It’s 2025 and you can’t afford to waste money on strategies and tactics that don’t generate qualified, hot leads who want to buy from you. With attention spans getting shorter than TikTok videos and competition lurking around every corner, it’s critical to use effective lead generation tools.
Not every tool, tactic, strategy, or platform will get results for every business. The key is knowing what tools will work for your business and learning how to use them right. Here’s a breakdown of the top 10 lead gen tools that small businesses are using to generate qualified leads in 2025.
CRM software has been around for a while now, but it continues to be a key component in lead generation for small businesses. Without it, it’s extremely difficult to capture leads, let alone follow up with them and close deals.
There are a handful of great CRMs out there, and each one offers a different set of features and benefits. However, in general, they typically provide a way to capture leads through web forms, tag your leads to segment your audience, and then nurture your leads through email over time, which is where the real money is.
CRMs also allow you to schedule and document sales calls, manage your pipelines, set reminders for follow-up calls, assign tasks, and your sales reps can see what each customer has already purchased or expressed interest in to make sales calls more effective.
Some CRM tools provide more extensive features than others, but most businesses don’t need anything overly complex. Businesses that make full use of a CRM – even on a small plan – tend to see an increase in lead conversion within the first six months.
· HubSpot CRM. Many people love HubSpot’s CRM and for good reason. It’s an easy, user-friendly system that allows you to collect and manage leads, automate email marketing, and build landing pages all in one. In fact, the entry-level plan offers all of these features for free. If you outgrow the free plan at any time, you can buy add-ons to grow as needed. It’s ideal for small to medium sized businesses who are just beginning to automate their marketing and sales.
· Salesforce. Salesforce has been around for a long time, and it’s considered the gold standard in CRM software by many. It’s extremely customizable and built for businesses serious about scaling. However, it’s highly complex.
This CRM is ideal for companies with complex sales cycles, big teams, and enterprise-level data. The system collects an impressive amount of data and has a beautiful dashboard to make sense of it all. The learning curve for Salesforce is steep, but it’s worth the cost for growing businesses that need access to deep analytics and AI forecasting.
· Keap. Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) has long been the go-to for CRM software, but it’s pricey and the learning curve is steep. However, it’s not as hard to learn as Salesforce. To help small business owners get access to all the best CRM features without the extra complexity, the company now offers two user-friendly versions for those who aren’t IT savvy: Keap Pro and Keap Max. The more complex application formerly known as Infusionsoft is now called Keap Ultimate.
You can do just about everything with this CRM, including build web forms, capture, segment, and manage leads, run advanced email marketing campaigns, sell products, and manage your sales pipelines. Keap is ideal for service-based businesses and entrepreneurs who want to scale without hiring a team.
· GoHighLevel. GoHighLevel (GHL) combines a basic CRM with email and SMS marketing, a funnel and website builder, appointment scheduling, and several additional features you can’t get with other applications. Similar to other funnel building apps, you can sell physical or digital products with order bumps and upsells.
If you want to earn even more monthly revenue, you can white label the GHL software, brand it as your own, and charge your clients a monthly fee to use it.
GHL is great for digital marketing agencies, entrepreneurs, infomarketers, and service providers with multiple clients.
· ClickFunnels. Similar to GoHighLevel, ClickFunnels is a sales funnel builder with an intuitive visual interface that makes it easy to build sales pages and move people through your funnels with order bumps and upsells, whether you’re offering physical or digital products. You can also sell courses and memberships.
Like all the other CRMs discussed here, email marketing is included. It’s ideal for just about anyone who needs to capture and nurture leads, including infomarketers, coaches, and even course creators.
Email marketing alone isn’t enough. When you use a CRM, you’re building and managing relationships, nurturing leads, tracking every interaction, and fine-tuning your conversions based on what you know about your leads. A CRM truly gives you the upper hand in all your lead generation and nurturing efforts.
For B2B small businesses, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a game-changer in lead generation. It’s a premium tool designed to help business owners find, track, and engage with potential leads and decision makers. You can filter your searches to target specific keywords, job titles, company size, industry, geographic location, and someone’s seniority level and/or years in their current role.
When you use this tool, LinkedIn will recommend potential leads and allow you to save leads you like and get notified when they change jobs, post content, or engage with your content. Liking or commenting on a potential lead’s posts warms them up a bit and eliminates ice-cold outreach.
With Sales Navigator, you also get access to InMail messaging to reach out to people outside of your network without having to initiate a connection request. InMail open rates are between 18-25%, which is far better than standard 3% seen with email marketing.
