Discover the best tools, tips, and strategies on how to turn your website into a lead generation machine

Part 1
Lead generation: an ultimate guide to the best strategies and tools
Last updated: May 2026.
TL; DR: Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers and capturing their contact information so your sales team can follow up. For B2B SaaS companies, the most effective methods are inbound: SEO-driven content, website chat, targeted pop-ups, and email sequences triggered by visitor behavior. Companies with a structured lead generation process close 133% more revenue than those without one (HubSpot).
Nowadays, lead generation is about two-way communication when users voluntarily share their contact data and allow you to contact them later. But to interest them, you have to offer something valuable instead 😉
Good to know, in this article, you can find everything about modern lead generation: non-obvious benefits it brings, the best strategies and tools to implement right now. Let’s go!
Want more guides? Here is the Dashly collection. Learn everything about:
Lead generation is a process of collecting contacts of people who are interested in your business and product.
Generally, there are several steps that a lead goes through. Let’s take the standard business funnel as an example:
At the Awareness stage, you’ll have to nurture your leads to make them buy from you, including newsletters. The deeper the funnel, the hotter leads you get.

But to define the hottest, you’d better qualify them when collecting.
Also, lead generation allows you to get several types of leads. Let’s consider each of them.
Lead generation is a fundamental thing of business revenue. The better your lead generation, the more income you’ll get. If that’s not enough, there are some more arguments to consider while launching lead generation:
Lead generation is impossible without knowledge of your target audience and market. The more you communicate with leads from your base, the better you understand who is your potential customer and who is not. All this gives you a clear picture of what market segments to focus your marketing efforts.
The better you set up lead generation processes, the more customers you get. It means that you’ll be able to collect more reviews from them. As a result, more website visitors will trust you and share their contact data.
Thanks to active lead generation, you’ll have a good-quality mailing list. This is a good argument to build strong partnerships with other brands and spread the word about your products.
Sounds good, isn’t it? Time to generate leads!
Understanding the lead generation process helps B2B teams build a repeatable system rather than running one-off campaigns. Most high-performing B2B SaaS teams follow a four-stage framework.
Before running any campaign, lock down who you are targeting. For B2B SaaS, an ICP typically covers: company size (e.g. 20-200 employees), buying role (Head of Sales, VP Marketing, or Head of CX), the pain trigger that makes them look for a solution, and the tools they already use (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce). A clear ICP reduces wasted lead gen spend by filtering out traffic that will never convert.
Drive traffic through SEO, paid search, and referral channels, then convert it with capture mechanisms on your website: a qualifying chatbot on your demo landing page, a targeted pop-up with a relevant offer, or a free trial sign-up form. AI Qualifier Agents handle the initial conversation automatically, qualifying every visitor 24/7 without manual effort from your sales team.
Not every lead is ready to buy. Apply a lead score based on two dimensions: fit score (how well the lead matches your ICP) and intent score (what they did on your website — pages visited, content downloaded, demo requested). Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) that hit a threshold move to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) status and get handed to a sales rep. Dashly’s AI Qualifier Agent automatically assigns tags and scores based on conversation data and behaviour signals.
Leads who are not yet ready for a conversation go into a nurture sequence — typically 3-5 emails triggered by their behaviour. Hot leads get an immediate handoff to CRM with a Slack notification to the sales rep. AI SDR Agents close the gap between a website visit and a booked demo by sending personalised follow-ups and placing calendar slots in front of the lead before a competitor does.
Before choosing tactics, understand the fundamental difference between the two approaches. For a deeper dive, see our full guide: Inbound vs outbound lead generation.
| Inbound | Outbound | |
|---|---|---|
| How leads find you | Through content, SEO, referrals | Cold outreach: email, calls, ads |
| Cost per lead | Lower over time | Higher, scales with spend |
| Lead quality | Higher intent — they came to you | Variable, depends on targeting |
| Time to first results | 3-6 months | Days to weeks |
| B2B SaaS fit | Best for PLG and demo-driven models | Best for enterprise and ABM plays |
| Automation potential | AI Qualifier Agents handle 100% of inbound | AI SDR Agents automate cold sequences |
Most B2B SaaS teams that scale beyond $1M ARR run both — inbound for efficient pipeline from high-intent traffic, outbound for targeted enterprise accounts. The strategies below focus on inbound, where AI-powered qualification delivers the highest return.
So how can you come up with new strategies for lead generation? Dashly expert has an answer 👇
Monitor your competitors. Steal like an artist: you may find inspiration in your competitors’ campaigns. Implement the best practices to your lead generation strategy to capture more leads.
So, we found a few examples of amazing lead generation strategies for your inspiration. Some of them fit eCommerce, some are for SaaS or EdTech. Sure thing, there are proven lead generation tactics that meet each industry.
Let’s take a look!
This strategy will be useful for attracting leads who already know your product and may be ready to buy from you. The main thing in this lead generation strategy is collecting their emails to send discount codes.
Companies place banners with discounts on websites. Here is an example of how MasterClass does this:

