The Best Lead Generation Tools for Building Profitable Pipeline

There’s a good chance that up to half of your existing leads aren’t a good fit for what you actually sell. 

In fact, when we surveyed sales professionals earlier this year, we found that 44% of sales teams are converting less than 5% of their leads.

“I get 50–70 emails a day and I can't tell you how many emails I get where someone is trying to sell me something for an engineer or a Head of Product — roles that are just not applicable to what I'm doing,” reports Nick Feeney, VP of Revenue at Loom.

Reaching out to people who aren't a good fit for your product isn't only unprofessional — it’s a  waste of time and resources and undermines your sales reps' confidence in their pipeline.

Fortunately, modern day lead generation tools make it easy for sellers and marketers to find high-quality prospects. And the best lead generation tools? They make it easy to convert them.

Here you’ll find a list of the top lead generation tools on the market right now.

At Apollo, we offer an all-in-one lead generation product ourselves. Yes, we may be slightly biased — but we also have our finger on the pulse. We understand exactly what separates a good tool from a great one, and we pulled from 100% real customer data, reviews, and experiences to give you the most accurate breakdown.

So without further ado…

Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to your business and nurturing them with the end goal of converting them to a customer. Lead generation is what lays the foundation for revenue generation and it’s one of the most important aspects of go-to-market for any B2B business.

In many ways, generating and nurturing best-fit leads is the majority of the job for an SDR, marketer, and dozens of other go-to-market roles. It’s a fairly enormous process that has a few key components.

1. Identifying your target audience. Businesses need to understand which types of individuals will get the most out of their product or service. This is called creating an “ICP”, which according to sales expert Victor Berloty, gives you alignment on the values and specific language you need to close a deal.

2. Performing the right activities. There are a mix of tactics you can use — some of them outbound, some of them inbound — to get the right leads into your pipeline. This includes conducting searches in B2B contact databases, content creation and distribution, engaging in thought leadership, and event hosting.

3. Qualifying and scoring leads. Not all leads are created equally. Once you have a pool of them, you need to use criteria (like BANT or other frameworks) to qualify prospects and evaluate if they fit your ICP. Implementing lead scoring models that weigh criteria based on what you care about most help with lead prioritization at this stage.

4. Building engagement campaigns.  Nurturing leads through the sales funnel with tailored content and communication is how you move potential buyers towards a close. Apollo data shows that running multi-channel campaigns across email, phones, and social media increases your chances of booking a meeting by up to 24%.
   

💡In case you haven’t heard: Apollo wrote a book — THE book — on outbound lead generation. It’s called “Outbound Sales,” it’s available for free on our website, and it lays out exactly how to fill your pipeline with high quality leads. 

Managing the lead generation process is a full-time job; and, quite honestly, impossible to scale without a contact database for granular searches, a platform for building automated campaigns, and everything in between.

But that’s why you’re here — lead generation tools can give you that.

A lead generation tool, like any internal software system, needs to align with your business needs across a few key areas.

Pricing

Lead generation software can be subscription-based, pay-per-lead, or tiered pricing models based on features and number of users. 

All said and done, they will typically range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per month, depending on the scale and complexity of your business and its needs. 

If you’re just starting to build your lead generation strategy, some tools will offer a free version, a free trial, or a basic tiered plan so you can get your feet wet without a big financial risk.

Support

When you choose a software system, you’re also choosing to work with the people who run it.

Vendors should provide comprehensive support options, including live chat, email support, and phone support. An especially robust support system will also have a knowledge base, tutorials, and training resources to help your team get the most out of the tool.

Key features

Any decent lead gen tool will have a searchable database, customer relationship management (CRM) integrations, lead scoring, and some level of analytics and reporting. 

But if you have goals to really ramp up your sales operation, you’ll need essential features like lead enrichment, data imports and exports, customizable workflows, and advanced automation.

For leaders at companies like Mutiny who are experiencing that growth (they achieved 200% more revenue in 90 days!), a non-negotiable feature of a lead generation tool is that it’s all-in-one, not only providing data but streamlining outreach.

“We [need to] aggregate contact data from these accounts and reach out in a sequencing tool — all in one.” — Liam Goldfarb, BDR Manager at Mutiny

Some lead generation tools will offer you that all-in-one functionality; others specialize in  specific areas of pipeline generation. We’ve broken down the best lead generation tools into the following use cases:

• The best end-to-end lead generation tools

• Lead generation tools for lead & contact databases

• Lead generation tools for cold emailing & outreach

• Lead generation tools for website visitor identification

• Lead generation tools for landing page creation

Read it all the way through or jump to the section that speaks to your business’ biggest needs. These are our opinions based on what we’ve seen, read, and heard from the users and the data — but only you know which solution will work best for you and your team.

