CRM Lead Generation Guide & Best CRM Software to Nurture Leads

Lead generation is the first essential stage in connecting with potential customers, capturing their interest, and setting the foundation for long-term business relationships.

Building a sustainable lead generation funnel helps companies uncover new revenue opportunities, enhance marketing effectiveness, and accelerate sales pipelines to drive sustained business growth. According to LinkedIn’s 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, seven in ten B2B organizations have increased their lead generation budgets for 2025, aiming to achieve a more consistent, scalable and high-quality lead flow.

The lead gen process becomes even more effective when supported by a CRM system. Modern CRM platforms enable businesses to automate lead capture, track audience behavior across multiple marketing channels, and deliver personalized engagement experiences at scale. As a result, organizations can increase lead engagement rates, optimize marketing funnels, and maximize return on marketing investment.

In this article, we will explore the basics of lead generation, how CRM systems can support this process, and the key business strategies for attracting and converting high-value leads. You will also learn how to choose the right CRM lead generation software and explore some of the most used popular solutions.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers (leads), capturing their interest, and collecting their contact information so that a business can continue marketing to them and eventually guide them toward becoming paying customers. It helps companies consistently engage interested audiences and build a steady flow of qualified prospects into their sales pipeline.

While the approaches to lead generation may differ depending on a company’s strategy, audience, or product, this process typically involves three fundamental stages:

Stage 1: Build Awareness. Reach out to the target audience through marketing campaigns, social media interactions, offline events, and digital advertising to generate initial interest.

Stage 2: Capture Lead Data. Encourage interested individuals to share their contact details by offering valuable incentives, such as exclusive content, free trials, or event access.

Stage 3: Initial Qualification. Evaluate captured leads based on basic criteria or lead scoring models to filter out irrelevant contacts and prepare marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for further nurturing.

The primary goal of lead generation is to fill the sales pipeline with the right types of prospects who can eventually convert into customers, supported by further marketing and sales efforts. Along the way, it also helps companies strengthen brand awareness, expand their marketing database, and more accurately identify interested prospects for targeted, effective engagement.

Inbound vs. Outbound Lead Generation

Lead generation tactics typically fall into two categories:

Inbound lead generation focuses on creating valuable, relevant content and experiences that naturally attract potential customers. Common inbound tactics include:

• Webinars, workshops and virtual events
• Personalized website content
• Interactive tools and product demos
• Free resources such as eBooks, templates, or assessments 

Outbound lead generation involves proactively reaching out to potential customers, often before they’ve shown interest. Examples of outbound lead gen include:

• Cold emails and calls
• Paid social media ads with lead forms
• Direct mail or targeted event invitations
• Sales outreach based on intent signals

Inbound lead generation attracts prospects through valuable content, while outbound tactics involve proactively reaching out to them. When combined, these approaches create a more consistent, effective, and scalable lead generation strategy.

What is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management – software that helps businesses acquire leads, nurture prospects, convert them into customers, and retain loyal clients to support long-term relationships and customer loyalty. It spans the full customer lifecycle, from early-stage marketing outreach and engagement to sales, service, and ongoing relationship management.

The main purpose of CRM software is to centralize, manage, and track all interactions with current and potential customers to strengthen relationships, improve operational efficiency, and drive sustainable revenue growth.

Why is CRM Important for Lead Generation?

Customer relationship management software plays a crucial role in the lead generation process, helping businesses enhance the entire lead lifecycle through data-driven, actionable insights. It provides a structured, centralized view of key lead data, giving marketing and sales teams the full context to nurture leads and convert them into loyal customers.

Unlike traditional lead generation tools, CRM software captures not only who the lead is, but also how they’ve interacted, including their origin, touchpoints, behavior patterns, and interest areas. This enables teams to qualify leads more accurately, personalize outreach based on real-time signals, and focus on the opportunities with the highest potential to convert.