After clicking on a banner, users land on the special lead generation page with a lead form where they should leave an email to get the discount.
However, the problem with such a method is banner blindness. People just ignore your offer, no matter how good it is.
The fix?
Spark a conversation with your website visitors. Include a chatbot into your lead generation strategy: it will engage more leads due to its proactivity and collect all the data needed.
A free trial is an excellent way to let users feel the value of your product and its features. Moreover, it is an exceptional opportunity to collect more users’ data during registration.
Usually, to boost lead generation, companies publish info about free trials on the Pricing/Main/Sign-up page. To engage visitors to register, they launch a chatbot because it is impossible to ignore such a charming assistant. Just look Dashly team uses this strategy:

This lead generation strategy works well with SQLs.
Who doesn’t like free books, checklists, guides, or templates? Users love this for the exceptional opportunity to get expert knowledge for free, while companies see it as a way to collect more target contacts. A win-win situation.
For example, here is the most popular lead magnet among Dashly blog readers:
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What’s good about this lead generation strategy is that you can use lead magnets on every page. In addition to lead generation forms, marketers use pop-ups and chatbots.
This lead generation strategy works well with cold leads and prospects.
This lead generation tactic is about showing expertise in your area. As we said, people enjoy learning something new. So you’re likely to get lots of signups from potential customers.
What’s good about this lead generation strategy is that you can make a partnership with a related company and combine your audiences.
Another advantage of webinars is content repurposing. You can turn recordings into YouTube videos or blog articles to collect more leads even after the event is over.

Usually, marketers use SEO or Ads to attract people to a relevant landing page with a lead form to register for a webinar.
But if you already have good traffic, it is better to launch a relevant pop-up or a chatbot on your website pages.
Here is how Thinkific collects all the essential data and passes it to your sales team.

This lead generation strategy works well with prospects and MQLs.
This is another lead generation technique that’s recently become popular.
Each business wants to find its weak points and eliminate them. So help them to do it. Show your expertise and conduct a free assessment of the brand website/socials/emails/etc.
In addition to actual recommendations, you can advise your product or service as a solution. It’s beneficial for both you and your website visitors. They get insights on their business improvement. And you capture leads.
Since it is a top of the funnel offer, publish it on the main page, blog, and dedicated landing page. But avoid punting it to pricing or product pages.
For example, obviously, this article is about lead generation basics at top of the funnel. As a reader, you may not know about our conversational platform tools. But we know that you’re interested in lead generation. Good to know, we have a special offer for such visitors: our experts help businesses with free consultations on how to improve website lead generation.
Thus, we put a relevant banner here 👇
This lead generation strategy works well with MQLs and SQLs.
Wanna more lead generation strategies for your website?
Sure thing, there are industries requiring a specific lead generation approach. In such a case, the Dashly implementation team builds a unique lead generation campaign according to the company’s needs. For your inspiration, here we’ve collected the best practices from our SaaS, Agencies, EdTech, or eCommerce clients.
Lead generation can boost signups in SaaS up to 70% — before using a chatbot, the Conversion Rate was only 20%.
Here is a lead generation case study of an online Instagram account audit platform. The goal was to increase the conversion to signup on the website. In this case, a chatbot has come in handy.

After developing campaigns and launching a chatbot just in two weeks, the conversion to signup increased by 36%, then by 70%.
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It’s a success story of the Kflwebdesign agency. The goal was to get as much customer data as possible.
Together with the customer, we launched a discount pop-up. This is one of the most simple lead generation practices, but it still works.

As a result, the pop-up collected 337 new emails. Later, 27% of these leads converted into buyers.
The hero of this case study is SkillFactory, a digital school for Data and IT specialists. One of the main tasks was to collect quality leads.
To boost lead generation, a marketer added a chatbot to the pages of the most popular courses. It engaged website visitors in the conversation and dealt with FAQs, asking for email at the end of the conversation.
Depending on a page, it collected emails from up to 22% of all the users who’ve seen the message.


Overall, the conversion to payment increased by 44%.
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And last but not least: eCommerce.
Dashly customer He&She combined pop-ups and a chatbot to boost lead generation. The company decided to carry out an experiment and find out which campaign would perform best.
The most successful pop-up brought 3 111 new leads.

