Sales wants more leads, and it’s your job to deliver them. Now what?
There is a lot of noise and competition for buyers' attention. Attracting the attention of new leads is hard – that’s why it’s important to meet your prospects where they’re at. Consumers expect businesses to provide them with a seamless purchasing experience. No matter which channel your company is using to communicate with prospects, the message needs to be consistent.
B2B companies rely on digital marketing strategies to create this multi-channel purchasing experience and attract qualified prospects. Then they use lead capturing software to manage these new sales opportunities.
Lead capture is the process of attracting prospects interested in purchasing a company's products and services and becoming paid customers.
Marketing teams use lead generation techniques to attract, qualify, and pass high-value leads to their sales team with the goal of converting prospects into paying customers.
Lead capture looks different depending on what channel you’re using to connect with your prospects. This guide will outline the best lead capture techniques with examples from some of our favorite companies.
In order to help you better understand this article, we’ve provided a glossary of common terms seen in this piece.
Using lead capture forms and pages on your website is vital to capturing in-market buyers who are either enquiring about products you sell or are exploring alternatives before making purchase decisions. When you use lead capture, it becomes easier for your sales and marketing teams to get personal information about these prospects. Then, they can nurture these leads based on the buying intent signals they show during their purchase journey. You can use lead capture forms on blog posts, landing pages, emails, social media platforms, and websites.
Creating a lead capture strategy is easier said than done. The first step is to make an irresistible offer that resonates with potential customers, grabs their attention, and persuades them to fill in the form. The next step is to design a lead capture page and run A/B tests to optimize based on what users like more. Learn about each of these steps in detail below.
Prospects who interact with your lead capture forms are likely new to your business. This means information like their company name, job title, and contact information aren’t in your system yet. Collecting this information early in the sales process will make it much easier for your sales team to connect with and nurture leads.
A rookie marketer might make the mistake of creating a form with dozens of form fields. Long lead capture forms aren’t a lost cause – you just need to be smart about when and where you use them.
Prospects in the early stages of buying usually don’t want to part with their personal information. A lead who is in the decision making stage of the sales process is much more likely to share personal information, in order to help aid the sales process.
Always ask yourself if the value of the offer you’re providing is worth what you’re asking of a prospect. Prospects are usually more willing to share personal information with companies if they believe it will lead to a more personalized marketing experience.
Create a quality value-add and keep your expectations of prospects reasonable. Anything extraneous or too invasive could scare the prospect off. Only ask for information that is essential for your sales team.
Here are a few other things you should keep in mind when creating your forms:
A lead capture page is a specially-designed landing page whose sole purpose is to capture information about your leads: name, email, phone number, and so on. This information is collected through a lead capture form and used to help you build a relationship with your leads. The end goal is to convert them into customers through your marketing funnel.
While lead capture pages aren’t necessary for housing lead forms, they are an incredibly popular marketing tool.
Here’s an example of how a lead capture page and form can work together:
Using lead capture forms and lead capture pages, marketing teams can create attractive marketing communications. Many marketers pair these specially designed landing pages with exclusive content and offers for prospects. This is a tactic marketers use to make the prospect feel more comfortable with sharing their information.
Here are three easy ways to make your lead capture page stand out:
As many marketers know, convincing cold leads to hand over their contact information is harder than it sounds. Customers are increasingly wary of giving away their personal information. Between the rising impact of data breaches and the volume of spam messages out there, consumers are more protective of their data than ever before.
It might seem impossible to clear this hurdle, but lead capture provides marketing teams a way to attract and engage qualified leads. The key to keeping a steady stream of new and qualified leads coming to your organization is creating a value proposition your prospects can’t refuse.
Email marketing is a popular lead generation strategy because it allows you to communicate with prospects directly in their inbox. Getting a hold of your prospects’ email addresses, however, is a challenge in itself. Newsletter subscription forms are a great way to provide a value-add in exchange for a prospect’s information.
This is a top-of-funnel strategy designed to familiarize prospects with your brand. If your marketing team creates content that prospects find valuable, they’re more likely to give you their email address in exchange for regular content.
Because an email newsletter is a top-of-funnel touchpoint for many prospects, you’ll want to keep the barrier to entry low. Don’t ask for more than a prospect’s name, company, and email address at this stage. Make it easy to sign up and clearly communicate what the prospect will get in return.
Here’s an example of a good newsletter subscription form:
Source: Databox
One drawback of this strategy is that it’s harder to create a defined audience. There’s no guarantee that the people signing up for your newsletter are viable prospects.
