It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the world of sales and lead prospecting. Identifying a qualified sales prospect is not only difficult, but it can also be extremely time-consuming for a sales team. Thankfully, there are companies available to help ease this burden. Lead generation companies promise to help increase your business’ revenue by regularly providing qualified leads for your sales team to pitch. Using Crunchbase Pro, we’ve gathered the top five lead generation companies that stood out in 2018.
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What is lead generation?
For sales newbies, lead generation refers to the process of finding customers who you think would be interested in buying your product or service. These potential customers are commonly called leads. If leads fit your target personas, they are a prospect.
A persona represents the characteristics of the target demographic you want to sell to – such as an individual between the ages of 30 to 40 with a family and an annual income of $100K. Sales generation companies and sales prospecting tools benefit salespeople by creating a pool of leads that have a target persona. They do the initial legwork of tracking down potential customers who would be interested in your brand, so you can focus on perfecting your sales pitch.
Top 5 lead generation companies to help with your 2019 strategy
SalesLoft
SalesLoft is an engagement platform aimed to help sales companies provide a better customer experience. Based in Atlanta, SalesLoft also offers personalized email services, lead generation, data-driven decision making and more.
- Founded in 2011
- Total Funding Amount: $75.7 million
- Investors include Techstars, Insight Venture Partners, Storm Ventures, Emergence, Techstars Boulder Accelerator, TechOperators, High Alpha, Tom Noonan, David Cummings, LinkedIn, and Kyle Porter
- Highlights: Email marketing and engagement tracking, SalesDialer system for sales calls, data insights for engagement, content, and activity
Apollo.io
Apollo offers an engagement acceleration platform that generates leads and helps increase conversions. In addition to driving engagement, Apollo features a database of over 20 million contacts.
- Founded in 2015
- Total Funding Amount: $9.3 million
- Investors include
- Y Combinator, Social Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, CRCM Ventures, SV Angel, ZhenFund, Argonautic Ventures, and Struck Capital
- Highlights: Prospective leads, increases engagement rates
Leadspace
Targeted toward B2B businesses, Leadspace helps improve engagement and growth for marketers. Additionally, it uses artificial intelligence and data analysis to offer the best leads for your business in real time. Based in San Francisco and Israel, Leadspace serves seven out of the top 10 largest enterprise software companies such as Google, Intel, and Oracle.
- Founded in 2011
- Total Funding Amount: $56 million
- Investors include Battery Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Vertex Ventures Israel, and Arrowroot Capital
- Highlights: Audience management platform for B2B companies, implements AI and data to provide real-time lead generation, offers increased engagement and faster growth
Datanyze
Datanyze focuses on technographics, or insights on a company’s tech choices and buying signals, to create leads for companies. Some of its main features involve technology tracking, predictive analysis, prospecting, and data enrichment.
- Founded in 2012
- Total Funding Amount: $1.8 million
- Investors include GV, Ridge Ventures, Mark Cuban, Flight Ventures, AngelList, Gil Penchina, Bryant Stibel Investments, Jeff Epstein, Kyle York, and Neeraj Agrawal
- Highlights: Technographics to find leads for companies, tracks technology purchases by businesses as well as buy signals, employs data and predictive analytics to find leads, simplifies the process to contact and set up a meeting time with a prospective lead
InsideView
InsideView is an intelligence target platform that generates prospective leads for over 20,000 companies. Its platform uses industry data, real-time events and private connections to provide more customized and deliberate leads.
- Founded in 2005
- Total Funding Amount: $76 million
- Investors include Foundation Capital, Emergence, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Split Rock Partners, Greenhouse Capital Partners, Big Sky Partners, and Spring Lake Equity Partners
- Highlights: Offers relevant leads based on sales intelligence, provides real-time insights of trigger events, shows connections between colleagues
How Crunchbase Pro can help with lead generation
With Crunchbase Pro, your sales team can perform extensive research and analysis on lead generation companies to find the partner that will keep your pipeline filled with qualified prospects. Crunchbase Pro offers filters to sort lead prospecting companies through funding, acquisitions, investments, and ranking. Our database also offers valuable information about each company, from web traffic to competitors, so you can make a fully knowledgeable choice for your lead generation company.
