Yes, we know that sales isn’t easy.

Even when it’s going well and sales are through the roof, the ceiling just keeps increasing – as it should.

If you aim to sell 100 items and you achieve it consistently, your next move should be to increase that number. That’s how businesses grow, right?

However, not all sales processes are the same and each one may be quite different than others depending on the industry, product or team size. This also includes activities and strategies that align with diverse processes and naturally, the techniques and the tools used vary too.

This is why we’re gathered here to address a very specific requirement that businesses and their sales teams have – picking the right lead nurturing tools.

After all, lead nurturing tools are designed to help businesses boost their sales processes. These tools can vary in their features and businesses should choose ones that are best suited to their sales requirements, services and capabilities.

Before diving into the top lead nurturing tools, it’s crucial to know what lead nurturing tools are and how they help businesses in their sales and marketing activities.

It’s important to have the basics covered, so read on to learn all about lead nurturing tools!
 

What Is Lead Nurturing?

Any good salesman knows there are three answers a potential customer could have for them – “yes”, “no” and “maybe”.

The greatest salesmen know there are only two answers – “yes” and “maybe”. “No” is not an option.

While the “yes” customers receive special treatment before and after purchasing a business’s product or service to enhance their experience, the “maybe” category customers are also due for some gentle coaxing to convert them.

These potential customers who are sitting on the fence are known as “leads” and the pursuit of persuading them to join the “yes” bandwagon is known as “lead nurturing”. It’s the process that follows lead generation.

Simply put, lead nurturing is the technique that’s used to cultivate leads that aren’t ready to buy as yet but are likely to somewhere down the line. It’s all about taking different approaches and applying best practices based on the characteristics, buying habits and buyer personas of diverse prospects in a way that gets them to join the community of existing customers.

To enhance these efforts, businesses use software applications known as Lead Nurturing Tools.
 

What Are Lead Nurturing Tools?

Lead Nurturing Tools are designed to help businesses design, deliver, manage, supervise and optimize their interactions with various diverse leads.

These tools come packed with features and capabilities that make it easier to deliver quality sales experiences to customers and sales capabilities to teams. This includes infusing the nurturing approaches with AI-powered personalization and automation across lead nurturing workflows.

Lead Nurturing Tools come with advanced tracking and analytics features that help businesses enhance their interactions and boost their chances of converting leads. It's the numerous features and capabilities that help businesses deploy winning conversion techniques in their lead nurturing processes.
Yet, how exactly do they help?
 

How Do Lead Nurturing Tools Help Businesses?

There’s a tool for everything nowadays, right?

Unsurprisingly, there are a wide range of tools available for lead nurturing too. These help businesses gain invaluable insights and information into their prospective customers by tracking and analyzing their behavior across various touchpoints.

Lead Nurturing Tools also helps in understanding how potential customers perceive their brand and what hangups they have in giving that final “yes”.

Furthermore, it also provides businesses with a richer context of what customers are interested in and at what level of the sales funnel they’re at, i.e. top (ToFu), middle (MoFu) or bottom (BoFu). All this while bringing them a host of advantages.

These include benefits such as:

• Lead Scoring

  One of the most important features that Lead Nurturing Tools offer is lead scoring, which helps businesses understand exactly how likely a potential customer is to purchase a product or service. This is done by assigning scores to leads based on their behavior and how much they interact with the business.
  
  Leads who spend more time on the business’ website or app, check out the brand’s social media posts, download content, read blogs or sign up for newsletters are showing more interest in the brand and are accordingly ranked higher. This is where businesses are encouraged to put in more efforts for conversion.
  
  On the other hand, potential customers who spend less time consuming the business’ content are less likely to purchase immediately and are ranked lower. Essentially, this process helps sales teams prioritize their efforts and enhances their chances of converting potential customers.

• Lead Segmentation

  Lead Nurturing Tools make the process easier by enabling businesses to segment their audience based on a wide range of criteria, including characteristics, lead source, industry, demographics, engagement levels, interests, job titles and more.
  
  This allows sales teams to deploy multiple types of content that can be personalized based on different segments, instead of sending out the same content to all their leads without considering where they are in the sales funnel.
  
  This also helps control the number of communications sent out to different segments, where leads closer to conversion get more detailed information about products they’re interested in and the ones further away are provided with messaging that instills confidence about the business.

• Automated Marketing

  Businesses can create, schedule and send a wide range of communication materials, including emails, messages, push notifications and more, at different times and using various types of messaging, based on where the lead is in the sales funnel. These communications can be highly personalized, down to the level of one-to-one interactions, enhancing the overall experience.
  
  Moreover, further communications can be triggered to be sent automatically based on a lead’s behavior or actions, providing them with appropriate next steps.
  
  The magic of automation doesn’t end at marketing activities though. It extends to include automating workflows, especially the routine, repetitive and menial ones, allowing the sales teams to focus on more strategic and productive tasks.

• Activity Tracking

  Once campaigns are launched and messages encouraging leads to convert are shared, businesses and their sales teams need to figure out if their efforts have paid off or not. Here, Lead Nurturing Tools help them track the activities of lead across multiple touchpoints and channels, which include email, social media and websites.
  
  Essentially, these tools help them identify how the leads have interacted with their communications, allowing businesses to identify the most effective strategies, campaigns and channels, while also understanding how to optimize future efforts.
  