Email newsletters have mass appeal, which means this strategy has the potential to generate a lot of low-quality leads. It’s important to have a lead scoring system in place to separate viable prospects from people who are just interested in reading blog posts.
Gated content requires a prospect to complete a form in order to gain access to a piece of marketing collateral. The goal of gated content is to generate leads. Marketers will create specialized content in the form of white papers, webinars, PDFs, or eBooks designed to attract prospects that fit their target audience.
It’s a popular lead generation tool marketers can use to create defined audiences, score leads, and more.
Gated content isn't used for brand awareness, generating traffic, or collecting keywords. The primary goal of gated content should be to generate new leads through form submissions. And because the content you’re gating takes more time and effort to create than a regular blog post, you can ask customers for more information.
Here’s an example of a gated content lead capture form:
When it comes to providing a value proposition for potential customers, nothing works better than giving things away for free. Many companies create a blockade around their products, forcing leads to sign up for product demos and consultations before they can give the tool a test run.
This is a huge ask to make of your prospects.
Prospective customers don’t want to hand over all of their personal information, privacy, and time to test a product that might get the job done. The smarter alternative is to give your prospects the opportunity to engage with your product at no risk to them.
Free tools and templates are an easy way to let your prospects engage with your product and decide whether it’s right for them on their terms.
Here’s an example of a free tool form:
Source: SurveyMonkey
With this strategy, you always run the risk of having leads who are only interested in the free version of your product. The good news is that leads who engage with your free tool and enjoy the product are highly-qualified leads. With the right retargeting strategy and engagement strategy, these leads can be nurtured into prospective customers over time.
The next evolution of the free tool strategy is offering a free trial of your product. A free tool is often just a sample of a singular feature of your overall product. A free trial offer allows prospects to do things like create an account, input their own data, and explore a variety of product features.
This strategy is also known as the “freemium” model in SaaS. Freemium is a subscription-based pricing model where some features of a product are free to use and others require a paid subscription. The idea is to give away just enough of your product to get prospects hooked, and place your most impressive product features behind a paywall.
This encourages prospects who are enjoying their free trial to convert into paying customers in exchange for a more robust version of the product for access to things like: more users, special tools, data and reporting features, product integrations, and more.
Here’s an example of a free trial offer form we like:
Creating clear terms of service for your free trial offer is very important. The word “free” doesn’t mean the same thing across industries. Customers don’t want to be surprised by things like auto-enrollment, unexpected charges, and cancellation fees they weren’t told about upfront.
If you require customers to have a credit card on file to receive a free trial, it’s your obligation to make the terms of the free trial and any payment involved available to prospects.
When prospects start asking for pricing information about your product, it’s a good sign they’re ready to buy. But don’t start chalking those accounts up as wins just yet. Customers are usually researching multiple products at once. They are looking for things like pricing, features, customer reviews, and more.
Many companies make the mistake of hiding pricing pages or they make product details difficult to locate, hoping customers will fill out lead forms. But forcing your prospects to hunt down information about your product starts your relationship off on an uneven foot.
It forces your customer to lead with caution.
The best way to combat this is to give prospects choices on how they’d like to get in contact with your team. Some leads might be ready to make a purchase now, others might want a less committed approach while they continue making decisions.
Here’s an example of a request for quote form:
Lead capture forms that lead to contact with sales teams should have more fields than other lead forms. This helps your sales team quickly familiarize themselves with the prospect and score the lead accordingly.
It also saves your sales team wasted time at the beginning of conversations. Because they won’t have to spend time collecting that information themselves, they can focus on selling instead.
Managing all of your inbound leads can get overwhelming, but lead capture software is an easy way to automate the sales prospecting process.
Lead capture software can be used by both marketing and sales teams to identify potential leads, score these potential leads, and use sales intelligence to turn prospects into paying customers. And with software automating most of the work in the background, your teams can focus more on selling and less on the tedium of database management.
For marketing teams, lead capture software offers a centralized hub for planning, implementing, and tracking customer communications. These bulk communications make it easier for your marketing team to deploy promotional campaigns to customers or leads. Sales teams can also utilize these communication tools to directly engage with prospects and customers.
In order to be included in this list, a product must:
* Below are the top five leading lead capture software solutions from G2’s Fall 2023 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
ZoomInfo SalesOS is a go-to-market platform B2B companies use for finding decision makers, filtering leads based on buyer intent, and tracking website visitors. This platform also features conversation intelligence capabilities to help companies analyze customer calls, emails, and meetings.
"ZoomInfo SalesOS is probably one of the easiest data research tools I have used so far. All you have to do is simply search for a company that you have to learn about and you will get the A to Z of that company.
