In any software sales career, qualifying your leads is an essential part of maintaining a healthy sales pipeline, and for fast-growing businesses with a lot of leads, this can be a huge drain on time and resources. If this sounds all too familiar, then it may be time to adopt a new piece of lead scoring software.
With features that take data from a range of sources, simplify the countless variables of sales pipeline data, and use these to rank leads in terms of their viability for closing deals, lead scoring software can be a hugely powerful tool for anyone working in software sales.
In this post, we’ll give you an overview of 6 of the best lead scoring software options, and help you find a suite that will simplify and streamline your work.
Best Lead Scoring Software
Zoho CRM
One of the best pieces of lead scoring software for sales teams that gain a lot of their leads through multi-channel marketing, Zoho CRM is capable of collating leads from all marketing disciplines and scoring them for further nurturing.
Drawing on analytics data from lead-facing marketing channels, such as email and social media campaigns, Zoho will allow software sales professionals to establish lead scoring rules based on demographic and engagement metrics, such as email open and click-through rates, landing page bounces, social media likes, and comments, and more.
Zoho CRM also has a ‘Free Forever’ plan with a limit of 3 users, making it hugely cost-effective for start-up sales teams.
While Zoho is a hugely effective option for lead scoring software, its interface is slightly more complex than comparable tools and can be a little hard to adapt to for people who are used to a more boilerplate CRM. However, when it comes to multi-channel integration, there are very few tools that can approach Zoho’s great functionality.
Salesforce Essentials
Salesforce Essentials is the perfect CRM for small businesses which require greater visibility of their sales process without paying for enterprise-level software. With a customizable selection of pipeline views and highly-detailed reporting dashboards, Salesforce Essentials will help you gain and utilize simple insights when you’re managing a relatively complex sales pipeline.
Although the Essentials suite itself won’t allow you to score leads right out of the box, it does have a large app store (AppExchange) that has a variety of integrations for lead scoring, allowing you to choose the option that’s best for your unique needs. As your operation scales, you’ll have the option to upgrade to Salesforce’s enterprise-standard Sales Cloud, which includes native lead scoring functions.
Aside from its versatile lead scoring features, Salesforce Essentials also serves as an all-around effective sales CRM that can be customized with third-party app integrations to suit your needs, and give your sales team a great base platform to carry out all their essential tasks.
Freshworks
A widely-used CRM that’s bolstered by impressive AI features, Freshworks is one of the best lead scoring software. It is a fantastic tool for any sales pro who wants to streamline and prioritize the most valuable leads in their pipeline.
Freshworks account holders will have access to their own AI assistant, which will automatically score sales leads based on variable characteristics and their behaviors when interacting with your marketing channels, giving you all the insight you need to effectively rank prospects in your pipeline.
One of the stand-out features of Freshworks is its capacity for predictive scoring, which will highlight the leads further along your pipeline that you’ll be most likely to close. This will help you make the right calls with a lot more notice than many other tools, helping you and your team stay a step ahead and avoid wasting time trying to nurture unhealthy prospects.
Aside from these features, Freshworks also promises an excellent standard of support, with 24/7 live chat and support agents available 5 days a week via phone.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Another one of the best lead scoring software, HubSpot Marketing Hub is a comprehensive marketing suite that can be a huge boon to both sales and marketing departments. Its AI-powered lead scoring will let you qualify and distribute your leads at scale, making it a great solution for larger companies that are feeling the strain of an active and diverse pipeline.
Aside from its effective lead scoring, it also has a number of sophisticated marketing tools which will help you with SEO and blog management, PPC management, social media management, and automation for email campaigns, just to name a few.
If you’re already using HubSpot’s standard CRM and other service platforms, it will come as no surprise that integrating the Marketing Hub is completely seamless, even for users currently on HubSpot’s free tiers.
Though lead scoring is only available in the premium plans of HubSpot marketing hub, and it may be a little strenuous on some teams’ budgets, the value of bringing all your primary marketing channels together under one interface can be well worth the investment.
Pipedrive
Known for its accessible interface and great versatility when it comes to upgrades, Pipedrive is a great lead scoring option for companies and sales operations that are projecting rapid growth in the future, and want to remain flexible as they scale.
The tool’s own LeadBooster add-on allows you to create a vast, searchable B2B lead database which will act as a source for key metrics. These metrics will in turn feed into detailed lead scoring, making it easy to determine the best way to align your time and expertise.
Though the native form of Pipedrive may feel a little bare to start with, it doesn’t take long to tailor it into a well-oiled sales platform for your business thanks to its fantastic selection of on-demand upgrades. Users can establish custom pipelines with automation features that will turn leads into deals, organize, sign, and amend electronic documents in the platform, and take advantage of various email marketing features to streamline their pitches.
Though Pipedrive can be a little challenging to adopt if you have a background in more native-first, “out-the-box” suites, it’s a great option for companies who are looking to expand and want to keep their options open as they do so.
ActiveCampaign
A robust and flexible tool designed for email marketing, ActiveCampaign is the best option on this list if a large part of your sales pipeline is owed to your email campaigns.
From the ActiveCampaign platform, you can craft targeted email campaigns the same way you would with standalone email marketing software, and send emails to specific audience segments. From there, all your generated leads can be scored using ActiveCampaign’s powerful AI functionality, based on recipient engagement signals like open rate and click-through. Finally, these scores are fed into a feature that will trigger more than 500 ready-made workflows, which when triggered, will send your leads personalized replies to help move them along the sales pipeline.
ActiveCampaign also comes with a native CRM. Although this platform is strictly geared towards email marketing, and may not have the same features your team is used to from other standalone CRMs, it can still be a plus for sales teams in the process of aligning all their go-to tools.
Wrapping Up…
Whether you’re feeling confused when prioritizing your leads, or you just want new ways to maximize efficiency within your pipeline, we hope this list of lead scoring software has helped you reach your goals.
If you’d like to learn more about lead prioritization and the wider world of software sales, be sure to check out our other tips and guides, or browse our job board for your next sales opportunity.