Lead Capture Software

Even though they're separate departments, sales and marketing work toward a common goal: Converting prospective buyers into satisfied customers.

• Marketing develops a variety of initiatives—ranging from traditional advertisements to targeted email and social media campaigns—to generate interest in your company's product or service.
  
• Sales capitalizes on that interest, closing deals and selling your product or service to targeted consumers.

This conversion depends on successfully attracting, or capturing, "leads," i.e., people or businesses with a potential interest in what you're selling.

It's crucial to track where your leads come from for two reasons:

1. So marketing knows which campaigns are successful.
2. So sales knows which leads are the most promising.

That's where lead capture software comes in. These tools help marketing teams aggregate and review the leads they pull in from various marketing campaigns, and help sales teams identify which ones get put on the "nurture" track.

In this guide, we'll discuss the key features of lead capture software, outline which tools you should look at based on your business size and highlight some considerations you should review with vendors before making a purchase.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is Lead Capture Software?
Common Features of Lead Capture Software
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Key Purchase Considerations

What Is Lead Capture Software?

Lead capture software gathers data about the people or businesses with a potential interest in your product or service and aggregates it into a searchable database. These tools then help teams analyze that data so that either the sales or marketing department can take the immediate next best action.

The information contained in these leads may include:

• Name
• Source of lead
• Contact information
• Preferred method of contact
• Previous interactions with your company

The sources of these leads include, but are not limited to:

• Responses to marketing materials
• Responses to sales outreach
• Customer support agents
• Purchased lists

Lead capture is the first step in the sales pipeline. The next steps include nurturing, lead scoring, analytics and a variety of other procedures that sales teams follow to turn leads into closed sales.

Thus, although lead capture software can be purchased as a best-of-breed, or stand-alone solution, you will frequently find it as just one component of a larger lead management suite or marketing software suite.

See the "What Type of Buyer are You?" section below for a breakdown of which tools you should consider based on the size of your business.

 

Common Features of Lead Capture Software

Lead capture software will contain some, if not all, of the following features:

Leads database	Create and store leads data from numerous marketing efforts in a centrally accessible database. Organize leads using tags or classification criteria that you can set. Import or export data to or from other sales and marketing software platforms as needed based on the buyer journey.
Lead forms	Place forms in key places on your website prompting visitors to enter contact details, often in exchange for access to gated information.
Multiplatform support	Gather leads from multiple platforms and marketing efforts, including your website, email, social media and other sources.
Lead analytics and reporting	Create and analyze lead reports to see how marketing and sales efforts are performing, i.e., which marketing campaigns are most successful and which types of leads are converting at the highest rates.
Integrations	Integrate lead capture with other lead management tools to make effective use of your database and nurture leads through to closing a sale.

A lead dashboard in Infusionsoft

What Type of Buyer Are You?

You can purchase lead capture software as a stand-alone tool, as part of a larger lead management suite, or as one application within a robust CRM or marketing platform. Your company's size and industry needs will influence how you should invest.

• Small business. If your business is small, you can likely get by with stand-alone lead capture software—if nothing else, it's good to have a database that keeps track of all the leads you've obtained. However, as you grow, you'll want your leads database to integrate with other sales tool, so consider how long you expect to use the stand-alone system based on your business growth expectations.
  
• Midsize business. If you're a midsize or growing business, consider a lead management suite, which will offer lead capture in addition to nurturing, scoring and segmentation capabilities. You'll want it to integrate with your other sales, marketing or customer relationship management (CRM) software.
  
• Large business. At the large or enterprise scale, your business will almost certainly need lead capture functionality as a part of larger lead management or sales and marketing software. It is unlikely that it would be cost-effective for you to purchase best-of-breed lead capture software.

Key Purchase Considerations

Other factors to consider when picking lead capture software include:

Integration with other systems. This will likely be the key consideration when it comes to choosing lead capture software. A database of leads that doesn't integrate with other sales or marketing tools won't prove very useful. To make lead capture a valuable resource to your company, you'll need those other functions to nurture leads along the sales pipeline and turn prospective buyers into satisfied customers.

Cloud-based vs. on-premise software. These days, most lead capture software is distributed over the cloud. This means that your business doesn't need to host the platform on its own hardware, and you won't require ongoing IT resources to maintain that hardware, as with on-premise solutions. Due to lower upfront and maintenance costs, cloud-based tools are often the smarter choice for small businesses. Ask vendors about their deployment options, training and customer support services when you're evaluating software to ensure you choose a system that best meets your needs.