Beyond visibility, lead gen CRMs add more context to the lead funnel — from initial contact to qualification and sales handoff. They support workflow automation, track follow-up activities, and ensure that every lead is efficiently nurtured through the pipeline. Additionally, CRM software provides accountability by showing who owns each lead, what actions have been taken, and when the lead was engaged. Most importantly, it aligns marketing, sales and service teams around shared data, goals, and timelines — a key factor in improving conversion efficiency and revenue performance.

These CRM capabilities make it a powerful tool for turning interest into revenue while keeping teams aligned and focused on high-potential opportunities.

Best Lead Generation Strategies for a Business

Growing a high-quality lead pipeline remains among the biggest challenges for businesses today. According to LinkedIn, around 37% of companies named it their top priority in 2025, which underlines the need for strategies that drive measurable engagement and lead conversion.

Here are the proven tactics to help your business capture and convert leads effectively.

1. CRM-Driven Lead Generation

CRM software remains one of the most widely used solutions for lead management and generation processes. According to Fortune Business Insights, around 26.9% of businesses used CRM platforms primarily for lead generation and customer retention accounted for the largest share of CRM usage in 2024, with around 26.9% of businesses adopting CRM systems for these purposes. This share is expected to increase as companies focus more heavily on customer acquisition and sales-driven engagement.

The core value of a CRM-driven lead engagement strategy lies in its ability to generate leads and track key engagement metrics within a single, centralized system. With CRM platforms, teams gain full visibility into the lead pipeline, manage marketing campaigns, and track audience behavior across different interaction channels. This helps identify high-intent prospects faster, personalize engagement, and ultimately drive more sales leads. In addition, CRM software allows teams to manage digital ad campaigns, track website performance metrics, and uncover trends in user behavior and preferences. These valuable insights help refine targeting, personalize outreach, and continuously improve marketing efforts.

Modern CRM platforms also provide various AI capabilities that enhance lead generation efforts and improve team efficiency. For example, solutions like Creatio AI can automatically assign promising leads to the sales team, predict lead conversion probability, generate personalized outreach suggestions, trigger follow-ups based on behavior patterns, and support a wide range of other marketing and sales processes.

Some of the most common applications of CRM software for lead generation include:

• Tracking lead sources and measuring acquisition performance across forms, ads, websites, and social channels
• Monitoring campaign effectiveness in real time using dashboards and performance metrics
• Managing campaign budgets and ROI through detailed attribution reporting
• Analyzing lead behavior across touchpoints to understand engagement patterns
• Segmenting audiences and delivering personalized messages at scale
• Optimizing content delivery based on user behavior and preferences
• Collecting, enriching, and updating lead data automatically from multiple sources
• Automating follow-ups, reminders, and task assignments to streamline workflows
• Aligning marketing and sales teams with shared data, performance goals, and real-time collaboration tools

Together, these capabilities make CRM-driven lead generation a powerful approach for full-cycle lead engagement and nurturing.

2. Online & In-Person Event Marketing

Event marketing, whether virtual or in-person, is a popular and highly effective strategy for lead capture and nurturing. By directly interacting with target audiences, this strategy helps businesses earn trust, demonstrate expertise, and generate leads in real time.

Enterprises often use online formats like webinars, virtual demos, industry panels, and executive briefings to reach large, engaged audiences. Meanwhile, the offline events like trade shows, conferences, roundtables, and networking sessions allow businesses to provide more focused, personalized conversations with potential customers.

Event marketing generates leads by helping businesses:

• Engage potential customers in a direct, personalized way
• Collect contact information through registrations or in-event participation
• Deliver tailored product demonstrations or solution presentations
• Educate prospects about their offerings in a live setting
• Position themselves as thought leaders in their industry

The true value of event marketing lies in its ability to attract highly relevant audiences and shorten the lead-to-sale cycle. For example, businesses can convert event attendees into leads by integrating event data into CRM workflows to trigger automated follow-ups, personalized email sequences, or meeting invites shortly after the first interaction. By combining direct engagement and scalable outreach, event marketing becomes one of the most efficient sources for sales lead generation.

3. Content Marketing & SEO

According to Forbes, 74% of companies report that content marketing is extremely effective for generating high-quality leads. Instead of promotional messaging, this strategy attracts potential customers by delivering relevant, helpful content that addresses their specific needs.