When it comes to integrations, Sales Navigator syncs with HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, and many other CRM and marketing applications. If you’re in B2B sales and still using standard LinkedIn, you’ll get the advantage with Sales Navigator.
Anyone who says popups don’t work is misinformed. Popups absolutely work, but they need to be done professionally and strategically. The truth is, when people want what you have to offer, they will give you their email address if you ask. Most businesses offer a valuable freebie in exchange for a user’s contact information, like a PDF guide, white paper, discount, or even a physical book sent through the mail.
Although you can display popups when a visitor first lands on your website, the most effective popups are triggered by behavior, like exit intent and scroll depth popups that only show up when a user performs certain actions. These types of popups convert better than ones that bombard a user with a barrier to the content they’re trying to access. Data shows that click-triggered popups have the highest conversion rates at around 22-29%, while exit intent popups convert at around 15%.
For ecommerce brands, exit intent popups with discount codes or free shipping offers are especially helpful in getting people to make a purchase. You can program popups to be triggered by just about any user action, like clicking on something, scrolling to a certain point, hovering over an element, or even adding something to their cart.
When people come to your website, many of them have pre-purchase questions. If you don’t have a chatbot to tackle those questions, most people will bounce and never come back. However, when you make a chatbot available, people can ask questions and get the information they need to make a purchase decision.
A chatbot can also help you generate leads by asking users to provide their email address so someone can get back to them as soon as possible. This turns passive visitors into prospects, even outside of business hours.
More than half of business owners say chatbots help them generate higher quality leads. That’s a big deal since low quality leads don’t convert as well and can be problematic with higher refund requests.
Chatbots can also help you filter out irrelevant leads by providing all kinds of information to your visitors, including answers to questions and even price quotes. It works well because a lot of people would rather type into a chatbot than make a phone call. As a result, many small businesses are able to generate 20+ new leads per week just through a chatbot. Having a chatbot is like having a 24/7 digital sales rep on call who doesn’t need any coffee breaks.
Nothing beats word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers, but you can level up even more by automating this process with an app. For instance, ReferralCandy helps ecommerce businesses create and manage referral programs effortlessly. Customers are automatically invited to join your referral program after making a purchase and are given a personalized referral link to share with their network. When a purchase is made through their referral link, they’ll get some kind of reward, like cash, a gift card, a prize, or anything else that makes sense in your market.
Referral programs integrate seamlessly with platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce for easy implementation. The best part is you can monitor key metrics, like referral sales and social shares to see who is getting the best results and where.
Although it’s simple, website builders like Wix have built-in lead capture forms that can be implemented with a drag-and-drop action. You can use these forms to calculate custom quotes, offer free downloads or paid offers, provide discounts, and more. This simple feature works great for small business owners who don’t have the budget for a full CRM application and are running a simple website.
If you haven’t started using quizzes, it’s time to start. Businesses that use quizzes for lead generation get higher conversion rates (40-50%) compared to traditional lead magnets (20-25%) when the quiz funnels are well-designed.
Quizzes tap into people’s curiosity and people love learning new things about themselves, even if it’s just something silly like what type of bird they were in a past life. However, when your quiz aligns with your product or service, it doesn’t just entertain people – it qualifies your leads.
Here’s how it works: You create a quiz (e.g., “What’s Your Ideal Marketing Strategy?” or “Which Wellness Routine Fits Your Personality?”), promote it on social media or through ads, and then collect email addresses at the end to reveal results. Once you have a list of leads, you can create personalized follow-up content and offers based on their answers. As long as it’s fun, relevant, and immediately rewarding, quizzes are an interactive source of engagement that can help you build a list full of conversion-ready leads.
You don’t have time or money to waste generating poor leads that don’t convert. Thankfully, when you start using the tools outlined in this article, your lead generation game will be leaner, smarter, and more effective than ever before. Whether you’re nurturing leads through emails, talking to them with a chatbot, or catching them before they bounce, the right tools can be one of the best investments you’ll ever make in your business.
Whether you need a custom CRM solution, support with email marketing, a high-converting quiz funnel, or a chatbot that generates leads while you’re asleep, you don’t have to figure it all out on your own. At Marketer.co, we specialize in building effective, smart, scalable lead generation systems using all the best tools in the industry to help you attract the right people at the right time.
Stop chasing cold leads and start converting warm ones. Contact us right now and let’s build your lead generation machine.
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