10 Automation Tools to Optimize Lead Generation, Marketing, and Sales

Marketing has seen a drastic change in the last few years and a lot of business owners are constantly looking for new ways to stay on top.

With more than 3.2 million small businesses opening every year, competition is fierce and it's important you equip yourself with some important tools to grow your business.

This article will cover 10 automation tools to optimize lead generation, marketing, and sales so that you can grow your business faster than ever before!

Lead Generation and Prospecting

Finding prospects, generating leads, and building your list can be a lot faster with the help of automation. Here are some tools that can help you in this aspect:

True Influence

Modern marketers need a good identity strategy to address multiple channels and to precisely target. People interact with brands across multiple channels, on multiple devices from different IP addresses and it gets harder every day to execute hard-hitting, unique and targeted campaigns. 

True Influence help marketing and sales accurately identify customers regardless of the device, channel, or physical location using intent data.

Their identity graph Triangulation^® technology identifies contact-level intent from B2B decision-makers across all departments in an account. Wherever prospects and customers engage with your content, you can recognize them.

LeadGibbon 

LeadGibbon is a fantastic tool for content marketing and lead generation. It is cloud-based and taps from a massive database of contact information, allowing you to quickly build a list straight out of LinkedIn. This is designed primarily for B2B marketing, and its real-time contact updating feature lets you quickly refresh and cleanse your database whenever needed. It also has an email verification feature that practically cuts down the time spent on the tedious process of validating emails. 

Prospect.io

Prospect.io is yet another tool that lets you gather prospects, find their contact details, and build a clean list from all the data gathered. Beyond contact prospecting, it provides you with tools that let you create multi-touch email drip campaigns, which is a proven method in making sales via email marketing. It also provides you the necessary insights that will help you up to your email marketing game, as well as a task tracker that will help you increase your productivity. 

ContactOut 

ContactOut is a great tool to have on hand if you are looking to do list building quickly. This tool finds the email address and other contact information of any LinkedIn user and also provides you with nifty features such as a dashboard and people search engine. It also integrates with powerful CRM such as Greenhouse which brings out its full potential with regards to prospecting automation. 

Marketing and sales

Closing deals and generating sales can be tricky. While leaving a human element to take care of this is ideal, you can benefit more on automating this stage of the marketing process. These tools can help you cut the work down and focus more on actually running your business:

MailChimp 

MailChimp is one of the most popular marketing automation tools on the market and it's easy to see why. MailChimp makes it easier than ever before to build your email list, send newsletters and automate all your marketing campaigns. What really sets them apart is their integration with social media — you can share content from almost any other site directly into a highly customized post. Managing social media accounts can be a repetitive and creatively exhausting task, and this feature is something that many marketers can use.  

CampaignMonitor  

CampaignMonitor is another great marketing automation tool, with a striking similarity to MailChimp with regards to their features. They offer many of the same features but they are more focused on design and email integration. The tool features a very easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface for designing emails, and it helps that this is also responsive and optimized for mobile devices. You can practically use this tool any time, anywhere, and from any device, so long as you have an Internet connection. 

Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is the tool that you should use if you are not only looking to create attractive emails with responsive designs but also have them sent straight to your lead's inbox. It integrates with your CRM and calendaring software and also has a drag-and-drop email builder that makes email creation a lot easier. It comes with features that let you track the emails that you have sent, as well as A/B testing and subscriber management that should help you get the most value out of your list. 

Marketo 

Marketo is a marketing automation tool that is highly recommended for those who are looking to take their sales and marketing efforts up a gear. It has features that you would expect from any marketing automation tool, including lead nurturing, landing page creation, email campaigns, and search engine optimization but what makes it stand out from the rest of these tools is its lead-to-revenue management (L2RM) framework. This framework is basically a set of disciplines that take your campaign from lead generation to income generation, complete with automation support all throughout your lead's life cycle. 

Salesforce 

Salesforce has its own Sales Cloud service that practically provides a complete solution to running a sales-boosting email marketing campaign. Some of its features include email templates, email marketing campaign automation, and lead scoring, and all of these combine to help you create emails customized for your target audience. All of these combine to create an automated platform that focuses on generating leads, creating opportunities, and making sales. 

Hubspot

HubSpot is a marketing automation tool that has built its reputation on the ability to help marketers collect and nurture leads. This tool practically puts the practice of nurturing leads on full autopilot, thanks to its email drip campaigns feature and a Workflows system designed to handle repetitive tasks and help you save time and put more focus on growing your business. 

Choosing the Best Tools to Automate your Business 

This list is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to sales and marketing automation tools. What these tools have in common is versatility and the ability to provide automated solutions for your business.

Do not feel overwhelmed while employing these tools to automate your business. Instead, put three questions before decision-makers. 

• How much are you willing to spend? You will need to first consider your budget in this case. Automation can be an expensive affair, especially since you are not only spending money on the installation of a new system. You might have to upgrade your hardware to accommodate your new tools, and most automation tools are SaaS (software as a service) that you will have to pay a recurring amount for. 

• What do you need to automate? Consider your needs before choosing an automation tool. If you only need to automate a specific function such as email scheduling, then you certainly do not need to invest in an entire software suite and just get only what really addresses your requirements.

• Do you actually need automation? If you are not really overwhelmed with repetitive tasks or if your company is small but doing well as is, then you might consider automating your business at a later time, especially when the budget is still an issue. 

Sales and marketing automation is a complex field. You will need a good platform and a set of tools to integrate automation into your business. Right tools matter, ask the woodcutter chopping trees with a blunt ax. Having the right tools give you an edge in a competitive landscape, and you can make your way towards more leads and better ROI.