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Lead management software is a sales tool that helps sales professionals track, score, manage, qualify, and nurture leads, plus track communications and manage pipelines. The top lead management software offer features for contact management, email sequencing, sales forecasting, and workflow automation, among others. To help you choose the right solution, we’ve highlighted the best lead management tools plus their use cases, pricing, and more.
Here are the seven best lead management software for salespeople:
To find the best lead management tool, we scored over a dozen popular CRM software using six weighted scoring categories and related subcriteria. We assigned each option subcriteria scores, which totaled an overall score out of five, with the software scoring the highest identified as our winner. Finally, we determined a primary use case for each tool that scored highly enough to make our list to help you decide if it’s right for your specific needs.
We first considered pricing and core features since these tend to be the primary considerations for salespeople and business owners when choosing a lead management platform. We then reviewed usability, with customer service, integrations, and customizations rounding out our evaluation.
We evaluated cost of entry, premium costs, and any free trials, versions, or demos offered.
We checked for common lead management features and their strengths, including lead management, collaboration, and email sequencing.
We tested ease of use and configuration and checked whether coaching was available.
We measured types of support: email, chat, phone, and hours of operation.
Did the software offer third-party integrations, types, and number of integrations per category?
Did it offer customizations for the lead management processes, including lead capture, reporting, and more?
Note: All per-user prices are with a one-year commitment unless noted.
Although some lead management software that made our list scored highly in a given category, overall, we found that Freshales offers the best value for salespeople looking for a way to manage and distribute leads. Below, we showcase how each tool fared in regards to pricing, features, and primary use cases.
AI-assisted lead management software that excels at sales forecasting and predictive lead scoring.
Freshales is a sales-focused lead management platform that has built-in sales features and CRM functionality and is ranked as our best overall CRM. It offers tools to help sales teams track and score leads and monitor activity in their sales pipeline. Freshsales is known for its Freddy AI feature, which performs sales forecasting and predictive scoring, making it a great lead management tool for teams that rely on accurate insights to make informed decisions.
While Freshsales tops our list of lead management software for salespeople, it is a little lacking in the integration arena when compared to other sales tools on our list. If you need more integrations for productivity or customer relationship management, consider Pipedrive.
Popular CRM with advanced reports and dashboards that enhance lead, opportunity, and customer data.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a customer relationship management platform with a focus on the sales pipeline and advanced reporting. Its feature set helps sales teams with every aspect of the lead management process, including lead creation, qualification, and nurturing. Most important, Salesforce can help you track the most impactful sales metrics to your team like follow-ups, conversions, and opportunities, then organize them into custom reports and dashboards.
Salesforce has a lot of features and integrations, so sales teams that are new to lead management software may find the options overwhelming. If you’re looking for a simpler solution that still offers robust sales features and reports, consider Freshales.
Visually-appealing software with sophisticated project management features.
monday sales CRM is a cloud platform offering both project and customer relationship management. It’s known for its visual appeal thanks to its color-coded, drag-and-drop dashboard features and 200+ easy-to-configure tacking templates with marketing, sales, and support teams in mind. The software excels at helping teams manage not just contacts, but project status as well, making it good for lead and post-sale activity tracking.
Task dependencies are lacking from monday sales CRM, so if they're vital to your team or sales management, we suggest looking at Salesforce, which has native time tracking features.
Sales management software known for its individual add-ons and integrations and intuitive UI.
Pipedrive is an easy-to-use sales CRM with visual pipeline management tools and robust plans. It really shines with its a la carte add-ons, such as Web Visitors to identify your website visitors and their intent, LeadBooster to generate leads through web forms or a prospecting tool, and Campaigns to segment your leads, send them relevant nurturing emails, and track their engagement. With Pipedrive, you can pay only for the advanced features you need.
Pipedrive’s customizations can seem lackluster to some users, so if customizing dashboards, reports, and sales processes is vital to your sales process, consider Salesforce for your sales workflows, which offers advanced features in many of its tiers plus additional add-ons.
Email automation and marketing tool specializing in email sequencing and campaigns.
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing platform that also has features for customer relationship management, contact management, and lead management. Segment your leads into lists, then set up email sequences based on custom criteria using ActiveCampaign’s templates or your own design. Additionally, you can set alerts so that when a prospect or lead performs an action, you can reach out to answer any questions or concerns while your company is top of mind.
Even though ActiveCampaign does support CRM tools and functionality, it's not the software’s primary function. If your team needs a sales tool with strong CRM features, we suggest you take a gander at Zoho CRM, which also has robust email nurturing tools.
Lead management tool with advanced features for lead management via various platforms.
Zoho CRM is a marketing and sales software known for its powerful workflow automations. The idea behind the software is to allow sales teams to focus largely on nurturing leads, fostering relationships with prospects, and managing contacts. This is done, in part, thanks to its multichannel marketing features, which allow salespeople to foster relationships through social channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram plus website chat, telephony, and email.
While Zoho CRM is great for multichannel marketing and sales, it can be slightly more difficult to learn than other options, especially for new users. If you're looking for a simpler option, we suggest Freshales, which also lets you engage clients via live chat, SMS, and more.
Free software with sales, service, and marketing features plus paid lead management upgrades.
HubSpot CRM is a free customer relationship management platform with additional upgrades available for advanced sales features. At the free tier, salespeople have access to sales, marketing, service, CMS, and operations features like deal pipelines, email marketing templates, live chat, and AI bots. Upgrading to the paid Sales Hub levels opens up other sales tools like reporting dashboards, automatic lead rotation, lead scoring, and sales forecasting.
HubSpot CRM is a great free option for sales teams and has many of the tools you might need, but adding sales features by upgrading to Sales Hub is costly. If you’re looking for robust no-cost sales and marketing tools and more affordable premium upgrades, we suggest Zoho CRM.
The best lead management software and tools enable sales teams to nurture leads and keep conversations going, regardless of where they occur: email, social, chatbot, or telephone. When searching for a lead management solution, seek features that fit your sales team's needs, such as lead scoring, lead capture, and sales forecasting. Read our list of sales software for lead management and pick the one you think will help your team capture and nurture leads the best.
Ronnie Payne has a background in ecommerce marketing and web development, having acted as a digital marketing consultant and operator of several online stores. He specializes in ecommerce, Internet marketing, content marketing, and web design.
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