The chatbot engaged in the conversation with 690 prospects.
Since most of the traffic was mobile users. The customer launched a banner for mobile users. It caught other 375 leads:

As a result, over 4k potential customers with three easy-to-set-up tools.
Here is a quick comparison of all 10 tools before we go into detail on each:
| Tool | Best for | Starting price | Free trial | AI-powered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dashly | B2B SaaS inbound qualification | Custom pricing | 7 days | Yes — AI Qualifier + SDR Agents |
| HubSpot | Full marketing suite | From $50/mo | Yes | Yes |
| Drift | Enterprise chatbot | Custom | No | Yes |
| Sendinblue | Email-first lead nurturing | From $25/mo | Yes | Limited |
| OptinMonster | Pop-up lead capture | From $9/mo | No | No |
| Tidio | E-commerce live chat | From $19/mo | Yes | Limited |
| EngageBay | SMB CRM and marketing | From $14.99/mo | Yes | No |
| Zendesk Reach | Support and sales combo | From $19/mo | Yes | No |
| Agile CRM | SMB automation | From $14.99/mo | Yes | No |
| Freshdesk | Support-led lead capture | From $29/mo | Yes | No |
Dashly is a team of AI inbound revenue agents that handles qualification, follow-up, and demo booking for B2B SaaS teams — 24/7, without adding headcount. The AI Qualifier Agent engages every visitor the moment they land, asks qualifying questions, and routes hot leads directly to sales. The AI SDR Agent follows up with leads who did not convert, sends personalised sequences, and books meetings from your calendar overnight.
Free trial: 7 days. Pricing depends on website traffic and the set of agents you need — see the pricing page for details.

As a lead generation instrument, Drift sticks to the conversational marketing approach. It provides tools for building trust between a business and customers, helping generate more revenue.
The solution will perfectly suit B2B companies from the mid-sized and enterprise segment.
Free trial: not available.
Free plan: available.
To get the exact pricing, you’ll have to book a demo with sales reps.

But according to users’ reviews, the pricing starts from $400, but consider that Drift offers only annual accounts.
If you’re a startup with less than 50 employees, and your business is less than 5-year-old, you can get a 97% discount (but again, the contract is annual).

If you’ve ever searched for a lead generation platform, you must have heard about Hubspot. It offers lots of different services for marketing, customer support, and sales, including lead generation tools.
The solution may be affordable for mid-size and enterprise businesses in any industry.
The platform offers a wide range of features:
Free trial: 14 days.
Free plan: available.
There are three paid plans for boosting lead generation. The free plan offers limited functionality for free.

The final price depends on the number of your marketing contacts — the number of users you’ll send emails or ads to.

Zendesk offers lots of services; one of them is Zendesk Reach, that will help you boost your lead generation strategy no matter how large your business is.
Also, if you have a chatbot, you can integrate it with Zendesk tools.
Free trial: 30 days.
Free plan: not available.
There are four paid plans; the price starts from $19/mo and depends on the number of users you add.

Zendesk lead generation pricing

This lead generation platform mostly focuses on marketing and customer support. The software allows combining several communication channels and collecting leads from each of them.
The solution will suit all sizes of businesses, mostly for eCommerce and IT.
Free trial: 21 days.
Free plan: not available.
Freshdesk offers three plans for lead generation. Note that chatbots are available only on the most expensive plan — the Enterprise Omnichannel.


Sendinblue is a tool for lead generation that helps businesses grow that mainly focuses on email marketing. This will suit any size of business from different segments.
Free trial: not available.
Free plan: available.
There are three paid plans; the price for the cheapest one starts from $25/mo and depends on the number of emails you’re going to send.


EngageBay is an all-in-one platform that offers tools for marketing, sales, and customer support teams, including tools for lead generation, of course. The solution will suit companies from different industries and sizes.
Free trial: not available.
Free plan: available.
The pricing depends on the people who have access to an admin panel. Note that the number of contacts is also billed separately.
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OptinMoster helps you generate more leads from your website traffic. Using this tool, you can create landforms, personalize your offer, and analyze campaigns.
The solution will suit businesses from any industry and size, but small and mid-sized businesses will find it the most useful.
Free trial: not available.
Free plan: not available.
There are four paid plans, starting from $9/mo. Although you can’t test the solution, they guarantee a refund if you’re unsatisfied with the software.


Along with CRM (what stands from the naming), the platform offers many tools for customer engagement, lead generation, and sales increase. The solution will suit all sizes and types of businesses.
Free trial: not available.
Free plan: available.
There are three plans; the cheapest one starts from $14,99/mo, and the final fee depends on the number of users.


