These are the tools we have used over the years to help us drive more leads through Credo, and that we recommend to anyone doing lead generation and nurturing.
Years ago we tried to tie all sorts of tools together for our lead generation. We made liberal use of Zapier and for a while, things worked, until we reached enough of a volume that we needed to centralize everything. HubSpot was too expensive at thousands per month, so we went with ActiveCampaign which does most of the same things at a fraction of the price.
Years later, we are still on ActiveCampaign and rely on it for our CRM and our marketing automation. We tie it together with Gravity Forms for lead forms and SalesMessage for two-way SMS.
We used HubSpot at Credo to help us manage our sales funnel and convert more people from a form submission to scheduling a phone call.
For a long time we used the free CRM, but in 2018 signed up to the Sales Starter to help us better automate our sales followup and communication processes so that we can spend more time selling and focusing on the right customers as opposed to spending more time on those less committed.
I’ve used Calendly for years to send to people a link through which they can schedule a call. It’s a well-trusted tool, and you can even embed it on your site so that you are sending people to your website to schedule a call as opposed to Calendly’s site.
We moved away from Calendly to HubSpot for a while, but moved back once we stopped using HubSpot and moved to ActiveCampaign for our marketing automation.
A good alternative we have not yet widely used is SavvyCal.
What to say about OptinMonster. Let’s be honest – most lead popup and form software is pretty terrible. It’s full of bloated code and slows down your website, the editors are clunky to use at best, and they’re overpriced.
OptinMonster keeps it simple and does their job very well. We use OptinMonster for popups on our site and for collecting leads easily. We’ve used a lot of other popup builders over the years, and OptinMonster is our tool of choice after all that time.
I have used Gravity Forms for years to capture leads on my various websites, including Credo. I love Gravity Forms because it allows me to do everything I want to do – custom CSS, passing variables in URLs to help with conversion, multi-page forms, and even integrates with tools like MailChimp, Stripe, and more that I require to build my business effectively.
Couple Gravity Forms with GravityView and you have a killer setup upon which you can grow your business.
SMS is one of the most effective marketing channels right now, but many brands get it very wrong. They’re blasting campaigns like it’s bulk email (those don’t work very well these days either) and wondering why they’re not getting any engagement.
In 2020 we moved to Sales Message to send reminders about upcoming meetings and to engage with customers on a personal level. The results have been outstanding. If you’re looking for a way to two-way SMS with your business’s customers, look no further than Sales Message.
If your business runs off leads generated, webinars are a fantastic way to share your knowledge in exchange for their information. Whether you’re presenting webinars yourself or inviting on guests (or both!), webinars drive leads better than many other channels.
When we started hosting webinars at Credo, we signed up to WebinarNinja (instead of Zoom, as WebinarNinja is half the price) and haven’t looked back.
Email marketing providers have come a long way in the last few years, and one of the major new players has been Drip. Acquired by LeadPages in 2016, Drip allows you to dynamically tag your subscribers which then powers automations and workflows that are not possible in other ESPs.
Drip has been used to grow six figure (and bigger) courses and ecommerce companies alike, and we love Drip for our email marketing automation at Credo.
We moved from Drip to ActiveCampaign in 2019, but still recommend Drip.
When you’re selling technology, sometimes one of the most effective ways to target prospects is through the software they are using that you either compete with or play nicely along.
This is why I use BuiltWith, to find companies using certain technologies so that we can reach out to them. Their paid plans offer a wide range of websites and volumes.
When you’re in B2B, you need to find the right email for the right person at the right company. Luckily Hunter exists, where you can put in a URL and find all the people at that company as well as their titles. This lets you reach out to the right people and have a higher chance of closing a deal.
If you’re using phone calls as a way to generate leads, you need a way to track them back to the campaign so you know what activities you’re doing lead to the best results.
Thus we recommend using CallRail, which lets you track your calls back to campaigns like your website or even advertising campaigns. Using their easy-to-use dashboard, you get the analytics you need to grow your business via phone calls.
This page last updated on October 3, 2022 by John Doherty
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