  This process includes leveraging detailed reports that are prepared by the tools, which helps in the automated tracking of metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement levels.

• Data Analytics

  One of the key ingredients to stellar tracking and robust reporting of performance is a powerful analytics platform. Lead Nurturing Tools come with the capabilities to provide in-depth reporting, based on the analytics of various pre-determined factors.
  
  These capabilities come into play before businesses run campaigns too. Artificial intelligence-powered predictive analytics can analyze the behavior of potential customers or leads and suggest what the next best step should be.
  
  This forms an important step in lead scoring and segmenting leads too, enabling businesses to prioritize the most critical and top-of-the-funnel leads, as well as choosing what the best strategies would be to engage with MoFu and BoFu leads.

• Customer Relationships

  Lead Nurturing Tools can integrate with a wide variety of tools already being used by businesses, including their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, marketing automation platforms, social media tools and other platforms used to boost sales.
  
  This allows businesses to streamline further trigger actions and communications. It also provides them with a platform to centralize lead and customer data, ensuring all of it is updated with each interaction, leading to better coordination in sales and marketing efforts.
  
  Furthermore, this enables sales teams to interact with leads in a more personalized and consistent manner, with access to up-to-date information.

 

Top Lead Nurturing Tools

The important thing to remember before picking a particular Lead Nurturing Tool is that they offer a wide range of features, capabilities and offerings that could impact different aspects of the lead nurturing process. This is why businesses should carefully consider which one they pick and ensure it meets their unique requirements.

However, for the most part, there are a few leading tools that are used widely, including:
 

• Pipeline

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  Formerly called PipelineDeals, Pipeline offers a user-friendly interface, easy integration with other applications, brilliant visualizations, customizations and more. The platform is perfect for small businesses.
  
  It comes with three pricing plans; Start ($25 per user), Develop ($33 per user) and Grow ($49 per user) and a customizable option for enterprises, while also offering a free trial.
  
  With automation aiding sales tracking and reducing administrative tasks, Pipeline brings in enhanced sales pipeline visibility and features that allows businesses to track the progress of deals from start to finish, while maintaining detailed profiles of leads and customers.

• Marketo Engage

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  Jumping up to a Lead Nurturing Tool that’s brilliantly suited for enterprises – Marketo Engage – is brought to you by Adobe (since its acquisition in 2018).
  
  If you’re a large business, you can count on Marketo’s comprehensive analytics and reporting powers, while enjoying its enterprise-grade automation capabilities.
  
  This highly scalable platform offers businesses vast integration options. It comes with outstanding automation, lead management, analytics, reporting, personalization, segmentation and account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities.
  
  Marketo Engage offers its users customized pricing based on four plans Growth (10 users), Select (25 users), Prime (25 users) and Ultimate (25 users).

• Pipedrive

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  Pipedrive comes in with superior personalization and flexibility, an easy-to-use and intuitive interface and powerful integration capabilities. Its core strength lies in its sales pipeline management, which makes the lead nurturing process easier with visualizations and customizations.
  
  It also offers strong sales forecasting, robust reporting and analytics, automated task management, streamlined deal management and more.
  
  The platform comes with a 14-day free trial and five pricing plans; Essential ($12 per user per month), Advanced ($24 per user per month), Professional ($49 per user per month), Power ($59 per user per month), Enterprise ($79 per user per month).

• HubSpot

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  HubSpot is known throughout the marketing industry for providing a comprehensive suite of services that speaks of quality automation, integration, email marketing, CRM, analytics, reporting and other features that make it a powerful sales and service hub. This is supported by its real-time chatbots and live chat capabilities that make lead nurturing a cake walk.
  
  Talking of pricing, HubSpot’s businesses and enterprises plans include its Marketing Hub Professional, which starts at $800 per month and its Marketing Hub Enterprise, which starts at $3,600 per month.
  
  For individuals and small businesses, its plans include Marketing Hub Starter (starting at $15 per user per month), Starter Customer Platform (starting at $15 per user per month) and Marketing Hub Professional (starting at $800 per month). It also offers a completely free plan.

• LeadSquared

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  LeadSquared brings sales teams an end-to-end solution that helps them accelerate the sales conversion process with features such as sales and marketing automation, deep analytics, conversion prediction, sales execution CRM and more. This boosts their lead scoring, lead segmentation and lead conversion capabilities.
  
  It also comes with a mobile CRM app that enables users to manage tasks and track sales activities on the go.
  
  As for pricing, the platform comes with a Pro and Super plan in its Sales CRM Suite of Features and Basic, Standard and Enterprise in Marketing Automation. Under both categories, the platform offers a customized pricing option, as well as special pricing for startups.

 

To Sum Up

Lead Nurturing Tools help businesses remain connected with potential customers who are still on the fence, allowing them to build stronger relationships using a variety of tools that can personalize the overall experience and lead to seamless conversion.

These tools come packed with a host of features and capabilities to simplify the lead nurturing process, including AI-powered analytics, automation and integrations. Moreover, they help businesses pick the next best step for leads, ensuring that they’re nurtured in the right way.

While different tools can offer different features leading to different outcomes, businesses must ensure they pick a tool that suits their unique requirements. 

Are you looking to boost your B2B lead nurturing strategies? Contact TechDogs today and learn how you can enjoy successful B2B lead nurturing!