Lead generation is a huge and established market in the sales and marketing niche. According to different sources, the capitalization of the lead generation market is 50-80 billion dollars.
As the market grows, so do the tools that allow sales and marketing specialists to source, extract and generate leads for their business needs.
Let's discuss who is using lead generation tools the most, what are the most well-known lead generation methods, and have a quick look at the TOP 3 lead generation tools in 2018.
Who are the most active users of lead generation tools in 2018?
As you probably know, lead generation is actively used by sales and marketing teams and specialists in different B2B and B2C companies. But lead generation niche has many more players besides sales and marketing guys. Let's take a closer look at them.
The most active users are of course sales representatives, sales development representatives (SDRs) and outreach specialists. All of these specialists use lead generation to source leads for their cold campaigns – including cold mailings, drip campaigns and cold calling campaigns.
Some of them, like sales representatives, need ready-to-use leads, while SDRs need basically targeted leads to score and develop them further.
Next segment of users is marketing teams and specialists. What differentiates them from sales specialists and teams is the number of leads they generate or source.
Usually marketers source or generate way more leads than sales guys, to use them in more massive marketing campaigns (and then generate warm leads for sales department) or to use the sourced leads and contacts to build marketing audiences (Facebook retargeting campaigns is a good example of using pre-defined audiences).
Thus marketers need more leads to build a stable audience for retargeting campaigns, or run a mailing campaign that will generate interested warm leads that will be forwarded to sales department.
The third big group of users are human resource (HR) specialists and companies. This includes various HR niches, such as in-house HRs, HR freelancers, or established HR firms that search for candidates on a daily basis.
HRs usually source less amount of leads than sales and marketing specialists, but they definitely pay the most attention to targeting and other data that enriches leads they generated. The reason is simple – HRs make small highly-targeted email campaigns with lots of personalization, or just make direct calls to save time and filter candidates.
Besides sales guys, marketers and HRs lead generation is used in many other departments. BizDevs (business developers), Partner Managers and many other specialists use lead generation tools and methods on a daily basis in 2018.
What are the most well-known lead generation methods in 2018?
There are few lead generation methods that were used the most before, and proved their efficiency. Basically not much changed for the last few years, so these are quite the same but evolved lead generation methods used in 2018.
One of the most well-known methods is the Website Lead Generation. This method basically consists of extracting contact information from website you visit. It took a lot of time back in the days, as you needed to find the information manually.
Nowadays tools like Snov.io allow users to extract contact information and emails associated with the websites instantly. This method is good when you need to get leads of very specific businesses or websites.
The second well-known method, and one of the most effective methods in terms of quality/quantity, is Social Network Lead Generation. This method is about extracting and sourcing leads from social networks.
The best network to source highly targeted leads is definitely LinkedIn. Basically, users of lead generation tools have to make a LinkedIn Search according to their targeting needs, and then the tool makes it easy to find and extract contacts of people in the Search List.
The last, but not the least, well-known method, and probably the most easiest and popular one is sourcing leads by using Lead Databases. Many companies, including Snov.io, have built-in databases containing millions of leads.
These leads are already verified, enriched and can be easily filtered. This method is the best option when company needs as many leads as possible in short time.
What are the TOP 3 lead generation tools in 2018?
There are many companies on the market that provide users with lead generation tools and services. This is a good sign, and it definitely shows that the market grows in the right direction. Competition never hurt nobody!
This time we will not discuss services that provide access to lead databases only, as what they mostly do is sell leads, not source or generate. Lead generation and sourcing tools are more interesting and flexible in our opinion.
TOP3 – Skrapp.io
Skrapp allows users to generate leads through LinkedIn only. It is Linkedin-oriented, thus allowing to source leads both from Linkedin Search and from Linkedin Groups.
Pros – Linkedin-oriented only, good for HRs and Sales specialists.
Cons – No other opportunities to generate leads (no website generation, no built-in database). No lead verification available.
Pricing – 5,000 leads cost $69.
TOP2 – Hunter.io
Hunter is one of the oldest lead generation tools, but a quite limited one. It allows to extract leads from websites or to find leads if you know a name of the person and the domain. Hunter is good, but it takes a lot of manual job to operate it. Also it's the most expensive lead generation tool out of these three.
Pros – lead generation from websites, lead finding by name and domain, lead verification.
Cons – no lead generation from social networks available, no built-in database, take a lot of manual job to operate it.
Pricing – 5,000 leads cost $100+.
TOP1 – Snov.io
Snov.io is the youngest but the most feature-rich tool on the market. It allows users to generate leads from websites, from social networks, from the built-in database. Also it's the first decentralized lead generation tool on the market – Snov.io is working hard on releasing the decentralized lead marketplace on blockchain that will increase lead quality a lot. Also, Snov.io allows to verify all the leads, and run mailing campaigns within the same dashboard, so there is no need to use any other lead verification or mailing tool. By the way Snov.io is the least expensive verification tool on the market.?Update(June 2018) Snovio released a chrome extension which serves as an?email verifier?which verifies emails immediately in bulk, whilst you browse websites.
Pros – all-in-one lead gen platform with lead generation from websites, social networks, built-in database. First decentralized lead generation tool. Has lead verification and mailing features on board.
Cons – the youngest tool on the market, if this counts as a con.
Pricing – 5,000 leads cost $49.
