What must-have software or tools do you use to manage online leads?
The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.
1. Wufoo Works Incredibly Well
Wufoo is a great online form tool that can be embedded on your site to collect leads. Beyond Wufoo’s easy-to-use and effective tools for managing online leads, it also integrates seamlessly with other important business tools like Mailchimp (for email marketing) or Salesforce (for customer relationship management). Forget the old school “Email Us” link on your site — use Wufoo! -Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.
2. Get Help With Highrise
I love Highrise and my team could not function without it. As your team starts to grow, it can become more difficult to manage leads throughout the organization. Highrise makes sales collaboration easy. The Highrise app for Google is also a big timesaver because I never have to leave Gmail to manage my leads. -Lawrence Watkins, Great Black Speakers
3. ProspectSnaps Makes iPhone Leads Possible
ProspectSnap lets me add people to my AWeber email list straight from my iPhone. It beats the heck out of carrying business cards with me all the time. Plus, my response rates are through the roof since AWeber does all the followup for me. ProspectSnap is just a faster, surefire way to get leads, instead of hoping people don’t throw away my business card and actually call me. -Angela Pan, Angela B. Pan Photography
4. Go Beyond Forms With Olark
Forms are great for gathering leads, but live chat on our site helps us reach leads who are a leery of a web form. With Olark, we can instantly start conversations with visitors on our site, and find out more about what they are looking for and how we can help them. -Wade Foster, Zapier
5. Stick With Infusionsoft
Using web forms and automated sequences to manage online leads with Infusionsoft is an amazing tool. We can see where a lead came from online, actions and begin follow up sequences so everyone gets great service — and it’s scalable. -Kelly Azevedo, She’s Got Systems
6. Try Rapportive for Gmail
Rapportive enables you to gain insights about leads who email you — which means you can instantly see their faces, see where they’re based, scan their recent online activity (on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more) and what prior email conversations you’ve had with them from directly within your inbox. It’s gives you a useful overview of a lead and helps you put them into context quickly. -Lea Woodward, Startup Training School
7. Let Them Land on Unbounce
Unbounce is an insanely powerful landing page tool that let’s you get things shipped and offers simple A/B testing on marketing messages. -Derek Shanahan, Foodtree
8. Instant Customer Does the Trick
If you speak in front of audiences, you know how difficult it can be to collect all those email address leads. Even when you have a stack of business cards, you probably do nothing with them for days or weeks. Instant Customer allows you to setup an SMS code or weblink for the audience to opt-in (allowing you to give them a free offer). This syncs to preloaded email content, and BAM! Leads turn into customers. -Michael Margolis, Get Storied
9. Salesforce.com Is Still the Best
There’s nothing better than Salesforce.com. As a startup, you have incredible amounts of people who want to support or partner with you. Salesforce.com will help you create a funnel. None of those leads will slip through the cracks once you set up your system! -Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches
10. It Works With Instapaper
Instapaper is a bookmarking tool, and you might be wondering just what use that could be in gathering leads. As I browse the web, I bookmark the websites of people and companies who fit my profile for leads. All of these sites get dropped into one folder, which has its own RSS feed, which I use to push them into my CRM tool. -Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting
11. Chimp Is the Champ
MailChimp is best known for being an email marketing tool, but it’s actually much more. Their forms make it easy to collect customer information. Their auto-responders allow you to automate followup with customers, segmenting them into appropriate groups. You can also view detailed analytics on who opened which emails and who clicked on which links. Trust the ‘Chimp! -Bhavin Parikh, Magoosh, Inc.
Great list. Definitely discovered some new lead management tools try. As an Internet marketing entrepreneur (eBiz ROI, Inc.), I really appreciate this post as I have discovered some new things to try for inbound marketing. We currently use #9 (Salesforce) and #11 (Mail Chimp), both of which are GREAT tools. We recommend them to all our clients using Internet marketing for customer acquisition. As eBiz ROI has grown, recently we have found the need to integrate traffic generation, lead generation, leads conversion and sales into an integrated, environment to include analysis and measurement for continual leads process improvement and to track marketing ROI. This is why we are now using HubSpot! So maybe there is a #12 – HubSpot to be added to the list :-) Thanks for sharing.
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Great list, my recommendations would be on similar lines – Salesforce, Gmail, Mailchimp and for live chat – I like ClickDesk better than Olark.