The best lead management systems and tracking software

Your marketing and sales teams share the same basic objective—to sell your service or product. Marketers drum up interest while sales teams guide prospective buyers to the checkout. But it isn’t always clear what happens between those two steps.

That’s where lead management comes in.

In this guide, we’ll answer your most pressing questions about lead management systems and how they can help your business convert leads into sales.

• What is a lead management system?

• Top sales lead management solutions

• Lead management and tracking software benefits

• Lead management system features

• Sales lead management FAQ

• Try lead management software for free

Lead management systems use specific sales processes, methodologies, marketing strategies, and software to contact qualified leads and turn them into paying customers.

Without the advantage of lead management software, sales reps may waste valuable time and effort on weak leads or unqualified buyers. Lead tracking software helps your team better estimate lead value, improve sales forecasting, and spend less time and resources on unviable leads.

How to use a lead management system?

Lead management ensures that potential customers aren’t dropped as they get passed from marketing to sales. Depending on which platform you use, the process may vary. But the basic lead management process generally looks like this:

1. Lead generation: Software draws prospects to your website via paid advertisements, search engine results, referrals, social media, or other lead generation tactics.

2. Lead capture: Collect consumer data through web forms to feed information into your CRM lead software.

3. Lead qualification: Determine a potential customer’s sales readiness by reviewing their pain point and how well your product or service can resolve it.

4. Customer segmentation: Divide potential customers based on location, demographics, and needs to personalize campaign efforts.

5. Lead scoring: Prioritize prospects based on the criteria your business deems most important, and place sales-ready buyers at the top.

6. Lead distribution: Automatically assign prospects to the salespeople who are in the best position to close the deal.

7. Lead nurturing: Educate prospects about your product or service to establish credibility, trust, and value.

This process doesn’t work by itself. Understand your ideal customer and maintain strong communication between marketing and sales teams to maximize your approach.

Determine the best sales lead management solution for your organization. Review the top sales management solutions of the year and see how each platform’s features compare.

1. Zendesk

Zendesk Sell is a powerful and easy-to-use CRM lead tracking platform that makes tracking your potential customers a breeze.

It comes with a variety of pre-built features that you can use out-of-the-box or tailor to your own specifications. Here are some of our favorites:

Using Sell, your sales reps can spend more time perfecting their sales emails, cold email templates, and sales follow-up emails.

Features

• Sales reports and analytics

• Pipeline management tools

• Mobile access

• Sales engagement tools

• Third-party integrations

• Email tracking

• Calendar integration

• Task automation

• Performance metrics

• Sales forecasting

• Sales pipeline analysis

• Integrated communication channels

• Workflow automations

Considerations

• Fully customizable sales pipeline that allows you to track leads from the moment they enter the funnel to the moment they convert to customers.

• Automatically capture and track key details related to leads, deals, and contacts.

• Streamline daily workflows with native workflow automations.

• Integrate with third-party apps to streamline the sales process from start to finish.

• Create advanced reports based on your sales data to make better business decisions.

• No free plan.

2. Keap

Keap is a CRM lead management tool built with long-term growth in mind.

Designed to nurture strong customer relations from the first impression onward, Keap provides businesses with tools for streamlining and automating their sales process so they can rapidly convert prospects to buyers.

Keap offers different pricing models that let you scale for your needs. Its lowest pricing tier starts with 500 contacts for one user.

Features

• Analytics and ROI tracking

• Data migration support

• Unlimited emails

• Segmentation

• Landing pages and web forms

• Marketing automation

• Sales pipeline management

Considerations

• Makes online payments easy by offering integrations with platforms such as PayPal and Stripe

• Offers end-to-end automation

• Provides the data and functionalities to customize sales and marketing initiatives

3. Zoho

Zoho CRM promises a 360-degree customer lifecycle platform for medium-sized businesses. It offers seamless integration with over 500 widely used apps and robust lead-tracking features like card scanners and targeted email marketing.

It also features an AI-powered conversation assistant and omnichannel communication options so businesses can reach their prospects on their favorite platforms.

