By The PhantomBuster TeamAsk the typical sales team about their biggest struggles in everyday work, and they'll mention aligning with the marketing team.
With lead automation tools and processes, you can let tools do the busy work while your teams focus on engaging and closing.
From lead generation to outreach, we'll show you some of the many lead automation solutions that save time and money.
TL;DR
Lead automation is the process of using software to automate the way a business captures, manages, qualifies, and contacts leads.
Marketing teams can use it to create lead gen forms and automate lead nurturing and email marketing.
Sales teams can use it for lead scraping, data enrichment, lead scoring, and outreach, among other things.
Best lead automation solutions:
PhantomBuster is the best choice for lead scraping, enrichment, and LinkedIn automation. Price starts at $56 monthly.
HubSpot CRM is best for teams that need a sturdy CRM with lead capture, tracking, and engagement features—prices per seat start at $90 monthly.
Clay is a lead enrichment automation that gets accurate lead data from 75+ tools. Price starts at $149 monthly.
Gong is an AI-powered sales engagement platform best suited for forecasting and capturing customer data based on website interactions. Pricing is not disclosed publicly.
Drift is best for companies using chatbots to capture, engage, and generate leads. Price starts at $2,500 monthly.
Unbounce is best for creating landing pages and lead gen forms. Price starts at $99 monthly.
Poptin is ideal for lead capture forms and popups that send data to your CRM database. Price starts at $20 monthly.
Active Campaign is best for teams that want to do lead nurturing through email. Price starts at $15 per month.
Pardot is best for lead grading and drip campaigns for businesses already in the Salesforce ecosystem. Price starts at $1,250 monthly.
Lavender is the top choice for optimizing and scaling your outbound email campaigns. Price starts at $27 monthly.
Marketo is ideal for lead generation and marketing engagement for B2B companies. Pricing is not available publicly.
What is lead automation?
Lead automation is the process of using software to automate the way a business captures, manages, qualifies, and contacts leads.
Where should marketing and sales teams use lead automation?
Whether you want more leads, better-qualified leads, improved communications, or something else, there are many different ways for sales and marketing teams to benefit from inbound and outbound lead automation.
Lead automation for marketing teams
Marketing teams can use lead automation software for multiple use cases:
Lead generation forms: Use landing page builders to capture lead data on your website and pass it off directly to the CRM for the sales team.
Lead nurture marketing automation: Capture leads once and, based on the data collected, nurture them throughout the customer journey.
Email marketing lead automation: Put leads in specific email list segments based on subscriber preferences.
Lead automation for sales teams
Sales teams in particular, can benefit from lead-generation automation tools in one of the following ways:
Lead scraping: grab qualified leads from online platforms, websites, social media, and more.
Data enrichment: add missing data points to your existing lead lists for more successful and accurate outreach.
Lead scoring: automate lead scoring calculation based on lead data to prioritize outreach based on buying readiness.
Outreach: lead automation helps sales and marketing teams create automated, personalized campaigns based on scraped data.
Lead automation examples
So far, we've focused on theory only. Here are some practical examples of lead generation processes and how they can be automated in the real world.
Automate lead enrichment
The more data points you have, the more effective your outreach efforts are.
For example, you can use lead scraping tools to grab information about your leads from various online sources. Besides the name and contact data, you can find someone's phone number, position in their company, social media handles, and much more.
With all of these data points, you can personalize your outreach. You can create personalized outreach messages instead of a bland, cold email.
You can use automation, such as the AI Enricher from PhantomBuster, to create prompts for lead enrichment based on existing data.
Automate the lead-scoring process
Besides providing more personalized experiences for your leads, having more data in your CRM helps with higher accuracy in lead scoring.
Tools such as HubSpot allow you to set your lead scoring criteria and determine which leads are of the highest quality for your business.
If you need more data, PhantomBuster integrates with HubSpot for data enrichment. This lets you directly push the most recent and relevant lead data to your CRM, automating your pipeline generation.
Automate LinkedIn outreach
Once you have relevant lead lists, you can automate reaching out.
For example, you can set outreach flows to connect on LinkedIn with leads inside your CRM with a high lead score.
Use tools to automate connection requests with personalized LinkedIn messages and follow-ups.
Automate email marketing campaigns
Use the leads from the previous stages of automation to create and scale email marketing campaigns.
Automatically create audience segments based on lead scores, industry, company size, location, etc.
Personalize sequences and individual emails based on information stored in your CRM.
Set up triggers and actions to send emails after the leads complete specific actions in the customer journey.
Lead automation tools
Ready to generate new leads, build targeted campaigns, and boost the customer experience while you're at it? These are some of the best tools to use.
1. PhantomBuster: For list-building automation and CRM enrichment
PhantomBuster is a lead automation tool that offers multiple options for lead scraping, enrichment, and LinkedIn automation.
Whether you have an existing list of leads or not, this lead generation tool helps you find their data and reach out to them on LinkedIn with ready-to-use automations.
Some of the key features of PhantomBuster include:
Lead scraping: get lead data from LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and other online and social media platforms.
Lead enrichment: add missing data about your leads, such as contact information, LinkedIn activity, the pages they follow, the groups they're in, and much more.
CRM integration: send all new lead information directly into HubSpot for better outreach management.
Lead engagement via LinkedIn: Automate likes and comments on the posts of your target audience, follow their profiles, comment on their posts, and perform many other forms of LinkedIn outreach.
AI lead enrichment: Use AI prompts to generate lead scores, extract specific info, or enrich leads with additional AI-generated details based on existing data.
Lead list creation: Build lists of leads from scratch simply by exporting a LinkedIn search.
PhantomBuster pricing starts at $56 per month and there is a free 14-day trial available.