My favorite feature is the org chart, which gives the list of employees in an organization based on their hierarchy levels. You can also use the scoops function to learn about the recent stories/news published by a specific company which is very important when you want to personalize your cold emails.
Chrome extension is an added advantage if you want to research a company from its website. My team and I use Zoominfo on a daily basis to outbound. If it's integrated with your CRM, then it's absolutely golden!"
– ZoomInfo SalesOS Review, Manoj L.
"In my experience with ZoomInfo SalesOS, I have identified several aspects that require improvement:
The complexity of the user interface can be overwhelming, particularly for new users. Simplifying and streamlining the interface would enhance the user experience.
While ZoomInfo SalesOS offers a vast amount of data, there have been instances of outdated or inaccurate information. Implementing a more rigorous data verification process would enhance the platform's reliability.
It takes time to fully grasp and utilize all the features and functionalities of ZoomInfo SalesOS. Providing more robust training materials or guided onboarding would expedite users' ability to maximize the tool's potential.
Addressing these areas of improvement would significantly enhance the overall user experience and amplify ZoomInfo SalesOS's value for sales professionals.
– ZoomInfo SalesOS Review, Rahul D.
Mr. E by EasyLeadz is a contact finder tool that helps companies find direct mobile numbers of prospects. Sales professionals and business developers use this platform to reach their ideal customers in an efficient manner.
"I was quickly able to find active phone numbers to reach people that answered phones in my pursuit of account growth and management. I have used other aps and had less than 30% accuracy of information; my hit rate was much higher with Mr. E by EasyLeadz."
– Mr. E by EasyLeadz Review, Deanna Y.
"The only thing i dislike about Mr. E by EasyLeadz is that the number of free credits for a user are quite less. They should be increased to at least 20 per month. Hopefully they do this soon."
– Mr. E by EasyLeadz Review, Gauri K.
CUFinder is an all-in-one B2B marketing intelligence platform that provides companies with B2B lead generation and data enrichment solutions. The platform uses advanced AI capabilities to help you find high-quality leads and enhance existing lead gen processes.
"CUFinder has a valuable database that provides useful information to sales and marketing professionals and any recruiter looking for them.
It's no exaggeration to say that I used to work with other tools, but after searching and checking people's opinions on G2 and seeing the pros and cons of lead generation services, I realized that CUFinder ranks highly. After using its enrichment services once or twice and more, I noticed that it is very different from other competitors. And it really deserves a high rating."
– CUFinder Review, Matthew Y.
"CUFinder should make their updates faster. It is really overwhelming when the results come and some of them are too old to even be considered and guess what you lose a lot of credits in this process."
– CUFinder Review, Anthony S.
LeadIQ is an all-in-one prospecting platform that makes it easy for businesses to find contacts, track sales triggers, and enrich CRM data. The platform also makes prospecting easier with a simple, one-click workflow. Moreover, it uses company insights and proprietary contact to help you write emails.
"It is super easy to use and pairs well with LinkedIn, which makes finding contact information a breeze. I can easily find direct numbers and cell numbers. I also like that you can submit a request for either contact info if you're having trouble locating a number or email address for a specific prospect."
– LeadIQ Review, Brenda T.
"I don't understand why it offers best-guess email addresses that haven't yet been vetted. Also, I have a very difficult time understanding why a particular lead doesn't load into SFDC. I understand it's usually because there are conditions that haven't yet been met but it's hard to sometimes understand why. Long story short, I wish the UX when unpacking a problem was as intuitive as the UX when it works well."
– LeadIQ Review, Andrew K.
Kaspr is a sales intelligence platform that lets businesses access B2B prospects' emails and phone numbers. The tool eases how you find and extract contact data of ideal customers from LinkedIn. Moreover, you can use this solution to create nurturing workflows and track ROI.
"Kaspr provides a valuable tool for businesses by offering enriched data on professionals, particularly their contact information. This facilitates lead generation and outreach efforts, making it easier for sales and marketing teams to connect with potential clients."
– Kaspr Review, Leonardo D.
"The box that shows the contact details is always expanded (opened) when I move from one LinkedIn profile to the next. I have to close it before I could read the contents being blocked by the box. It is better to leave the box always closed but readily available for the user to click to see the number of contacts available before deciding to retrieve the information."
– Kaspr Review, Michael L.
Lead capture helps attract the right prospects to your website, gather valuable contact information, and ultimately improve the quality of leads being passed to your sales team. When marketing and sales teams work together, everybody wins.
Lead capture is just the beginning – there’s so much more to finding leads that convert into paying customers. Start using lead intelligence software today to set up automated lead data verification.
This article was originally published in 2020. It has been updated with new information.
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