Apollo.io is the leading all-in-one solution for revenue teams, providing salespeople and marketers with one of the largest verified contact databases on the market — 275 million B2B contacts across 73 million companies — plus a suite of lead management and engagement tools that nurture prospects through the funnel to close.

Its offerings for lead generation are arguably the most comprehensive on the market.

Key features

• 275M+ contact database with 65+ filters like job title, employee headcount, and technologies used 

• A free Apollo Chrome Extension that layers prospecting data on top of LinkedIn and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Salesforce, Gmail, and company websites

• Lead scoring and signaling tools that allow you to rank and prioritize your pool of leads 

• Website visitor tracking for identifying active buyers

• Sales sequences for building outreach campaigns of automated and manual touch points across email, cold calls, LinkedIn, and action items

• Out-of-the-box automated workflows and plays that trigger sales actions based on conditions you set

• AI-powered conversational intelligence that transcribes, analyzes, and extracts insights from your team’s calls

• An Analytics hub with pre-built reports and dashboards to analyze individual and team performance against your goals

• CRM data enrichment that automatically fixes duplicate, stale, or missing data

• Hundreds of integrations to unite your most important sales tools in one platform plus an Open API to build your own (which companies like Leadium use to 3x annual revenue 👀)

Pricing

Apollo is free to use, forever. On a free plan, Apollo users can:

• Get full access to an extensive database of 275M+ contacts with tons of search filters for granular segmentation

• Build a library of sequences and activate up to two of them at a time

• Receive unlimited email credits and send up to 250 emails/day

• Use up to 150 minutes of conversational intelligence

• Integrate with Salesforce and HubSpot

• Leverage Buying Intent data and track website visitors

You can sign up for Apollo for free here and try it for yourself.

For sales teams who are looking to make Apollo core to their process and ramp up their usage, there are three, customizable pricing plans:

• Basic: $59 per user/month + a 14-day free trial

• Professional: $99 per user/month + a 14-day free trial

• Organization: $149 per user/month

Source

Here’s the full explanation of Apollo’s pricing plans and structure.

What customers are saying about Apollo.io

With nearly 8,000 customer reviews on G2, Apollo tops the charts with a 4.8 out of a 5 star rating on G2. G2 also lists Apollo as #1 out of 100+ tools in the Sales Intelligence category. 

This is according to their “Momentum Scores” model that factors in swaths of data across social, web, employee, and review sites.

 Source

The majority of users (not just in sales, but for marketing and revenue teams, too!) are leveraging Apollo for B2B lead generation. Here's what they have to say.

“Apollo feels like it was built by a sales team that needed to actually complete tasks quickly...It's very easy to use and we were up and running quickly. Having data integrated with your sequencing tool shortens the time to sequence for leads and it's awesome.” — Jacob M., Sales Development Lead at SMB, G2 review

“I use this tool daily to find 500 to 1000 targeted leads and send them email or make a sales call…Apollo has great customer support to resolve every issue I address to them [and] it is very easy to integrate my CRM with this tool.” — Peter G, Freight Broker at Mid-Market, G2 review

B2B contact databases are another subset of lead generation tools.

Many customers have found that Apollo does data best, but there are other big players on the market you should be aware of.

Source: Medium

ZoomInfo is a B2B software and data company that provides businesses with access to company and contact information through a searchable database. Boasting 174M emails and 70M direct dials, ZoomInfo’s database is one of the biggest on the market that’s refreshed regularly enough to maintain a reasonable level of accuracy.

It has a few lead engagement tools to help you activate your data, too, making it a solid option if you have a large team and the budget to spare.

Weigh ZoomInfo against Apollo in this side-by-side comparison.

Key features

• Contact database with search filters across 600M profiles, 174M email addresses, and 70M direct dials

• Data enrichment API

• Chrome Extension for web prospecting

• Buyer intent insights

• Sales process automation and sequencing

• Conversation intelligence

• Integrations with popular CRMs and marketing tools

Pricing

ZoomInfo offers pricing packages for sales, marketing, and talent teams — with access to features that fit those use cases.

Its pricing is not listed on its website and is known for being untransparent. However, RevPilot reports on the pricing available from 2022 (keep in mind that it’s likely lower than what it is today in 2024).

• Professional: $14,995 annually

• Advanced: $24,995 annually

• Elite: $39,995 annually

It’s one of the more expensive tools on the market (if not, the most) and its price points are probably the biggest disqualifying factor for teams in their software search.

