B2B Marketing Blog

I’ve read a few posts lately on the value, or lack thereof, when tracking anonymous visitors to your website.  Some have stated no value, and others minimal.  Well I‘ll argue there’s value and here’s why.

Your Marketing Automation solution gives you a window into all visitors to your website.  As the Marketing manager you’re monitoring your campaigns and nurturing programs, along with assessing the success of your various PPC ads, etc.; fulfilling the value proposition of Marketing Automation.  Similarly, you’re assessing the anonymous or company visitors who have yet to convert through a form fill, webinar registration, etc.,  to ‘prospect’.    With most Marketing Automation solutions, the anonymous visitor will build a lead score based on their activity and expressed interest through navigation of your website, and will eventually attract your attention through an increasing score, or perhaps they’re a known target company, all before converting to a prospect.   Bottom line, anonymous or not they’re demonstrating appropriate virtual buy signals or trigger events that say they’re interested which arguably says you should be interested.

Many might argue that you should nurture and lead the anonymous visitor through to self identifying first, and in reality that’s exactly what will happen with the majority.   The anonymous leads at the top end of the sales funnel and under normal course of business are nurtured through to qualified status by Marketing and then assigned to a rep .   So in the end you certainly have to be mindful of tossing too many unsubstantiated leads over the fence to Sales – you can read all about the negative impact of that on the many blog posts on Marketing and Sales alignment – but once and a while you can do it and let your sales guys go into the more traditional hunter mode.   In our opinion, the key to adding this activity to your arsenal of lead management is to make it simple and efficient .

Here’s how we do it with ActiveConversion;

1. An anonymous visitor to the site is identified as meeting your requirements – usually demonstrated in their lead score or a target company.
2. The anonymous ‘company’ lead is then assigned to a Sales rep – albeit early in the lead management process.
3. Jigsaw, a database of contacts and company information is  integrated into ActiveConversion-SalesView and allows the sales rep to quickly identify contacts within the function most likely looking for your product/solution – ie Finance, manufacturing, marketing, purchasing, etc.
4. A personalized email reaching out to each of the chosen contacts is done using the Outlook Plug-in for ActiveConversion allowing for direct one-to-one communication and ongoing monitoring – see who responds to your call to action.
5. The interested individual within the targeted function is usually quick to identify and in most cases glad to hear from you as they’re in that ‘window of dissatisfaction’ and looking for a solution to their requirements.

Simple, efficient and with positive results – after all they may have been anonymous, but  they were on your website and exhibiting ‘buying’ behavior – don’t let the opportunity get away.

We use it to augment our marketing and sales activities when an accelerated approach is warranted and have had great results to date.

A sales lead is a sales lead is a sales lead, right?  I think not.  I’ve gotten lots of leads from marketing groups that were so bad that they weren’t even worth looking at.   To compound the insult, my blockhead sales manager would insist that I follow up on all of these duds.   Funny thing, he didn’t last very long because his sales reps were not productive enough…

What was wrong with those leads?  To begin with these leads were not qualified.   They had a low probability of closing at the outset.   They might have been good for marketing to start a campaign with but certainly they were not sales-ready.  Many didn’t even have a need for my product because they had signed up for something like a free shirt at a trade show.

So a good sales lead tool would qualify leads for me and the rest of the sales reps.

In Web 0.0, readers of print ads could fill out “Reader Service” cards that we called bingo cards.  What was laughable was that the bingo cards would arrive on my desk several months after the print ad was published.  So even if the sales lead was qualified, it had gone stale.  And you wonder why sales doesn’t have alignment with marketing…

So a good sales lead tool should deliver the lead in a timely fashion.

Now we have defined two characteristics of good sales leads: timeliness and quality.  By extension a good sales lead tool would deliver at the precise moment the lead needs attention from the sales rep that is assigned.

Within the definition of qualified leads there will still be a variation in priority.  For example leads that close in 90+ days will have a lesser priority than those that close in 30 days.  A good sales lead tool will nurture those longer-term leads and re-grade them higher when they show pre-defined behaviours.  A  great tactical tool feature is one that alerted the sales rep after the prospect clicked through on a one-to-one email from the sales rep.

In Web 2.0, web site visitors  fill out ‘Contact Us’ forms.  What is powerful about this is that unlike the bingo cards, they arrive immediately, and if the website is properly equipped, they also arrive with intel like how they found your page, what their search term was, how many times they’ve been to your website, what they did  when they visited your website, what their company does, where it is located, and how big it is.  Now we have the core of an Ideal Sales Lead Tool. They exist today. To not use one is at your own peril in the Web 2.0 world.

Previously I wrote about how SMB can take advantage of Google Local Business listings. The Google Maps team has just launched a new dashboard in its free Local Business Center that will provide you with information on how users interact with your local listing on Google Maps and Google Search.

It will show you stats such as how many times your business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, which queries led customers to the business listing, as well as which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location. All you have to do is claim your listing in the Local Business Center and go through a quick verification process to get access to this information.

For the local business owner who relies on Google in helping customers find the business, you can now measure the impact of search, especially the top search queries that result in your business showing up in the listings.  I’ll bet that once you see these search queries, you’ll wonder how your listing can show up more often in the search.  This will lead you into assessing whether you should move forward and buy the keywords in the Google AdWords campaign.  You’ll also think about optimizing your website to get more inbound traffic from natural search results.

If you are interested in knowing more, you can go to the Office Google Blog to learn more details about the new Local Business Center Dashboard.