Zoho’s most affordable pricing tier includes standard features like sales pipelines, customer dashboards, and 10 fields for lead scoring rules.

Features

• Collaboration tools

• Card scanner app

• Live chat

• Social media integration

• Targeted email campaigns

• Google ads integration

Considerations

• Comes with a mobile app

• Boasts incredible email marketing functionalities

• Flags duplicate data (like multiple entries of the same contact information)

• Difficult to delete documents

• Profile views are not customizable

4. HubSpot

HubSpot’s Sales Hub is a CRM sales lead management tool that lets businesses keep all their prospect data and activity centralized on a single platform. The pipeline features allow users to access contact details and track every customer touchpoint so they can jump in at exactly the right moment. The HubSpot CRM Starter Plan is priced competitively per month for two users.

Sales Hub is a reliable tool for scoring and prioritizing potential customers, segmenting them into targeted lists, and tracking email exchanges in real time.

Features

• Meeting scheduling

• Email tracking and notifications

• Reporting dashboard

• Email reply tracking

• Mobile app

Considerations

• Email tracking features can lead to unwanted data uploads, but you may lose out on important information if you turn it off

• Simple to import and export sales leads

• Can’t integrate with third-party email tools

5. Lead Docket

Lead Docket is a lead flow software tool designed for individuals, mid-sized businesses, and enterprise firms. It offers web forms for capturing new prospect contact details and automated communications follow-ups that let salespeople keep potential customers informed and engaged on every step along their journey.

Additionally, it comes with marketing optimization so users can see where their leads are coming from and gauge the efficacy of their campaigns.

Lead Docket offers integrations with business apps like Docusign, Mailchimp, and CallRail. Pricing details are available upon request.

Features

• Campaign management

• Online forms

• Data extraction

• Sales pipeline management

• Prospecting tools

Considerations

• Straightforward integration process

• Lackluster customization capabilities

6. ClickPoint

ClickPoint serves a range of industries, including education, mortgage, B2B, travel, insurance, and call centers.

Designed for salespeople in the office or out in the field, ClickPoint helps businesses improve their reach to prospects and automatically prioritize the deals that matter the most. Plus, actionable sales reporting sheds light on which lead sources bring in the most value and which ones are underperforming.

Features

• Calendar reminder system

• Call logging

• Auto-dialer

• Marketing automation

• Field sales management

Considerations

• Real-time scoring

• Dashboards for calling and performance

• Automated text and email nurturing

• Intuitive platform that is simple to use

• Difficult to customize without enlisting the help of a company representative

7. LeadSquared

LeadSquared is a CRM and lead management system used in industries such as travel, real estate, education, marketing agencies, ecommerce, and more.

Designed for B2C businesses with high sales volumes, LeadSquared is a useful tool for connecting all the customer journey touchpoints on a single platform so that teams can focus on the next task, armed with the information they need. For teams on the go, LeadSquared offers mobile access on Android and iOS devices.

Features

• Calendar reminder system

• Marketing automation

• Performance metrics

• Pipeline management

• Social media integration

Considerations

• Admirable API integration with other applications

• Allows for field customization

8. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a cloud-based CRM system designed to help salespeople focus on activities rather than outcomes. It includes all the key features for tracking and managing potential customers and other functions like call recording, client tracking, and online forms. It also uses the power of analytics to turn selling into a science, so sales teams can adjust their processes based on data rather than gut instinct.

Features

• Churn management

• Calendar-based reminder system

• Collaboration tools

• Landing pages and web forms

• Dashboard with customizable metrics

Learn more about the Pipedrive integration for Zendesk.

Considerations

• Easy to implement

• Mobile app can be complex to use due to the number of filters

• Must integrate with Slack or Zapier for salespeople to receive notifications

• Collects sales performance and historic data

9. Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder gives businesses more visibility into who’s interested in their product or service, allowing salespeople to prioritize where to target their efforts. The software provides tools for contacting leads quickly so you don't lose to a faster competitor, and it offers insight into customer behavior so you can anticipate their needs.

