools for lead generation?

If you go by the traditional way, lead generation simply involves attracting the right audience. The traditional way is majorly inbound. You create a lead magnet, do such marketing magic, people come to know about the lead magnet, they exchange their contact (most probably, email), in exchange for the lead magnet, and then you reach out to them for sales.

The lead generation tools eliminate the reason to have a lead magnet (which costs time and money) and directly present you, leads for outbound marketing. So in my opinion, lead generation tools are majorly outbound.

So if you have a lead magnet, no you don’t need tools to generate leads. You need traffic. If you don’t have a lead magnet, you do need tools. Easy?

The problems with manual lead generation

The reality isn’t that beautiful. The first problem you will face is where to find your target audience. Depending on your business model, you can (& should) begin with social media platforms.

The next problem you will face is getting in touch with the ideal audience. Say for example, on Linkedin, if you don’t have a sales navigator account, you can’t view profiles of more than 100 people per day. If you’re new to the platform, the number is even lower.

The rate at which you can get in touch with your audience is very low hence killing the whole purpose of lead generation. Again, if your average ticket size is higher and even converting one or two leads into sales is good enough, you don’t have to worry about generating more.

The real problem with lead generation is scalability. You can do only so much manually, and the process is very tiring to continue doing it manually for a long time.

Solution?

Use tools that can generate leads for you, and that’s the meat of this answer. Let’s take a look at it now.

Disclaimer: The tools I will suggest will not generate sales for you. You will still have to have a strong strategy that you’d have for a manual approach anyways.

Parameters of best lead generation tool

I don’t know anything about your business needs. I have no idea the reason you even need to generate leads. So, I have four parameters based on which you can decide the best tool to generate leads for your own business.

Let’s begin

1. Efficiency: How reliable is the tool to generate leads? What’s the uptime?
2. Quality: The results you will generate from leads depend on the quality of leads. That’s majorly dependent on you, but the tool shouldn’t generate irrelevant leads because of the bugs. You don’t pay for the bugs.
3. Ease of use: How easy it is to replace manual actions with a piece of code? We’re talking about changing the behavior/habit of people.
4. Automation: The tool should continue to generate leads for you while you sleep.

Best lead generation tool

The bad worker always blames his tools. But if the tool has its own brain, the worker wouldn’t blame the tool in spite of being bad.

Tools with a brain are part of the automation ecosystem. Automation is a fairly new concept and since a very large portion of lead generation happens on social media, the platforms are very well aware of such tools and discourage their presence.

First, the lead generation tool does nothing but scrape data from social platforms, which they don’t like. Second, the data that’s being scraped is a commodity to those platforms, which they don’t want to dilute.

Lead generation tools are like Robinhood, they take from the rich and give it to the less rich (yes! you’re not poor, you’re just less rich)

So who’s that Robinhood?

I’ve been using TexAu for a year now. I was jobless in Mar’2021 (I lost my business), I’ve got a job, leads for my business, and a lot of contacts on LinkedIn & Twitter as part of my networking treasure.

The tool has come a long way. There are over 180+ automation across various social media platforms, you can create a complex workflow to meet specific requirements, you can schedule automation to generate leads while you sleep, keep the engagement going while you’re not even active on social platforms, and much much more.

Here’s how I’d rate TexAu on the above mentioned parameters:

In terms of efficiency, the tools have very good uptime. You can rely on the scheduled automations. However, there are some automations that don’t work something, but that’s okay, that’s the evolution curve. So it’s 7.5 out of 10.

In terms of quality, I have not faced any unfamiliar results from the automations. There were anomalies but that’s because of the social platforms themselves. So it’s 9 out of 10.

In terms of ease of use, texau is a little difficult, but you aren’t a veteran of WWI so yeah, you will catch up pretty soon. So I’d rate 9 on 10.

In terms of Automation, I’d rate TexAu 10 on 10. The workflows that you can create are way more powerful than you can think of. I think it’s their USP. The tool is built to create specific workflows that can’t be predetermined.

So there you have it. I’m not a huge fan of giving too many choices and making your decisions making power weaker.

There are alternatives, but you can decide on the parameters mentioned above. I’ve saved you some time (your welcome ;)) to find and judge the lead generation tools from the web.