2. HubSpot CRM: For lead capture, tracking and engagement
HubSpot is one of the world's most renowned CRMs, with many features for marketing and sales teams.
HubSpot lets you capture leads on your website, track their progress through the sales funnel, and engage with them with marketing and sales automation tools.
Top HubSpot features for lead management and automation include:
Lead capture forms and chatbots: Grab customer data on your website and store it directly in your CRM while automatically populating relevant fields.
Lead scoring and segmentation: Automatically score and qualify leads based on their interactions with your website and product.
Marketing automation: Create workflows for lead nurturing processes, such as sending follow-up emails and setting up trigger actions based on lead behaviors.
HubSpot pricing for their Sales Hub starts at $90 per seat per month.
3. Clay: For lead enrichment automation
Clay helps you enrich your leads with data points from 75+ channels and tools and then uses AI to contact them.
Top Clay's features include:
Claygent: AI agent/web scraper that visits lists of domains and extracts the necessary information for your sales campaigns.
Automated email outreach: Use scraped data for faster, more personalized email messages to your leads.
Waterfall enrichment: Search multiple channels and databases simultaneously to find all the missing lead information.
You can get Clay starting from $149 per month.
4. Gong: For AI sales engagement
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that uses AI-based insights to help you engage customers, accurately forecast sales, and improve your team's productivity.
Some of the best features in this app are:
Gong Forecast: Use AI to predict which leads will become future customers based on up-to-date CRM data.
AI-powered engagement: Reach out to the prospects most likely to convert at any given time and send personalized messages based on existing lead data.
Gong Insights: Capture customer interactions in your CRM and get the data you need for personalized, scalable outreach.
Gong pricing is not publicly available, so you must reach out for a quote.
5. Drift: For lead capture using chatbots
Drift is an AI-powered sales engagement platform that uses conversational AI to turn regular visitors into customers. With a combination of bots, landing pages, and personalization tools, Drift serves unique experiences for each visitor.
The most relevant features of Drift are:
Conversational landing pages: Chat-based pages that nudge visitors from the top of the funnel to make a purchase.
Prospector and AI engagement score: Give scores and qualify leads based on CRM data and historical interactions with your website and business.
Drift Intel: Turn anonymous traffic into familiar accounts without the visitors filling out any forms.
Drift's prices start at $2,500 monthly.
6. Unbounce: For lead-capturing landing pages with automatic personalization
Unbounce is an AI-powered landing page builder that helps you launch, optimize, and split-test landing pages.
Some of the most valuable features of Unbounce:
AI optimization: Send website visitors to the version of the landing page that is most likely to drive conversions.
Landing page and popup builder: Collect leads with beautiful forms, popups, and pages and pass them on to your sales team through a CRM integration.
Dynamic text replacement: Serve the most relevant capture forms based on your lead information.
Unbounce pricing starts from $99 per month.
7. Poptin: For lead automation using popups and banners
Poptin lets you engage and convert visitors on your website and then passes those leads directly to your chosen CRM.
The most valuable features include:
Autoresponders: Welcome new leads to your lists by sending them automated messages as soon as they join a list.
Advanced targeting options: Show lead capture forms only to those audiences that meet your criteria.
Automated actions after form submissions: Send leads to another pop-up, launch a thank-you message, redirect to a URL, send an auto-responder, and more.
Pricing starts at $20 monthly.
8. Active Campaign: For lead nurturing via email
Active Campaign is an email marketing platform that lets you automate everything from 1:1 outreach to mass email campaigns.
Top Active Campaign features are:
Sales triggers, actions, and goals: Set key points in customer communications to create targeted email campaigns based on interactions.
Split and conditional actions: Use complex email logic to create highly personalized sequences and emails.
Site and event tracking: Send emails based on fresh data from your website.
Active Campaign pricing starts at just $15 per month.
9. Pardot: For lead grading and drip campaigns
Pardot is Salesforce's built-in marketing automation tool. It can send relevant email campaigns, capture data through forms, log engagement history, segment leads, and more.
Pardot's most useful features include:
Lead scoring: You can assign scores to your sales leads based on their previous behavior on and off your website.
Lead grading: Automatically assign grades to leads based on how closely their data matches your ideal customer profile.
Lead qualification: Combine scoring and grading to produce a list of the best leads for outreach.
Pardot is purchased separately from Salesforce and plans start at $1,250 per month.
10. Lavender: For AI lead nurturing emails
Lavender is a real-time sales email coach that helps you optimize your outbound email campaigns to improve sales results. It works within your email marketing platform to deliver effective campaigns for nurturing leads and converting them into paying customers.
Top Lavender features are:
Faster email personalization: Get personalized email content recommendations.
Email score and optimization: Use AI to calculate the effectiveness of your sales emails and identify areas for improvement.
Use ChatGPT and AI directly in your email tool: Use AI prompts to craft the best sales email more quickly.
Pricing for Lavender begins at $27 per user per month.
11. Marketo: For lead generation and marketing engagement
Marketo Engage is a powerful B2B marketing automation tool from Adobe that helps you easily run multichannel campaigns.
Top Marketo features you should know about are:
Website ad retargeting: Use previous browsing data to target anonymous and known website visitors with personalized ads.
Automate nurture streams: Facilitate conversational marketing by giving leads personalized content based on persona and buyer stage.
Marketo pricing is not disclosed publicly; you must request a personalized quote.
Conclusion
Automated lead generation helps you do more with less. With the right software, you can automate most of your sales and marketing processes, freeing up more time and having a meaningful impact on business growth.
Automate lead generation with PhantomBuster.Scrape and collect leads, enrich your existing data, and automate your outbound sales through LinkedIn. PhantomBuster is free to try for 14 days.
