Raise your hand if you’ve spent hours buying lead lists and launching cold email campaigns looking for qualified prospects. 🙋We’ve been there.
In fact, according to ViB’s recent B2B marketing trends report, the two biggest challenges marketers are facing this year are improving lead quality and conversion rates (54%) and generating more leads (41%).
In other words, excelling in the basics of B2B marketing is still a daily challenge. Running successful B2B lead generation campaigns is overwhelming and quite frankly, takes up so much of your valuable time.
Through trial and error, we’ve compiled a list of the most effective B2B lead generation tools that span across different areas of your lead generation strategy. Our goal — to help you outpace your competitors and keep your B2B sales pipeline full.
So what do these B2B lead generation tools do?
Each of these tools specifically addresses different areas of the marketing funnel – helping you develop integrated campaigns that cohesively work together to build brand recognition, nurture leads through their buying journey, and encourage action for a successful sales close.
Whether you’re here to evaluate various B2B lead generation companies, or simply want some inspiration on what B2B lead generation strategies you can start incorporating, we’ve got you covered.
1. Best Full-funnel Demand Generation Tools: ViB
If you’re in high-tech, ViB is the go-to demand generation partner offering comprehensive full-funnel B2B lead generation services that leverage an online platform called the ViB Community.
With a white-glove touch to their solutions and an impressive 84% customer retention rate, the ViB team is dedicated to helping your company grow while also saving you money.
What makes ViB’s demand generation solutions different?
It all lies in the approach. The ViB Community is a network of millions of tech professionals from some of the industry’s most powerful and recognizable companies.
Unlike conventional B2B data providers or web scraping tools, prospects voluntarily join the community to discover emerging tech. In fact, ViB has been growing and nurturing these relationships with millions of tech profiles for over 10 years.
ViB delivers its range of lead generation solutions via a ViB Community portal. There, they match B2B marketers with targeted buyers who have opted in to discover emerging tech in their industries and according to their interests — i.e. real, nurtured leads actively looking for your solutions.
ViB’s full-funnel demand-generation services and tools include:
1 – B2B Email Lead Generation
The flagship solution, ViB Emails, resends any existing email you have to your ideal customers from your targeted high-tech industries. The best part? It’s delivered as an end-to-end service, where ViB takes care of email deliverability and lead capture. This helps you enter inboxes of high-value accounts and fill your funnel with fresh leads especially if you’re in a time and resource crunch.
2 – B2B Content Syndication
Unlike B2B content syndication providers that typically charge by impressions or clicks, ViB Syndication seamlessly matches your assets with the right buyers with a pay-per-lead model. This way, you get a more assured ROI with your current assets by having a clear lead deliverable, and contact information you can action on.
3 – B2B Appointment Setting
ViB Appointments helps you schedule appointments that actually turn into opportunities, without a call-center. Gone are the days of training outsourced SDRs and hard-selling over a cold call. And, attract real interest while lowering your CPL (cost per lead) by over 2x.
4 – B2B Event Marketing and Promotion
With ViB Webinars, get a full-service webinar with a targeted audience without wasting your valuable resources. ViB will plan, promote, host, track, and deliver a guaranteed number of leads to each session, making it way easier to scale an webinar marketing strategy regardless of your resources.
5 – B2B Market Research
Leverage ViB’s network of millions of industry professionals to generate original, credible research with ViB Research. Co-design research questions with ViB’s team of researchers and analysts to ensure you’re generating the research report you need. And once you’re armed with original insights, turn them into valuable, shareable pieces of thought leadership content to further educate and drive more leads.
The best leads come from quality sources you can trust. Explore how the ViB Community can generate your warmest leads today.
This ecosystem of demand generation solutions seamlessly address various functions of your marketing strategy.
Whether you’re looking to increase awareness and fill the top of your funnel, or to create engaging touchpoints, or even cut to the chase and generate qualified meetings, ViB can solve any challenge or frustration you’re experiencing while saving your team’s valuable time.