What customers are saying about ZoomInfo

With 4.4 out of 5 stars on G2, ZoomInfo users have a lot to say about their experience from the undeniable breadth of their demographic and firmographic data to some concerns surrounding its accuracy.

“I like having one centralized database for gathering contact information. The platform is easy to use, and the UI is pretty good…I've found the contact information accuracy is becoming more and more inaccurate. Whether that be no direct or mobile numbers to incorrect email addresses, ZoomInfo seems to be slacking in this area.” — Verified user in Enterprise, G2 review

“The ability to filter and search for certain titles or departments is very good…The biggest downside is the inconsistent data. Companies will often have incorrect addresses, LinkedIn links, or other data points that get pulled in incorrectly or are not quality-checked.” — Verified user in SMB, G2 review

Source: Factors.ai

Cognism is a lead generation platform that stands out for its CRM data enrichment and mobile numbers. Unlike Apollo and ZoomInfo, Cognism is strictly a database tool, with no sales sequence or workflow automation tools.

Their claim to fame is their data and they boast that their mobile number database is manually verified to an accuracy of 87%. 

If you’re looking to generate leads on the phones, Cognism is a good fit — but you’ll need a separate lead generation tool that handles the engagement side.

Key features

• Global contact database with 10 million verified mobile numbers

• Intent data, firmographics, technographics, and sales triggers

• Chrome extension that works on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, and corporate websites

• Unrestricted viewing and page-level exporting of B2B contact data in all packages.

• Integrations with Outreach, Salesforce, and other popular sales tools

Pricing

Cognism’s pricing model is centered around a flat rate platform fee that gives you full access to its database and extension. From there, depending on the level of data verification you need and if you’d like access to sales event data, you’ll fall under a Platinum or Diamond plan.

The business offers pricing on a case-by-case basis, so you’ll have to contact their sales team to get an exact quote.

Customer reviews of Cognism

With 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2, users have good things to say about Cognism. Their hundreds of reviews speak on decent data quality and ease of use.

“We've had a great experience using Cognism for building prospect lists and gathering detailed information for setting up our leads in Salesforce. It consistently manages to provide information for at least 70% of our lists, which significantly enhances our lead generation efforts.”

— Verified user in Mid-Market, G2 review

“Quick and easy to use, very intuitive to detail the exact search criteria you'd like to use. Downloads are very quick to obtain a great deal of data — and most of the contacts you find have populated email addresses and phone numbers.”

— Jack B., Mid-Market, G2 reviewer

Once you have the data on who your prospects are, you need tools that help you create personalized outreach that connects with them.

Here are the top lead gen solutions for streamlining your outreach and engagement.

Source: gzconsulting.org

Outreach stands out in the lead generation space for its advanced automation, customizable workflows, and deep analytics.

It’s important to note that, like Salesloft, Outreach is solely an engagement tool. It can help you move deals through the pipeline to close, but to find workable leads, you’ll need another tool to layer on top of it.

That tool could be ZoomInfo, in theory. But unless you have a massive budget to throw at separate prospecting and engagement tools, you may need an all-in-one solution. 

💡Learn how Predictable Revenue cut costs by 50% by rolling the functionality of ZoomInfo, Outreach, and Salesforce into Apollo.

Key features

• Sales sequencing for automated and organized engagement

• AI-generated deal insights that make predictions on deal health and winnability

• Conversation intelligence for deeper cold call insights

• Pipeline management tools to measure the quality and maturity of your deals

• CRM integration with Salesforce

• Rep coaching tools like coach cards, bookmarks, notes, and summarized transcripts

Pricing

Outreach offers feature-based pricing and packaging per user, which means that teams need to pay to add on any additional features that exist outside their plan. 

Here’s a glimpse of how it’s laid out:

• Engage: Sequences, templates, snippets, etc.

• Call: Dialer, call monitoring, AI call summaries, etc.

• Meet: AI meeting assist, real-time recording, etc..

• Deal: AI deal assist, deal health and overview, etc.

• Forecast: Pipeline management, projections, etc. 

You’ll need to talk to sales for an exact quote but prices typically start at $140 per user/month for sales engagement capabilities, then an add-on of ~$10/month for dialer. Additionally, with their annual pricing only model, users sometimes have to pay thousands of dollars for implementation fees.

Source: Outreach

Note: Outreach does not offer a free account or free trials of paid accounts

What customers are saying about Outreach

“The standout feature of Outreach is its robust automation of sales engagement processes. The software can be quite complex, which might be overwhelming for smaller teams or businesses…It is also on the pricier end of softwares.” — Mid-market, G2 review

“Metrics on campaign, means of contact, & number of steps before success gave great insight for future success…[but] the unified prospect database capabilities are not fully encompassing.” — Michael K., Mid-market Sr. Business Development Associate, G2 review

Compare Outreach with Apollo side-by-side here.