A lead-focused content approach leverages the company’s expertise to answer key questions, solve real challenges, and guide prospects through the buying journey. Common formats for this strategy include blog articles, whitepapers, case studies, templates, and interactive assets such as videos or expert interviews. Content marketing also empowers the generation of sales leads across other channels, including email, social media, paid campaigns, and organic search.

With search engine optimization tactics, businesses can further improve their content marketing performance. SEO ensures that high-value content is discoverable, easy to navigate, and aligned with the users’ search logic. The core benefit of this lead gen approach is attracting qualified traffic and guiding users toward the next step in the sales pipeline, whether it’s downloading a resource, filling out a form, or booking a demo. Beyond content optimization, SEO also improves user experience through better landing page structure, faster loading speeds, and mobile responsiveness. Together, content and SEO form a complex, long-term lead strategy that contributes to the entire marketing and sales funnel.

4. Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most popular marketing channels, which provides timely, personalized messages based on user behavior and interests. According to Sagefrog, around 29% of businesses consider email marketing an effective source for sales and marketing leads.

In the context of lead generation, email campaigns allow companies to build awareness, nurture early-stage interest, and encourage potential leads to engage further with the business. The key value of email marketing for lead generation lies in its ability to automate outreach, capture early prospect interest, and build a pipeline of engaged contacts ready for future qualification.

This strategy supports the lead generation efforts in the following ways:

• Capturing leads through gated offers such as whitepapers, webinars, or downloadable tools
• Driving traffic to lead capture pages with clear CTAs and targeted messaging
• Promoting referral campaigns to bring in warm, high-intent prospects
• Reactivating inactive users or past subscribers through re-engagement flows

In addition, the engagement metrics — such as email opens, clicks, and conversions — can further feed into lead scoring models within CRM systems, helping teams automatically qualify new leads based on behavior and seamlessly hand off sales-ready contacts to the sales team.

5. Digital Advertising

Digital advertising enables businesses to generate and engage leads faster by delivering targeted messages to high-intent audiences across platforms like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and programmatic networks. These campaigns are designed to drive qualified traffic to targeted landing pages where users can interact with the gated content and share contact information for product demos, free trials, or consultations. With advanced targeting capabilities, teams can reach specific audience segments based on job title, industry, behavioral patterns, or purchase intent, which significantly increases conversion potential.

Beyond targeting, digital advertising is also highly effective for retargeting campaigns. Businesses can re-engage previous website visitors, ad viewers, or inactive subscribers, guiding them back to key lead generation pages. Once leads are captured, contact data from campaigns can be automatically fed into CRM systems to enrich profiles, apply lead scoring, and prioritize follow-up through personalized nurturing workflows. This end-to-end approach helps sales and marketing teams effectively manage leads and convert them into paying customers.

6. Social Media Marketing

Social media has become a powerful tool for building awareness, engaging target audiences, and driving sales leads. According to Statista, around 65% of marketers actively use social media to generate more leads, making them one of the most widely adopted channels for driving top-of-funnel conversions

The main advantage of social media lies in its ability to keep potential leads engaged through real-time interaction and precisely targeted content. The common lead generation tactics include:

• Running targeted ad campaigns with strong calls to action
• Promoting gated resources that offer value in exchange for contact details (e.g., webinars, whitepapers, or toolkits)
• Driving traffic to lead capture pages through posts, stories, and bio links
• Hosting live sessions like Q&As or product walkthroughs that prompt sign-ups or follow-ups

In addition to reaching new prospects, social media enables businesses to re-engage high-intent audiences through coordinated organic and paid strategies. Marketers can deploy content campaigns, such as product updates, limited-time offers, or event promotions, and enhance those with retargeting ads and lead-focused messaging. These efforts help move users toward conversion-focused steps such as demo bookings, form submissions, or content downloads.

7. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Unlike inbound tactics that engage wider audience segments, account-based marketing (ABM) targets specific, high-value accounts with the greatest potential to convert. The core objective is to generate qualified leads by engaging key decision-makers through personalized, high-impact outreach.