2: Best Sales Intelligence Tool: ViB Deal Discovery
ViB Deal Intent is a new, innovative approach to B2B lead generation that we’re excited about.
Unlike their counterparts, ViB’s new Deal Intent solution is a stage-specific sales lead generation service, meaning they help sales and marketing teams find and capture middle to bottom-of-funnel leads.
What makes middle to bottom-of-funnel leads so different? These prospects are actively comparing and evaluating solutions your company is offering, meaning they are much closer to a potential close.
Plus, Deal Intent comes with an important deliverable — deal intelligence. While verifying leads, ViB sources valuable insights that are explicitly given by the leads themselves, including:
- Confirmation of interest
- Budget restraints
- Decision timeline
- Buyer committee role
- Competitors being considered
- Contact information and consent to be contacted
These nuggets are information are typically impossible to get, unless you have a strong pre-existing relationship with a prospect. And that’s exactly how ViB delivers this solution.
How does it actually work?
ViB leverages their community of millions of tech professionals to identify contacts as they move through the buying journey.
ViB Deal Discovery invites their community members who match your company’s requirements to participate in research around their buying priorities. Every applicant is then screened and removed if they do not meet the requirements. After obtaining these insights, ViB groups the most relevant leads together. With the recently gathered information, your company receives a list of leads that are actively looking for your solutions. The information ensures your company has a highly productive first touch.
Appointments
Generate pipeline by meeting prospects who match your ideal customer profile
Syndication
Generate new content downloads with leads who may never find you organically
Deal Intent
Generate leads with active projects, and explicit intent data from the source
Webinars
Generate a fully planned live or simulated live webinar with a lead guarantee
3. Best Email Marketing Tool: Mailchimp
As a B2B marketer, email marketing is a core function to reach and engage with your audience. The more features in your email marketing toolstack, the better.
That means robust automation capabilities for personalized and timely follow-ups, as well as detailed analytics to track and measure campaign performance and optimize email marketing lead generation.
Mailchimp is a marketing automation and email marketing platform designed to increase your bottom line through targeted lead generation.
This tool is unique for its user-friendly interface, extensive integration capabilities, and marketing automation features, making it a versatile all-in-one platform for email marketing and audience engagement.
For example, you can dispatch a series of automated emails based on actions taken by your subscribers. So, your team can create automated workflows that do the heavy lifting for you – to save time and increase team efficiency.
By sending the right emails at the right time, B2B marketers have seen a drastic improvement in email open rates, click-through rates, and overall conversions.
Unlike other email platforms, Mailchimp ensures deliverability, meaning your highly tailored emails actually get seen. You can also manage email marketing campaigns individually or through an omni-channel structure; their platform retains all your data in one place.
With advanced analytics, you can track, analyze and optimize your impact. If your team uses analytics platforms like Google Analytics or Shopify Analytics, you can integrate them to have a comprehensive view of your campaign performance to help design a repeatable B2B marketing strategy over time.
4: Best Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool: Salesforce
As a sales or marketing team, one of the biggest fears we face is letting a valuable prospect or customer fall through the cracks.With multiple accounts and stakeholders to manage, each requiring unique sales activations or follow-ups, it’s easy to become disorganized.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Salesforce is a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that designs workflows for obtaining customer data, sales pipelines, and marketing campaigns. They also offer seamless integrations with third-party applications.
This CRM tool also provides one of the most comprehensive reporting features in the game, enabling seamless opportunity tracking, nurturing, and conversion.
Team members can access Salesforce on any device (mobile, desktop, and tablet) and allow you to create business frameworks that fit your needs — everything is tailored to fit your goals and KPIs.
The biggest benefit?
Salesforce’s customization-friendliness helps your team automate your sales and marketing systems which result in higher lead captures. Not only that, but it’s also designed to grow as you do. Whether your business model changes completely or departments’ processes change, Salesforce is easily manipulated to be as effective for you as possible.