Source: Instantly

Instantly is a software platform designed to enhance lead generation and cold email outreach for sales teams. It offers automated email sequences, personalization, and inbox warmup capabilities to help users efficiently manage and optimize their email campaigns.

Key features

• 160M contact lead database with filters like job positions, technology, and keywords

• Built in CRM to call and SMS from a browser (though may be less comprehensive than an external CRM)

• Unlimited inboxes to send emails from

• Email deliverability tools like email inbox warming and deliverability performance dashboards

• Instantly AI for lead analysis and personalized messaging

• Integrations with popular CRMs like Pipedrive and Salesforce

Pricing

Instantly has four basic pricing plans:

• Growth: $30 per user/month

• Hypergrowth: $77.60 per user/month

• Light speed: $283.30 per user/month

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Source: instantly.ai/pricing

Their pricing is “built for businesses of all sizes”, but with prospecting and engagement features sold separately, many of their users report steep costs.

Note: Instantly does not offer a free plan but does offer a 14-day free trial of paid plans.

Customer reviews of Instantly

“At a high level, the platform is incredibly intuitive. The Instantly accelerator has everything you need to get started. When you get more granular with usage of the platform, a lot of that intuitiveness is lost and requires a lot more self teaching…This is not a platform for someone who isn't willing to put in a lot of hours of work.”
— Reagan N., Wealth Investor, SMB, G2 review

“Instantly is a great tool, it combines everything you will need to search potential leads, warm up your emails, contact those leads and follow-up with those leads.”
— Wilson A., SMB founder, G2 review

Source: The Brand Hopper

6sense is an AI-driven platform that gives sales and marketing teams access to recommended actions, persona map, people and company pages, chrome extension, prioritization dashboards and alerts.

Key features

• Company & people search

• AI-powered intent data

• Pipeline intelligence

• Marketing-specific tools like digital advertising hubs and predictive analytics

• LinkedIn Chrome Extension

• Integrations with apps like Outreach, Salesloft, and Mutiny

Pricing

The 6sense pricing model is based on a combination of users and credits given. They offer four different plans, including one that’s free.

Source: 6sense

You need to contact their sales team for an exact quote but, according to Vendr, an average team can expect to pay $123,000 per year for 6sense. Which sounds — far too expensive to believe. However other sources, such as this post from a Reddit user, confirms the steep estimate.

 

Source: Reddit

Is it worth the cost? We took a look at what reviewers had to say.

What customers are saying about 6sense

The 6sense marketing-specific platform has 860 reviews and 4.3/5 stars on G2. Its sales platform is less popular, and also less loved, with a 4/5 star G2 rating. (Also, it’s not ideal that those platforms are separate to begin with).

We chose a few reviews that capture the overall sentiment around what it’s like to be a user of the tool.

“I like the idea of bringing warm accounts to the forefront of our attention/dashboards, however I think a lot of the time the data it's based on is wrong or is [already] an existing customer in our platform…6sense isn’t my preferred platform for sales.”
— Verified user in IT services, Enterprise, G2 review

“Being able to have customized, detailed intent is so extremely helpful when cold calling! Also the ability to see when someone has visited your website. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you are used to where things are, you can find a lot of info about who you are attempting to reach out to.”
— Verified user in Mid-Market, G2 review

Source: Clearbit

Clearbit (recently acquired by HubSpot) is a B2B sales intelligence tool that helps sales teams find new leads and run lead generation campaigns. With loads of integrations, reliable contact data, and a web extension, it’s a powerful tool for sourcing your most promising leads. 

However, since their HubSpot acquisition, they no longer enrich email addresses or direct directs, which makes it a poor fit for executing cold outreach.

Key Features

• Prospecting database of 300M+ contacts and search filters to narrow down your target audience

• Data enrichment to update and enhance CRM contact and company data

• Lead scoring based on buying intent signals

• Marketing-specific tools for tracking website visitors, manage campaigns, and generate leads

Pricing

Unlike other sales intelligence tools on this list, Clearbit pricing is based on the size of your company and database, monthly web traffic, and contact creation (rather than product usage, credits, or users).

Their specific pricing is vague, but some sources report plans starting at around $3,600 per year with limited volume, going up to $100,000+ for larger companies.

Note: Clearbit does provide a free option that gives you a 25 credit limit per month.