Effective ABM evaluates accounts based on firmographics, past interactions, buying intent signals, and their current position in the sales funnel. These insights help determine the right timing, messaging, and channels for outreach, ensuring that the lead generation efforts are focused on the most promising opportunities.

To capture attention and drive action, ABM implies building personalized tactics such as one-to-one email campaigns tailored to stakeholder roles, account-specific landing pages, targeted LinkedIn ads, and coordinated outreach with sales. By narrowing focus and customizing communication, it helps businesses boost lead quality, reduce lead-to-revenue time, and improve conversion rates, especially in complex B2B sales cycles.

Best CRM Tools to Support Lead Generation 

Marketing Creatio 

Marketing Creatio is a ready-to-use AI-native platform to automate marketing campaigns and lead management workflows with no code and a maximum degree of freedom. It enables users to design, launch, and optimize highly personalized campaigns and enhance marketing strategies with end-to-end workflow automation and embedded AI capabilities.

With Marketing Creatio, marketing professionals can build an all-around customer experience, from initial engagement and lead nurturing to conversion and long-term loyalty. The platform allows businesses to create detailed customer segments in a matter of seconds, manage complex marketing campaigns across multiple channels, improve engagement and significantly increase conversion rates.

Key features of Marketing Creatio

1. Customer 360 View – A 360-degree view of contact and account data with a complete omnichannel engagement history across the entire customer journey
2. Lead Management Automation – Robust AI-powered tools for end-to-end automation of the lead lifecycle, from capture to qualification and conversion
3. Campaign Management – Advanced capabilities to plan, budget, execute, and track marketing campaigns and projects of any complexity
4. Email Marketing Management – Full-cycle automation of email marketing campaigns of any complexity and scale
5. Digital Advertising Management – Complete digital ads lifecycle management and optimization to plan, execute, and optimize ad campaigns with built-in analytics.
6. Event Management – A complete system for planning and managing all stages of online and offline marketing events of any scale

Creatio platform also offers a unified AI architecture that integrates agentic, generative, and predictive AI patterns into a comprehensive marketing automation platform. Its role-based AI agents help teams automate campaign workflows, understand user behavior, create personalized content, visualize and analyze campaign performance, and streamline various operations. As a result, businesses can scale their marketing efforts and convert engagement into real pipeline growth and stronger lead-to-revenue performance.

With access to over 700 third-party applications and integrations, businesses can easily extend the platform’s capabilities to match their unique requirements. To further support end-to-end customer and revenue operations, Marketing Creatio seamlessly integrates with Sales Creatio and Service Creatio, forming a complete CRM suite to streamline operations and accelerate business growth.

Creatio’s Challenges

• Advanced customizations may be challenging for users unfamiliar with no-code applications

Creatio Pricing & Rating

Creatio offers a flexible, composable pricing model in which businesses pay only for the products they use. The subscription cost starts at $40 per user per month, with the AI capabilities (Predictive AI, Generative AI and Agentic AI) automatically added to each plan at no cost. It also offers a 14-day free trial, allowing teams to explore the platform’s full potential and customize it to their specific needs.

Ratings:

G2: 4.7

Capterra: 4.7

Gartner: 4.8

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Zoho (Marketing Plus)

Zoho Marketing Plus is a marketing automation platform designed to help businesses manage and automate lead campaigns across multiple channels. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools for email marketing, social media management, customer journey automation, and website analytics, which provide end-to-end sales lead generation and engagement.

Marketing teams can generate leads using customizable signup forms, landing pages, and pop-ups that integrate directly into websites. Zoho also enables automated campaign planning to connect leads at the right time and nurture them through multiple channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, email, and social media. With built-in analytics and reporting capabilities, businesses can monitor campaign performance, track lead behavior and uncover valuable insights for strategy refinement.