5: Best Social Media Tool: Hootsuite
It’s easy to view social media as a “must-have” part of your marketing strategy while also questioning how much of a difference it truly makes.
Social media allows companies to establish valuable relationships with PR companies and other thought leaders in their industry. And, it allows customers a comfortable platform to share insights and give feedback. We like to call this the Social Value Chain.
Increasing your social value, or how your prospective customers view your company, builds brand credibility and leads to a higher conversion rate.
One of the most effective social media publishing and monitoring platforms is Hootsuite.
Hootsuite allows you to create, schedule, and publish content from a single dashboard. With its machine learning capabilities, it tells you the best times and days to post, leading to a higher engagement rate. This helps you save hours of monotonous work by planning content out as far in advance as you’d like.
Their robust engagement tools allow your team to funnel messages from every network together in one space. Go one step further and set up listening streams to stay ahead of the curve and join conversations happening within your target market.
Say goodbye to wasted and ineffective time and enjoy a platform that automates and personalizes conversations with prospects in real time.
6. Best Prospecting and Sales Outreach Tool: Outreach
While CRM tools handle customer interactions throughout the sales process, B2B outreach and prospecting tools are specialized for lead discovery and capture, enhancing the initial stages of the customer journey. In other words, it helps your marketing, BDR and SDR teams be successful.
Outreach.io is a specialized prospecting tool for lead generation and engagement during initial stages of the sales process, primarily lead discovery, prospecting, and nurturing.
The tool automates and optimizes sales outreach efforts, through email campaigns, personalized communications, and tracking prospect interactions.
According to Outreach.io, “Economic change has ushered in a new era of B2B sales. [Outreach] empowers the entire sales team to increase deal velocity, win rates, and more.”
They offer a variety of features including:
- Outreach Engage
- Outreach Guide
- Outreach Commit
- Data Safety
- CRM Integration
So how is Outreach.io used?
Sales engagement
Outreach streamlines prospecting workflows to generate a conversion-focused sales pipeline. Templates and snippets help generate responses so your reps aren’t overwhelmed by the number of prospects they have to engage with. That helps you save your team from burnout while still giving your prospects the attention and care they need.
Sales execution intelligence
Outreach also helps you make informed, confident decisions with insights from one of the biggest B2B datasets. Machine learning supports every touchpoint throughout the buying journey. Team members can test and optimize the way they sell and adapt as your industry inevitably evolves.
Learn how Paula achieved a 60% conversion rate from lead to opportunity
7. Best Website Analytics Tools: Leadfeeder
Most website analytics tools give us a 10,000 ft view of the prospects visiting your website. You may have insights on the “hot spots” of your website, the products with the highest views, or even the locations your web traffic is coming from.
But, how hard is it to actually get valuable, specific insights on all website visitors?
Leadfeeder is a web analytics tool that identifies your website’s visitors even if they don’t fill out a form. They boast a robust database of static and dynamic IPs, giving you insight into every website visitor.
How does Leadfeeder work?
- Install Leadfeeder tracker script on the backend of your website.
- They identify companies that have visited your website.
- They gather contact information from employees from those companies.
- Your team is given that information and reaches out via your CRM platform or email.
Leadfeeder is a great tool to fill your sales funnel with leads that are already aware of your solutions and looking to take the next step toward action.
We particularly like this because this tool helps you make use of first-party data — which is data collected from your direct consumers. Along with zero-party data, these are the most trustworthy data sources if you’re looking to build compliant B2B data lists for lead generation.
8. Gifting and Experience Marketing Tool: Postal
So you’ve acquired leads and begun online engagement strategies to nurture your leads through the sales funnel.
But, you’re having a hard time differentiating yourself from your competitors.
Everyone is prioritizing building lasting customer relationships and with digital transformations taking place, you all end up using the same platforms to do it.
What if we take things offline again?
