Your campaigns are running. Traffic is arriving. And sales stays quiet. So you start looking for software, and that is usually where it stalls: you open three comparison pages, find three different feature lists, and get no closer to a decision.
A sales director at a technical services provider put the underlying problem well. Their site is full of window shoppers, people who look around but never fill in a form. That is not unusual. 98% of website visitors leave without converting, and almost every vendor promises to close that gap. They simply do it in very different ways, with very different data.
Comparing lead generation software only works once you know what you are comparing on. Below are seven questions taken from real buying conversations, in the order that narrows things down fastest. If you want the wider picture first, read what B2B lead generation is and how to approach it.
Question 1: which job are you outsourcing?
More leads is not a job. In every commercial process one specific link is jamming, and that link decides what kind of tool you need.
Broadly, four jobs are for sale:
- Identify. Which companies land on your site, and on which pages.
- Enrich. Who works there, and through which channel you reach them.
- Follow up. Starting the conversation, automatically or by hand.
- Measure. Which campaign brought which company in, and what it returned.
Tools that do different jobs cannot be compared with each other. Skip this step and you end up putting a visitor identification tool next to a marketing automation platform, then drawing a conclusion that means nothing. For a view of what actually exists in your market, see the best lead generation tools for the UK market in 2026.
Write the jammed link down in two sentences. If you cannot, you do not yet know precisely enough what you are looking for.
Question 2: how much of your traffic does the tool actually see?
Coverage is the criterion skipped most often, and the one that makes the biggest difference. A tool that depends on cookie consent for identification only sees the visitors who click accept. The rest stays out of view, however good the tool is otherwise. How company identification works without cookies is explained in identifying website visitors without cookies.
So do not ask how many companies do you identify. Ask what happens when someone dismisses the cookie banner. That difference sits in the technology underneath, not in the marketing on top. Leadinfo does that identification cookielessly and reaches 100% company identification without cookies.
Where the data comes from belongs in the same question, not in a separate round with legal. Whether a tool processes company data or personal data, where that data is hosted, and whether the vendor offers a data processing agreement all shape the same decision. Leadinfo identifies companies rather than individuals, hosts EU-only in Ireland and Frankfurt, and is ISO 27001 certified. What falls under GDPR in practice is set out in does company data fall under GDPR.
Question 3: what do you get per identified company?
Volume is the easiest measure and the least useful one. In our own sales conversations, and most sharply in the German-speaking market, the quality of email addresses and phone numbers is the deciding factor rather than the number of companies identified. Prospects there start a trial specifically to check that quality.
So decide upfront what minimum you need in order to act:
- Company name and industry. Enough if you want to know what type of organisation is arriving.
- Contact details. Needed as soon as sales wants to call or email directly. At Leadinfo the contact match sits at 93%.
- Behavioural data. Which pages, how long, how often they return. The basis for scoring and prioritising.
- Campaign attribution. Which channel brought the visit. Critical when you have to justify budget.
Ask about the limits as well. Identification is a matter of probability rather than certainty, and a vendor who says so plainly is easier to trust than one who does not. We have written those limits out in how reliable IP tracking is for identifying website visitors.
Question 4: what happens after the identification?
This is the question that comes back most often with companies switching tools. They do not want another list of names, they want the follow-up to sit in the same system. Identification without follow-up produces a dashboard nobody opens after three months.
So test the path, not the feature:
- How does an identified company reach the right colleague?
- Within what time, and through which channel: CRM, email, Slack or Teams?
- Who decides whether a signal is strong enough to act on?
If the answer to all three stops at the export button, you are buying reporting rather than lead generation. What that path looks like in practice is described in how to convert identified website visitors into leads.
Question 5: does it fit the stack you already have?
Across customer conversations one pattern is unmistakable. Companies with a working CRM connection get consistently more out of their lead generation software than companies without one. Without a CRM, any tool becomes a viewing tool.
Check before the demo, not after:
- Is there a native connection to your CRM, or does everything run through Zapier or Make?
- Can the data go back to Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads for sharper campaigns?
- Does it work with your marketing automation?
- Is there an API for the custom work you will end up wanting anyway?
How such a connection gets set up in practice is covered in connect identified website visitors to your CRM.
Software without a proper connection becomes an island. And islands do not generate leads. They generate manual work.
Question 6: who will use it, and what if that person leaves?
This question appears in almost no comparison, and it predicts the outcome better than most features do.
Two patterns keep recurring. The first: field sales will not log into a dashboard. If the tool lives only in that dashboard, nothing happens, however good the data is. The second: the knowledge sits with one person. When that person moves on, the CRM connection breaks, the triggers quietly stop, and nobody knows how any of it was set up.
So ask two practical questions. Can someone work with this tool without logging in, through a report by email or an alert in Slack? And how many colleagues can have access, so the knowledge does not stay with one person?
Question 7: what does it cost, and do you know that upfront?
Price is rarely the objection. Price transparency is. Companies that switch name knowing where they stand in advance as a separate criterion, independent of the size of the amount. Contract form belongs with it: monthly and cancellable, or locked into a year.
Watch the unit as well. One vendor charges per user, another per identified company, a third works with credits. Work it through against your expected usage rather than against the starting price.
Then do a simple sum. How many qualified leads do you need per month, what is your average deal value, and what is it worth if the tool brings you two extra deals a month? Our own pricing is published in full, including what sits in each package: see solutions for every budget.
From seven questions to a shortlist
You started this article because sales stayed quiet while the traffic kept arriving. The first step costs nothing. Write the jammed link down in two sentences, and put next to it the minimum data you need to act tomorrow. Then put no more than three tools on your list and test them one at a time on your own traffic, with the colleague who will have to work with it. Buyers ask for this themselves: two tools over the same weeks, a like-for-like comparison. Leadinfo delivers identification and follow-up in one place, so the test also shows what happens after the identification. Start a trial and judge the first week on what your own data shows, as in this example of the best lead gen software for small businesses.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best way to compare lead generation software? Not on features, but on four things: which job the tool does, how much of your traffic it sees, what you get per identified company, and what happens afterwards. Once those four are clear, a feature list finally says something useful about your situation.
What is the difference between a tool that identifies companies and one that provides contact details? An identification tool tells you which organisations visit your site and what they look at. An enrichment tool adds people and contact details to that. You often need both, but they are different jobs. So do not compare them against each other.
Can you use lead generation software in a GDPR-compliant way? Yes, provided you check a few things. Choose software that processes company data rather than personal data, that is hosted inside the EU, and that offers a data processing agreement. If identification works without cookies, you are also not dependent on cookie consent.