Key Features of Zoho Marketing Plus

1. Web behavior tracking to gain insights into lead journeys and engagement patterns
2. Audience segmentation based on behavior, source, or profile data for creating more relevant and personalized messaging
3. Custom lead capture forms for collecting contact details through sign-up forms and pop-ups
4. Marketing automation capabilities to build automated lead journeys based on behavioral triggers

Zoho’s Challenges

• Complex and non-intuitive interface
• Inefficient lead management for B2B workflows
• Occasional issues with contact import
• Limited customization flexibility

Zoho Pricing & Rating

Monthly subscription fees for Zoho Marketing Automation start at $30 per user, each additional user can be added for $12 per month.

Ratings:

G2: 4.1

Capterra: 4.3

Gartner: 4.4

HubSpot (Marketing Hub)

HubSpot’s suite of marketing tools, known as HubSpot Marketing Hub, provides a core set of features to help businesses capture and engage leads. The platform offers customizable forms, pop-ups, and landing pages that can be embedded directly into websites to easily collect visitor information. It also includes intuitive tools for personalized and automated email marketing, enabling users to build tailored campaigns based on user behavior and engagement levels.

Beyond its lead generation capabilities, HubSpot Marketing Hub helps businesses monitor and optimize campaign performance through built-in analytics and reporting. Users can track traffic sources, funnels, and conversion paths to gain insights and refine their strategies accordingly. The platform’s free Knowledge Base and HubSpot Academy provide accessible training resources, allowing teams to quickly understand its features and build workflows aligned with their goals. With over 1,600 third-party apps and integrations, HubSpot can easily connect with existing tools and expand its functionality across broader marketing and sales operations.

Key Features of HubSpot Marketing Hub

1. Landing page builder to create and test customized landing pages that are responsive across all devices
2. Exit intent forms to capture more leads before they leave
3. Social media management tools to manage, schedule, and monitor engagement across multiple social platforms
4. Project management tools to streamline campaign performance through the holistic view of tasks, deadlines and resources

HubSpot Challenges

• Advanced features are available only in higher-tier plans
• Subscription costs can be relatively high as usage scales
• Steep learning curve may slow down onboarding and adoption
• Personalization options can be confusing and less intuitive for new users

HubSpot Marketing Hub’s Pricing & Rating

HubSpot Marketing Hub’s pricing starts at $20 per user/month under the Starter Customer Platform plan, scaling up to $3,600 per month for 5 users on the Enterprise plan. Additional seats are only available for the Professional and Enterprise tiers, starting at $50 per user/month.

Ratings:

G2: 4.4

Capterra: 4.5

Gartner: 4.5

Freshmarketer

Freshmarketer is a marketing automation platform built to help businesses attract and engage leads through coordinated multichannel campaigns. It can be integrated into Freshsales customer relationship management system, providing effective collaboration between marketing and sales managers throughout the customer journey.

The platform supports the creation and management of campaigns across various channels, such as email, SMS, WhatsApp, and chat. Marketers can build audience segments based on behavioral triggers and custom events, create personalized automation flows for contacts based on the lifecycle stage, engagement level, or campaign source. Its email marketing workflows are particularly useful for lead nurturing, offering features like timezone-based delivery, automated follow-ups, and dynamic content personalization.

Freshmarketer also includes AI-driven tools, which can be purchased as a separate add-on. These features assist with email content creation, follow-up recommendations, and intelligent contact scoring, which allow teams to identify high-potential leads and optimize outreach timing across the funnel.

Key Features of Freshmarketer

1. Predictive customer segmentation to engage contact groups through more personalized, high-converting campaigns
2. Customer journey mapping to visualize and automate customer journeys with dynamic workflows that adapt to user behavior and actions
3. A/B testing for comparing the performance of different versions of emails and landing pages
4. Heatmaps and session replay to identify areas of interest and optimize for better engagement

Freshmarketer’s Challenges

• Contact limit is restricted to 500 per month on entry plans.
• Add-ons and advanced features can significantly increase overall cost.
• Customization requires time and may need technical support.
• Customer support is often slow or difficult to reach.

Freshmarketer Pricing & Rating

Freshmarketer offers a 21-day free trial, with marketing plans starting at $15 per user/month. However, the total cost may increase depending on contact volume, as the base plan includes a limited number of contacts and additional contacts must be purchased separately. 