Tidio is a lead generation platform that helps you combine lead generation with greater customer support. This offers tools for companies from different industries, but it will mostly suit mid-sized and enterprise companies.
Free trial: 7 days.
Free plan: available.
There are four basic plans. A chatbot is available on the Chatbots plan; however, you can try it with 100 users on a Free plan.

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We asked our team who works with lead generation to give a piece of advice to those who want to start lead generation. But there are two things we should mention first:
See what Dashly experts tell about lead generation:
Always focus on lead quality, not quantity. Regularly monitor who exactly you capture: are these leads target ones? If they’re not, there’s no point to invest in their acquisition, as it won’t help you generate more revenue.
Don’t forget your lead generation strategy is never set in stone. Look for inspiration and constantly update it like our growth hacker Polly 👇
Test your lead generation channels, messages, and audiences. Launch A/B tests to find out which offer performs better and improve your lead generation campaigns.
And don’t be afraid to reach out beyond your website!
To get better results on lead generation, try PPC ads in tandem with lead generation tools on your website. This will help you bring more target leads and make the most of your traffic.
Wish you higher conversions and more target leads!
Lead generation is the process of attracting potential buyers to your business and capturing their contact information so your sales or marketing team can follow up. In B2B, this typically means converting website visitors into leads through content downloads, chat conversations, demo requests, or sign-up forms. The quality of leads matters more than volume: a lead generation process focused on intent signals produces far better pipeline than one focused on raw contact volume.
There are two main types: inbound and outbound. Inbound lead generation attracts prospects through content (SEO, blog posts, guides), website conversion tools (chat, pop-ups, live chat), and organic channels. Outbound involves proactively reaching prospects through cold email, cold calls, or paid ads. Most B2B SaaS teams get their best ROI from inbound methods because the leads are already showing intent when they convert.
A B2B lead generation strategy is a planned set of tactics for attracting and converting potential business customers. A strong strategy combines at least three channels: organic search (SEO-driven content targeting buyer-intent keywords), on-site conversion (chat, qualification bots, targeted pop-ups), and lead nurturing (email sequences triggered by behavior). The strategy should define who the ideal lead is, which channels to use, how to qualify inbound traffic, and how to hand qualified leads to sales.
The five highest-ROI tactics for B2B SaaS: (1) SEO content targeting problem-aware and solution-aware keywords in your category; (2) website chat with an AI agent that qualifies visitors and books demos 24/7; (3) targeted pop-ups that offer relevant lead magnets at key exit or engagement moments; (4) email nurturing sequences triggered by sign-up or trial behavior; (5) a free plan or trial that lets prospects experience value before they talk to sales.
The most effective tools depend on your approach. For inbound capture and qualification: Dashly (AI agent + chat + pop-ups + email in one platform), HubSpot (CRM + forms + email), and Intercom (messaging). For outbound: Apollo.io, Clay, and Salesloft. For SEO and content-driven lead gen: Ahrefs (keyword research) and Clearscope (content optimization). Most fast-growing B2B SaaS teams combine one inbound capture platform with an SEO tool and a CRM.
The key metrics: (1) number of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) per month; (2) lead-to-opportunity conversion rate (benchmark: 10-20% for inbound B2B SaaS); (3) cost per lead by channel; (4) time from first touch to sales handoff; (5) pipeline contribution from marketing. Avoid optimizing for raw lead volume alone: optimizing for MQL-to-opportunity rate catches channel quality problems much earlier.
Lead generation captures contact information from people already interested in your product. Demand generation creates that interest from scratch through content, ads, and brand awareness. B2B SaaS teams typically run both: demand generation fills the top of the funnel, lead generation converts that interest into qualified pipeline. AI-driven tools like Dashly bridge the gap by qualifying inbound leads the moment demand converts into website visits.
AI agents automate the three most time-consuming lead generation steps: initial qualification (asking BANT questions 24/7), lead scoring (tagging high-intent visitors based on behaviour), and follow-up (sending personalised sequences and booking demo slots). Teams using AI Qualifier Agents typically reduce time-to-contact from hours to under 5 minutes, which increases demo booking rates significantly without adding sales headcount.
Costs vary by channel. Inbound SEO: -, 000/mo for content and tools. Paid search: — per qualified lead. Outbound sequences: — per booked meeting. For teams using AI qualification tools, cost per qualified lead drops because the AI handles initial screening — removing non-target leads before a sales rep touches them. Most B2B SaaS teams find that combining an inbound capture platform (from around -/mo) with SEO content delivers the best long-term cost per qualified lead.
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