What’s in the Perfect Tech Stack for Lead Generation in 2022? 6 Types of Selling Tools

There are hardly any SDRs who rely only on the company’s CRM to hit their sales quota. Companies of all sizes build up their technology stacks to speed up the sales cycle. It’s now the common, intuitive wisdom of executives and business owners: if you want your sales team to sell more, keep their selling tools up-to-date. We all now use technology to store our memories, take notes, make calculations, read books and do many other mundane activities. Similarly, the business-to-business lead generation and sales process has multiple steps and stages that benefit from technology: updating spreadsheets, providing quick search options, adding leads to the CRM, scraping contacts of leads on LinkedIn, creating efficient workflows, and setting up drip email campaigns. Here’s a quick rundown of tool categories new businesses should consider when looking to convert leads into customers. 

What tools are necessary for business-to-business lead generation?

In B2B sales, sales teams need programs and software to facilitate lead generation and connection to prospects and customers, provide resources for quicker deal closing, and streamline mundane tasks. There’s no limit on the number of tools on the stack, but the teams should know how to use them properly.

Typically, sales teams build up their toolkit based on their needs and sales goals. Suppose your company is quickly developing and has a solid lead generation pipeline. Then you aren’t looking for a new tool for generating more leads, but the team might be interested in a project management tool to help you all organize your interactions. Or, a small team does marketing and sales, so they need to automate their marketing activities and might need help finding more leads.

Here are six types of tools that most probably find their way into your tech stack.   

1. Customer relationship management (CRM)
2. Prospecting tools
3. Marketing automation
4. Sales automation
5. Email marketing
6. Sales reporting

1. Customer relationship management (CRM)

A CRM is the foundation of a company’s business stack as in addition to being a single source of customer and lead data, it keeps track of B2B prospects, identifies sales opportunities, and overall facilitates lead generation.

Among the most popular CRMs are:

HubSpot CRM.

From data storage to sales process automation, HubSpot’s CRM platform is 100% free and offers many integrations with third-party tools. Basically, it means that what you can’t get for free you can have as an add-on. Manage your lead data with HubSpot and do your email marketing, reporting, data import, and so on through other tools.

Salesforce.

Another sales software giant offers more than just a CRM platform. Focusing on improving customer relationships, Salesforce’s CRM is an enterprise-level solution that makes it easier for small and medium-sized companies to run sales customer processes. Collaboration, productivity, and sales intelligence tools make up for steep pricing.

Pipedrive.

As a simpler counterpart to the CRMs mentioned above, Pipedrive works best for beginners and small teams. The tool helps salespeople manage prospects, keep all communications in one place, collaborate, and synchronize correspondence. Additionally, BI reporting and sales automation features are also available.

2. B2B sales prospecting and lead generation software

Whereas a CRM stores B2B lead data online, prospecting tools provide context and analyze data for effective lead generation. Basically, a good prospecting tool highlights buyer intent and digital footprint so that SDRs pursue only high-quality business leads. The sales rep who works on the account gets notified about several decision-makers, organizational changes, related events, or new opportunities and can personalize messages accordingly.  

Approach your lead generators with the following prospecting tools:

Leadfeeder.

This simple website tracking solution for B2B lead generation lets a company see who visits their website, what the odds of the visitors being converted are, and where they can be found (company name, email address).

LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

This is a paid native tool for marketers and entrepreneurs to generate leads.

AeroLeads.

Since LinkedIn is not intended for lead generation at scale, many marketers and salespeople use third-party LinkedIn tools to send out connection requests, follow up, and message contacts at scale. AeroLeads use contact data from LinkedIn and builds up lead lists.

Vainu.

This sales intelligence platform provides enriched data, sales triggers, and high-degree personalization to enable sales. Vainu formulates insights and predictions based on real-time company data. Advanced search based on more than 150 data points, tracking, and enrichment are essential features.

3. Marketing automation platforms

Marketing automation tools help entrepreneurs and marketers to attract prospects to their services. The tools do mass emailing, land page building, lead scoring, and reporting. Some marketing automation software solutions have sales enablement features and align marketing in sales by personalizing email outreach, tracking online marketing campaigns and data scraping.

HubSpot.

Along with a CRM, HubSpot offers sales and marketing automation software free of charge in its basic plan. The Marketing Hub helps teams create email marketing campaigns, manage ads, and improve SEO, while the Sale Hub streamlines sales workflows, provides contact insights and offers other lead generation features.

Pardot.

Salesforce’s Pardot automates content creation and uploading, helps in form building, and has standard email marketing functionality. The platform integrates with Google Ads and tracks keyword performance.

4. Sales automation and sales engagement software

Even though most tools offer some automation, sales need more. Also referred to as sales acceleration, this category of sales software enables salespeople to access important data and sell more effectively quickly.

SalesLoft.

This sales engagement platform tracks communication across channels and builds effective pipelines. Data and AI provide helpful insights salespeople can act on and win deals.

Outreach.

This AI-powered sales engagement platform uses AI intelligence and data to identify sales opportunities and proactively guides entrepreneurs to more sales. Scaling workflows across communication channels, the tool tracks sales engagement, forecasts sales success, and reports on sales performance. 

5. Email marketing and email deliverability tools

In general, marketing and sales automation tools usually automate email marketing and outreach campaigns. Still, there are email-related issues to address with another tool. For example, you will need stand-alone software to resolve spam and email deliverability issues.  

Folderly

This email deliverability platform will give you a complex spam fix and email performance monitoring. As an email spam checker and warm-up tool, the platform will help teams avoid spam filters, run content analysis, and set up DNS correctly.

6. Sales reporting tools

What’s the point of having a stand-along reporting tool if CRMs and other software have built-in reporting and analytics? The answer is: to access it easier. Not only do robust business intelligence platforms analyze extensive sales data, but they also predict trends, suggest insights, and give sales forecasts.

Mode.

This sales analytics platform provides the rich context for your sales data and helps make data-informed decisions.

Periscope Data.

This analytics software analyzes data from multiple sources in SQL, Python, and R. Providing multiple visualization layers, Periscope provides tools and data coaching to create visuals for teams.  

Tableau.

This self-service analytics tool helps salespeople understand their data. Using drag-and-drop builders, users create and share data visualizations.

Build your unique collection of tools for business-to-business lead generation

The choice you make emerges at the intersection of your needs and the tool’s functionality. Carefully evaluate each software piece and decide if you need it in your sales stack. We start building our stack from a robust CRM that tracks and understands customer behavior based on our extensive experience in lead generation for B2B by “Belkins“. Then we add a tool for each specific need that is not covered, auditing the whole stack from time to time. We regularly clean up and update the stack to streamline the sales process.