Ratings:

G2: 4.2

Capterra: 4.4

Gartner: 4.0

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 by Microsoft offers a comprehensive solution for managing and optimizing lead generation across the entire marketing and sales funnel. By centralizing customer data it allows teams to get actionable insights on customer engagement and develop personalized, multichannel campaigns to target specific audiences.

The platform includes tools for intelligent lead orchestration, allowing teams to segment leads based on behavioral and demographic data, automate lead qualification, and adjust campaign messaging in real time to improve engagement. With support for email, social media, web, and mobile channels, Dynamics 365 helps businesses create cohesive and consistent outreach strategies.

Its most common use cases in lead gen include launching targeted email campaigns, re-engaging cold leads based on historical behavior, and automating outreach for event marketing. Marketers use Dynamics 365 to send event invitations, follow-ups, and to identify high-value leads with strong conversion potential.

Key Features of Dynamics 365

1. Event-based lead engagement to manage lead capture, follow-ups, and qualification for both in-person and online events
2. Dynamic segments to create and update marketing lists in real time to nurture leads based on various criteria
3. Out-of-the-box templates and customization capabilities for emails and content blocks
4. Integration with other Microsoft enterprise tools, including Office 365, Power BI, and Microsoft Teams

Dynamics 365 Challenges

• Platform updates can break customized extensions
• Interface is not user-friendly and often requires technical expertise
• Customization flexibility can lead to instability in out-of-the-box features
• High subscription costs, with pricing and licensing often difficult to interpret

Dynamics 365 Pricing & Rating

Dynamics 365 Sales pricing starts at $65 per user/month, with a free trail available for each plan. However, access to the platform’s more advanced lead generation capabilities typically requires an upgrade to the Enterprise plan, which starts at $105 per user/month.

Ratings:

G2: 4.3

Capterra: 4.4

Gartner: 4.2

How to Choose the Right Lead Generation CRM Software

An effective lead generation CRM should support your entire pipeline, from capturing leads to their conversion into paying customers. To find the right software for your business, consider the following key factors:

1. Your Business Goals. Choose unified CRM software that applies to the full lead cycle. Beyond helping generate leads, it should also provide built-in features for lead nurturing, opportunity tracking, and sales automation.
2. Integration Capabilities. Lead generation CRMs should cover all your acquisition channels to centralize and track all lead sources, such as websites, social media, paid ads, and email
3. Core Functionality. Look for features that are specifically designed for running and scaling lead generation efforts. The most popular include campaign management, complete view of contacts and accounts (also known as Customer 360), email marketing, event tracking, lead scoring and segmentation, analytics and reporting, and team collaboration functionality.
4. Personalization & Scalability. Consider lead generation CRMs that adapt to your business, without forcing you to change your workflows to use the platform. This system should be easy to configure and scale as your business grows.
5. Workflow Automation & AI. The built-in automation and AI features can significantly streamline various marketing processes. For example, AI-powered CRMs can auto-assign fresh leads to sales managers, score leads based on behavior, generate personalized emails, or even predict conversion probability to optimize workload and improve team productivity.
6. Budget Alignment. Ensure the platform fits your budget and provides the winning mix of lead generation features, scalability, and long-term value. Before committing, test a free trial or request a live demo to evaluate the platform’s usability and fit.

Maximize Your Lead Generation and Management with Creatio CRM

Lead generation is the foundation of any sales funnel, which enables businesses to build strong pipelines and drive sustainable revenue growth. Whether through inbound content, outbound outreach, digital advertising, or event marketing, companies can attract and convert high-quality leads at scale.

These strategies are most effective when supported by CRM software that manages the entire lead lifecycle—from initial capture and qualification to conversion and long-term retention. Modern CRM platforms offer the tools to enhance targeting, automate outreach, and ensure every lead is engaged with speed and precision.

Now is the time to scale your lead generation with a CRM that adapts to how your business works. Try an AI-native, no-code CRM solution by Creatio and see how it helps you attract, nurture, and process leads more efficiently. Start your free 14-day trial today. 

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