Postal is an offline engagement platform to send personalized, tangible gifts, and direct mail to prospects, enhancing the overall lead nurturing process — with a physical touch in a digital world.
Offline engagement strategies used to be expensive. And, with the economic shift causing companies to reduce spend by over 10-20%, offline engagement opportunities may seem impossible.
But with Postal, customers have experienced a nearly 20% increase in sales meetings booked, $80K in closed won revenue within the first 30 days of use, and a noticeable increase in ROI within 2 months.
Scale, execute and track corporate gifting campaigns by using their online platform. Engage targeted accounts with offline ABM (Account Based Marketing) campaigns.
How does this help with lead generation?
- Use intent signals from Salesforce or your preferred CRM platform to automatically trigger offline campaigns.
- Make informed decisions throughout the campaign lifecycle with valuable customer behavior insights.
- Deliver an exceptional experience (that matters most to your prospect) when they’re most receptive.
Pens, shirts, and coffee mugs are no longer the standard. Use customer insights to find gifts that mean the most to your prospects when they’re most receptive. Data-driven experience marketing that truly delights your customers has never been easier.
9. Video Lead Generation Tool: Wistia
B2B marketing teams have a lot to gain from integrating video into their marketing strategy — an increase in brand awareness, increase in engagement, and a viable solution to building out your sales pipeline.
In fact, in ViB’s latest B2B marketing trends report, “short-form video has the highest ROI of any social media marketing strategy, with long form and podcasts following pretty closely behind.”
Wistia is your complete video marketing platform, designed to grow your business. Their unprecedented video hosting solution gives marketing teams the ability to create, host, market, and analyze video.
This tool helps you collect leads right from your videos with their built in lead-capture forms. You can personalize each form to get the information you need depending on the video content they are engaging with. Then, automatically sync their data with your CRM platform.
Easily host webinars and conferences within minutes. Wistia also records your event so it’ll be a lasting, evergreen video that can be used and sent to others within your network.
Discover the latest trends and statistics — and the key actions B2B marketers and leaders need to take today.
10. Form and conversion optimization tool: OptinMonster
With thousands of different lead generation form plugins on the market, it’s hard to distinguish which are most effective. And, according to marketers, “website and SEO (83%) are the most important marketing channels in one’s current strategy (ViB, 2023).”
Are you leveraging your website’s full lead generation potential?
One of the most underutilized lead generation channels on websites is the form builder. It’s easy to add in a simple contact us form and wait until people begin reaching out.
But, what if your form builder could provide you with valuable insights, improve your engagement, and boost your bottom line?
OptinMonster is the gold standard in form building lead generation. Their goal is to bring qualified leads to companies of every size. With their intuitive user interface, users can easily customize their campaigns and add lead magnets like discounts, coupons, and more! Display rules are then set by your website admin to ensure they’re being seen by the right people at the right time.
OptinMonster also seamlessly integrates with your email service provider, allowing all captured data to be housed in one place.
How do I know if my company would benefit from OptinMonster?
If you agree with at least one of the following statements, it’s time you add OptinMonster to your marketing arsenal.
- Email marketing is a main source of leads for your business.
- Marketing and sales funnels aren’t as full as you’d like them to be (maybe you experience seasonality more than you’d like).
- You value user experience and feel like yours just isn’t where it should be.
- You’re looking to save your team valuable time and money.
Whether you’re looking for better customization or easier CRM integration in your online form builder, OptinMonster is the easy, most reliable choice.
Give your B2B lead generation strategy a boost
From email marketing platforms to appointment setting lead generation services, we’ve covered a host of valuable tools your company can implement to accelerate your sales funnel and improve your bottom line.
We suggest implementing these tools as your team begins noticing gaps in your marketing strategy.
If you’re at a place where you’re overwhelmed with options and feel like you might have more gaps that you’re noticing, reach out to one of our team members at ViB, and we’ll provide you with a comprehensive solution that fits your needs.
We provide tailored, proven, high-quality services that give you exactly what you need and nothing more.
