Five powerful lead generation and sales prospecting tools for small businesses

Small businesses struggle to build visibility online due to tight budgets and limited work force.

These five marketing platforms offer small businesses affordable lead generation and sales tools to provide them with some competitive advantage.

Small businesses need lots of support these days. With huge budgets being shifted online by large corporations, competing for the web presence has been harder and harder.

Luckily there are tools that offer great solutions for small businesses making their lives much easier and allowing them to be seen online.

1. Leadfeeder

One of the most pleasant discovering of this year, Leadfeeder has been my recommended tool in a couple of articles already. It is really simple to use, takes seconds to set up and works like a charm. I love the efficiency and simplicity of the tool.

Leadfeeder connects to your Google Analytics and identifies companies behind your site visits. It saves all the data and scores each identified company visit based on how much they have interacted with your site (e.g. repeat visits, how many pages they have viewed before leaving etc.)

• See which companies visited your site, which page they landed on, where they came from and how long they stayed


• See the company contact info and employees (as well as how you are connected to them on LinkedIn)


• Create filters to see company visits based on the source (for example, see company visits which were referred to your site from Twitter) to better customize your pitch


• Receive regular email alerts with the most recent company visits prompting your immediate action (the sooner you pitch, the better chances are they will remember who you are).

Basically, Leadfeeder turns your site visitors into well qualified prospects opening lots of follow-up opportunities for you.

2. Hatchbuck

Hatchbuck is a solid CRM and marketing automation system for small businesses that makes it easy to nurture prospects and drive more sales. Some of the more useful features include:

• The real-time dashboard: see customer activity on the fly. Monitor your contacts' activity: See who's visiting which pages.


• Dynamic tagging to organize your prospects: for example, you can assign a tag to anyone clicking a link in an email you send. This way you can start a campaign or send them another email on that topic.


• The form and link actions to follow-up on clicks, visits and online forms: for example, you can trigger actions based on clicks inside an email.


• Easy email templates that look rich and professional

Hatchbuck prides itself on having the best customer service (which customers seem to agree upon) which already makes it worth exploring. They offer free real-time demo allowing you to make up your mind if it fits your needs.

They are also quite affordable and easy to understand which makes it a perfect solution for small businesses that have limited sales budget and no in-house engineering departments.

3. DrumUp Employee Advocacy Feature

There's one marketing opportunity most small businesses fail to be willing to benefit from: utilizing their whole teams to capture and nurture leads.

Luckily, this trend is quickly changing as we witness a few really huge companies changing their social media policies to give their teams more freedom and encourage their employees to vouch for them online.

According to Inc, a well set-up employee advocacy program is able to to result in 5x more traffic and 25% more leads.

DrumUp is a cool social media management platform giving any company all the necessary tools to organize employees' social media activity and turn them into brand advocates.

• You can connect your blog, press or other content feeds to DrumUp. As soon as a new article is added to the feed, it is automatically broadcast to employees for them to easily share across multiple social media channels.


• Set up monthly contests to reward most active and eager employees. DrumUp offers easy and transparent leaderboard tracking for that.

4. Linkedin Sales Navigator

LinkedIn has really been pushing their Sales Navigator, a premium service that gives users greater control over the site's features. It also provides products for sales prospecting, lead generation, B2B networking, and more.

According to their stats, signing up for the Sales Navigator increases productivity by 80%, and vastly improves sales results. Users (they claim) will be 51% more likely to meet their quotas. It includes better communication with targets, so that is at least one benefit you can find from it.

They don't go based on teams, but instead on individual seat pricing. Each member is $79.99 per month, and it includes a premium LinkedIn profile.

Here's a solid tutorial guiding you through Sales Navigator feature.

• Find and organize leads: use a useful search feature to find leads, save them and keep an eye on their updates


• Build B2B contacts: save companies in your account which allows you to track new leads, follow updates and receive company news so you're well-informed before your first conversation with a prospect


• Utilize your employees' connection: Use TeamLink to filter your search results to see bridged or team connections. If TeamLink identifies a personal connection between your prospect and a team member, you can ask a mutual connection for an introduction.

5. Cyfe

Cyfe is my go-to tool on so many levels which is almost unbelievable. I use it to track my social media channels, keep an eye on my customer service teams, monitor my site performance and more. Cyfe can be used to create a powerful lead generation.

Create a separate dashboard with one or many of the following widgets to keep an eye on different aspects of your lead generation process:

• Google Analytics real time visits


• Google Analytics most recent referrals


• Zendesk tickets


• Optin stats and recent subscribers (Many email marketing platforms are supported, others can be connected via API)


• Recent leads and prospects

Cyfe is surprisingly affordable which makes it a perfect monitoring solution for small businesses.

Are there any other tools that belong in this list? Let me know in the comments!