B2B lead capture can be a tiring process, demanding time to create a comprehensive system that will generate leads online in the long run for your organization. And especially in B2B, with sales cycles that can run for over a year, you need a continuous stream of leads to avoid any drops in revenue.
However, with lead automation tools you can take out the drudgery of generating leads and focus on the creative side of your campaigns, as well as what truly matters—the ROI.
In this article, you’ll discover free tools to automate online B2B lead generation, as well as following up on prospects with email and social media. At the end, we wrap up with tips to implement automated lead generation for your sales and marketing teams.
Most marketing and sales teams lose precious time inputting data manually into spreadsheets instead of leveraging automation.
Depending on the complexity of the lead prospection task (such as scraping LinkedIn profiles in your industry vertical), you can spend a whole workday—and effectively get no work done.
These automation tools complete in a few seconds tasks that otherwise would fill up your calendar, so if hunting for leads online is one of your duties, include them in your arsenal:
With Zapier, you can set up automated lead generation workflows for your team, such as a notification on Slack whenever a lead fills a form. Also, you can automate a data dump from Facebook Ads to a spreadsheet, so you don’t have to keep accessing the platform to check the performance of your campaigns.
You can leverage Zapier with over three thousand apps for your lead generation and since it integrates with most ad platforms and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, there’s definitely a Zapier automation available for your needs.
Here are some popular B2B automations on Zapier:
While Zapier is focused on data transfers and automating notifications, Phantombuster is specialized in data scraping.
With this tool, you can scrape data from LinkedIn connections, Instagram hashtags, and media posted by Twitter accounts.
Functions such as “auto like” and “auto follow” are also available for these social networks, so you can automate outreach to prospects and even lead nurturing. In fact, you can automate personalized messages to leads and extract their responses!
For B2B, here are the most valuable LinkedIn automations (known as “phantoms”):
IFTTT stands for “If this, then that” and it’s an automation tool that follows precisely this formula, such as “if I post on Medium, then share on LinkedIn”.
Similar to Zapier, you can automate notifications for your team on many platforms for lead generation, but since its app library is so vast, there’s even an IFTTT for ordering Domino's if the Yellowstone Caldera erupts.
And with a dedicated developer platform, brands can create their own apps for IFTTT users, which not only increases brand loyalty but also makes the lives of their clients easier.
Here are some IFTTT automations for B2B marketing:
These softwares have databases and tools to capture lead contact information from LinkedIn or content syndication efforts.
By hiring a lead capture platform, your company can easily find prospects that fit with your ideal client profile (ICP) and engage them with personalized campaigns.
You can find on G2 reviews the highest-ranked lead capture software, including Lusha and Callrail.
An alternative to B2B lead capture software is to hire a demand generation provider, such as INFUSEmedia, which promotes your brand to its proprietary database of 138+ million decision makers.
Unlike lead capture software, with a demand generation provider, you have staff at your disposal that will create, track, and optimize campaigns to generate leads online. So, it is the best option for short-staffed businesses that don’t have this expertise in-house.
Also, a B2B demand generation provider can generate leads most aligned to your ICP, no matter how exclusive the criteria, and nurture them in the long-term to create a continuous stream of sales-ready leads.
When it comes to lead follow up tools, you can use the automation apps we mentioned earlier (Zapier, Phantombuster, IFTTT), yet they aren’t as comprehensive of a follow up as what CRMs provide.
With automation tools you can automate messages and notifications, but a CRM provides not only that, but also lead scoring, multichannel lead nurturing, and buying committee engagement.
Here are two CRMs that include lead follow up tools:
Currently the top-ranked CRM on G2 (at the moment of writing this article), Salesforce has a full suite of lead follow up tools for marketing and sales, including a Journey Builder in which you can define touchpoints with prospects via email, social media, and ads.
Salesforce also integrates with Slack for its Customer 360 solution, which integrates teams and partners in a single platform to share data, hold meetings, and provide client support.
One of the most popular CRMs worldwide, HubSpot has dedicated marketing and sales suites for generating and nurturing leads online.
For lead follow up, its marketing automation tool can set up email drip campaigns that touch base with leads automatically on multiple channels such as social media and SMS.
Meanwhile, its lead management tool provides a timeline of each lead and their interactions with your brand, along with a dashboard for sales representatives to send an email or call without leaving HubSpot.
The CRMs we mentioned earlier work perfectly for lead generation, however, there are some handy email lead generation tools for sourcing contacts to fuel your campaigns.
The following tools help you discover the emails of decision makers at target companies, which makes them ideal for account based marketing.
With this free tool, you can find the emails of employees at several companies, from Fortune-listed to small startups (there is a paid version if you need to do 50+ searches per month).
Simply type the company name in the search bar to find the available email addresses. Hunter.io also has an option to discover emails associated with a website and can identify emails with a full name.
This is a similar tool to Hunter.io, but with a more comprehensive interface and additional services such as email verification and data enrichment.
With 50 free email leads, Voila Norbert is a great tool to discover the emails of prospects by typing in their name and company.
This platform also includes an email finder and validator, yet also includes unique solutions for email lead generation.
The first one is the Reply.io LinkedIn Chrome extension, which collects emails from your LinkedIn searches. And the second is the email warm-up feature, which builds up reputation for your address to avoid it being flagged as spam.
To finish off this article, here are some tips for your automated lead generation efforts:
Automation is supposed to save time, so why not start by asking your team what’s time-consuming in their agenda? And take notes to see if anything can be automated by the solutions we mentioned above.
Many menial tasks, such as writing up reports or even sharing posts on multiple social media channels can be automated with Zapier or CRMs.
You should always make it a priority to remove repetitive labor from your team’s agenda and let them focus on the actual work of generating leads and making sales.
Data centralization is important and helps you gain insights from all your B2B lead generation efforts. Also, if your data is on a single platform (be it a CRM or even a spreadsheet), this makes it easier to automate workflows for your whole organization.
For example, with a CRM you can automate Slack and Email notifications for new leads or whenever a lead’s score advances a stage in the sales funnel.
Being the sole person at your organization for automation can be tiring—soon you’ll be known as the “automation guy” for whenever people need to automate their workflows.
The best thing you can do is teach your team how to automate their tasks. You can host a workshop to cover the basics and the most relevant automation for a Sales Development Representative (SDR).
Also, tools such as IFTTT are very intuitive and best for the sales team to configure on their own for following up with leads.