Leadfeeder’s pricing plans are per month per feature. You can expect all the basic features of lead tracking software, such as qualification, segmentation, and nurturing. There are also CRM features and user interaction tracking.

Features

• Dashboard

• Goal setting and tracking

• CRM

• Reporting and analytics

• Pageview tracking

Considerations

• Easy-to-use software with a high-quality database

• Clean and functional UI design

• Can set up numerous feeds to monitor repeat visitors

• Robust feed customization features

• Doesn’t always detect accurate intent data or provide actionable insights

10. Lead Capsule

Lead Capsule is a lead management software platform that’s best for brokers, aggregators, and call centers. It specializes in capturing and selling information to other businesses, so they can focus on making sales rather than hunting for valuable prospects.

It helps drive traffic to your special offers, capture contact information in web forms, and track your lead sources so you can see where your best prospects are coming from.

Features

• Source tracking

• Pipeline management

• Prospecting tools

• Segmentation

Considerations

• Responsive customer support

• User-friendly system

• Abundance of features can be difficult to navigate

Here are some of the biggest benefits of investing in these software tools.

Software development is an ever-evolving segment of the tech industry—it changes as the market adjusts to new buyer demands and tougher competition. As you search for the right tracking tool for your business, don’t overlook these important sales lead management software trends.

• Sales forecasting: Predict deal volume and value to improve your overall sales strategy and resource allocations.
  

• Pipeline analysis: Keep tabs on deal progression, and identify stuck opportunities early.
  

• CRM dashboard customization: Get a 360-degree view of where your prospective customers stand using drag-and-drop widgets so you can monitor deal activity, daily tasks, and sales performance goals.
  

• Integrations: Connect your lead tracking software to other business productivity apps.

CRM lead software comes with many other profit-boosting features and benefits, such as contact management software, pipeline automation, and a power dialer. Learn all about them here.

Implementation times can vary by several months depending on certain factors:

• The lead management system you choose

• Availability of resources within your organization

• Access to online and in-person training from your vendor

• Level of customer support available

• Complexity of your environment

Tip #1: Plan ahead

The key to speedy implementation is to loop in your team and set tasks and goals for implementation and utilization early on.

Tip #2: Try an out-of-the-box solution

Certain solutions may lend themselves to a faster setup. For instance, 70 percent of companies can implement Zendesk Sell within seven days because it is an out-of-the-box solution. Businesses have access to top Zendesk representatives for training, too.

Tip #3: Lean on your provider

Look for a lead management software provider that helps you implement the tools and provides ongoing support.

Still have questions? Here are simple answers to common queries about lead tracking software.

How does lead management software work?

Lead management systems help sales representatives focus on high-impact assignments by managing repetitive daily tasks. This type of software can also match leads to sales reps based on pre-set criteria to ensure accurate routing.

How do you generate sales leads using lead management tools and software?

Find qualified prospects using sales lead management system features or by trying some of these lead generation tactics:

• Offer discounts and freebies

• Generate inbound leads with forms on your website

• Promote referral incentives

• Engage in social selling and place ads on social media

• Hire a business that specializes in lead generation to do the heavy lifting for you

How is lead tracking different from CRM software?

Lead tracking software matches prospective buyers with the appropriate sales rep to increase the likelihood of a closed deal.

CRM, on the other hand, manages an existing customer base.

The reason CRM software and lead tracking sometimes go hand-in-hand is simple—the hope is that every potential buyer becomes a loyal customer. Using CRM lead software is a smart choice because it integrates two powerful tools on a single platform.

A quick internet search will show hundreds of sales lead tracking software options. Choosing the right one is all about knowing your business from top to bottom and being honest about your budget and customer management needs.

Before signing on the dotted line, here are some steps to help you make the best choice for your company.

• Know what tracking features you need

• Define your budget

• Research your options

• Test drive the top choice(s)

• Request a demo

Whichever platform you prefer, keep in mind that it should be able to scale with your growth. Otherwise, you’ll need to go through the process of selecting and implementing software all over again.