What customers are saying about Clearbit

Clearbit is geared towards marketers and is best suited for organizations that require enhanced data enrichment and highly-targeted marketing campaigns.

Which seems to be the theme across the bulk of their G2 reviews.

“Currently we use Clearbit enrichment and prospector. Prospector is good, but the enrichment side is really where we extract value on the marketing front.”
— Eoin C., Head of Marketing, G2 review

“I enjoy Clearbit's clean UX/UI, and the fact that it makes my job easier for better understanding visitor intent along with data enrichment or the softwares that we use each day.”
— Verified user in Mid-Market, G2 review

With the right data and personalization tools, landing pages can become a lead generation engine. Marketing software can help you target specific audiences with landing pages that are customized to the needs and interests of potential customers.

Apollo customer Mutiny, a website personalization tool themselves, creates landing pages with custom images for their own go-to-market efforts, helping them achieve a 200%+ increase in outbound revenue in the course of 90 days.

With the right lead gen tool — you can, too.

Source: https://documentation.unbounce.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025960951-What-is-the-Page-Overview

Unbounce is a landing page platform for marketers and agencies, built with the vision that you shouldn’t need a fully-fledged IT or web dev team to launch lead converting landing pages. With testing and optimization features, it makes it simple to build conversion-optimized campaigns that’ll help you scale your lead generation efforts.

Key features

• Drag-and-drop builder for landing pages and capture forms

• No-code A/B website testing

• AI copywriting tools for emails, ads, and pages

• Real-time analytics

• AI website optimization

• Chatbot creation

• Integrations with tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Mailchimp

Pricing

Unbounce offers four distinct pricing plans — each with a 14-day free trial offering (besides Concierge, which doesn’t offer trial).

• Build: $74/month for 1 user max (billed annually)

• Experiment: $112/month for 3 users max (billed annually)

• Optimize: $187/month for 5 users max (billed annually)

• Concierge: $649/month for 15 users max (billed annually)

What customers are saying about Unbounce

Unbounce has a fairly average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars on G2. After scouring the reviews, it’s clear that the platform accelerates the time it takes to get a personalized landing page up with a fraction of the resources.

“Within hours of signing up, we had our first landing page live & collecting leads. The testing feature & real-time reporting make this a must-have tool for our business.” — Joe M., Marketing Director at SMB, G2 review

“Expensive but worth it…The tools to create landing pages are nearly limitless. Pictures, dynamic word inserts, Google tracking, notifications via email, webhooks, etc. I really like that you can set up tests that allow you to make subtle changes and see the results.” — Rick W., Marketing Consultant, G2 review

Source: https://instapage.com/blog/14-day-trial/

Instapage is another great web platform that’s fully dedicated to building landing pages that rake in the leads. 

It’s user friendly, it allows you to get things done quickly, and it’s perfect at its craft of helping entrepreneurs build landing pages that are personalized and speak to the needs of your interested ICPs.

Key features

• Landing page builder with AI content generation

• Personalization copy based on keywords, firmographics, and demographics

• A/B testing and experimentation

• “AdMap” to connect paid ads to relevant landing pages

• Popup form builders for lead capture

• Integrations with 120+ marketing tools including HubSpot and Zapier

Pricing

The Instapage pricing system is very simple with only three pricing plans:

• Create: $79/month + a 14-day free trial

• Optimize: $159/month + a 14-day free trial

  • $239/month if you have 30,000+ unique monthly visitors

• Convert: Custom pricing

Instapage’s pricing is based on the number of unique visitors you have visiting your landing pages per month. This includes the free trial, which only gives you a maximum of 2,500 web visitors.

What customers are saying about Instapage

With 4.3 out of 5 stars on G2, Instapage users genuinely love the platform’s ease of use and customer support. There are some qualms with its basic AI writing feature — but, how great are any of the AI-generated writing tools, anyway?

“[Instapage has] user friendliness, a good customer support team, and it's easy to implement…[but] the AI content writing tool is not quite advanced and I didn't like the type of copy it generated.” — Verified user in marketing, SMB, G2 review

“No code is required, and it is easy to connect with Wordpress and other CMS. The experiments are also very good without the need to do it in either Google Analytics or Meta.” — Daniel C., Marketing Specialist, G2 review

This probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard of the tools on this list. 

Maybe you’ve even experimented with one or two of them at some point in your sales or marketing career, exporting a few lead lists in one, sending a couple cold emails in another.

But, real results from your lead generation process requires more consistency than that.

An all-in-one lead generation tool commits your teams to a cycle of planning, executing, measuring, and refining; one that eliminates all guesswork and keeps data, engagement, and buyer insights unified.