In speaking to the Inside Sales teams (calling in from different countries), most agreed that, irrespective of language, the most common positive response you can get is along the lines of “OK, send me some information, and I’ll take a look at it”.

The real question is: so did your phone call work? Did they really show interest by looking at your email, or perhaps even going to your website to learn more?

The good news is that they said that this was one of the reasons they liked using WebleadsB2B WebWHO. With it, they could tell which of the people they called actually went so far as to trawl the website for more information, which pieces of information they really were interested in, and if they later returned to the site for return visits.

I was pleased for them. Through a combination of rich content on their website, and the marketing detection tools they use from WebleadsB2B, they were getting positive results, and were happy customers! They explained, “when they ask for more information, we send them an email containing links to specific information on our site. Our email system can usually tell if they clicked on the link, but with WebWho, we can see what they did on the site, and tell if they come back later for more.”

“Our approach is quite simple”, they continued, “if they don’t click on any of the links, we leave them alone. However, if they click through and looked at the web pages on the site, and even returned later for another look, then we signal them out as having passed the qualification test.”

The big change here, they agreed, was that while not all their calls worked in getting a reaction from the prospect, the important thing is that they could now tell if they were reacting positively or not. Before they just could not really tell.

I then told them about another WebWho user who uses a similar approach with “customers” rather than prospects. WebWHO identifies when their customers visit, and which pages they looked at, and that’s enough for their sales people to call since they already know who to contact. This has really helped their up-sell opportunities.

“Cool”, was the reply, “we are going to try that too”.

For more on WebleadsB2B WebWho, take a look at our data sheet: Real-time insight into who visits your websites.

LEADGEN gives you free access (no registration needed) to the most recent and most useful B2B lead generation resources on the internet. Sure, you could roam around the internet for hours searching for this material yourself, but this newsletter saves you the hassle of looking, and also avoids in most cases the inconvenience of having to fill in any registration forms.

LEADGEN aims to provide you with impartial material from a multitude of sources such as independent analysts and the leading vendors in B2B lead generation. Respected sources such as Marketing Sherpa and B2B reports from Forrester are just some of the examples we have provided. LEADGEN also includes WebleadsB2B updates for our customers and prospects.

To get a sneak peak at an example bulletin, click here.

To subscribe, use the form below.

We hope you enjoy these monthly bulletins, and welcome any remarks or suggestions you make have. Drop us a note using the contact us form at webleadsb2b.com

 Over the last few weeks, we’ve been quietly working on new features for WebWHO. Yesterday, we completed the beta launch of  WebWHO 1.2 version , and we are happy to announce the new version will be going live very soon.

 Customers: If you’d like to try the new version, it’s easy! Very shortly you can just head over to www.webleadsB2B.com and click on the Customer Login to launch the new version.
All others: try out the free trial from our website.

Below you will find a screen-shot showing some of the latest features which include:

Investigate Lookup – an icon is now displayed for any organization that has filled in a form on your site. Simply click on the icon, and all details about that person will be revealed, including Web Validation and LinkedIn data.
Google Lookup – the address and telephone number, and even a map showing its location, can now be displayed giving  you new contact details about your visitor.

Click twice to view full size

Thanks again for being part of the WebleadsB2B family! Please help us spread the word, and we’ll keep working hard to deliver the world’s finest lead generation software.

snapshot B2B lead generation survey

A recent survey of 1,800 marketers (SilverPop Survey: Exploring the Difference and Similarities of B2C and B2B Marketing tactics) confirms what we have come across many times in our B2B projects with customers. When it comes to profiling and scoring prospective customers, the B2B world is clearly very different from B2C.

The diagram shows that the three most important criteria points for B2B marketers in ranking prospects is by:
1. Industry
2. Expressed time to make a purchase
3. Their corporate revenue (or company size).

These are actually the same criteria we use to create PROFILES as part of our lead generation process. We can go even go further that this and include other characteristics such as the prospect’s title, department, location, returning visitor status etc.

I believe the survey supports one of the key characteristics of our approach, and explains why it is so important to use PROFILES in B2B lead generation.

In the websites we monitor, just over 75% of visitors coming to a landing page through an online advert are not from “target” businesses who meet our customer’s PROFILE of being in the right industry, nor the right company size. The good news is that 5% to 25% of the visitors DO meet the target profile, and are the ideal prospects to follow-up on.

The bad news is that many companies are ignoring these ideal prospects since they are unable to identify the visitors who fit their ideal customer profile. Instead, marketers focus on other activities such as buying email lists of people who probably have never heard of your company or your products.

Isn’t this a little crazy? If you were a shop owner, which one would you focus on:
• The visitors in your shop
• Or the people out on the street who are by chance walking by?

Surely it makes more sense to pay attention to those in your shop (who even fit your ideal customer profile) than the people walking by.

Now consider the impact of focusing on these people in your store. Consider how your sales could benefit if these prospective buyers could be turned into leads.

So, it is clear that it’s important to focus on your most important visitors who meet your ideal customer profile. It sounds obvious, so why are so few of us doing it? It’s all about using PROFILES to help you identify and focus on the web visitors who are most likely to buy. For more on PROFILES and why they are so important, please read our “The Benefits of Post-Click Marketing  Whitepaper”  – I think you will find it useful in improving your lead generation results.

email or cold call

Most of us, even if using an autoresponder, will send out an email reply to those  who fill in a landing page form, and then follow it up with a telemarketing phone call. A few of us will qualify it with a call before sending an email. Others of us, don’t really mind either way, as long as they send out both an email and a telephone call. So which approach is best?
 
On first impressions, it seems more probable that we should always email a reply first and then, after removing the “mickey mouses”, follow it up with an inside sales or telemarketing call. This allows us to validate their email addresses, and might even trigger a response showing they are interested. I know many marketing managers who consider contacts via the website to be nothing more than an inquiry, and must be matured with further email dialog before a call is to be made. Today, lead generation software makes this easier by allowing us to track our website visitors, and to see who has responded to our emails.

However, this approach is proving problematic. Firstly, how many of us really track “individual” web visitors to see if they are interested in our product or services? How many of us really check on the names of those that opened an email we sent? Most of the time we want to know just the percentage of those that opened the email we sent out, and that’s about it. We simply don’t have the resources to dig in deeper.
 
Secondly, the time when we send most emails out is when it is part of a new campaign we are launching, and which email addresses to we use for these campaigns? That’s right, all too often we use the emails we obtained from those who filled in a form on our web site and placed in an excel file or into our CRM database. The problem here is clear. If we don’t have a high quality contact database, emailing first is all too often a waste of time and money.

We’ve all spent days crafting email templates and content together, only to see them sent out to unsuitable contacts. It quickly becomes clear as we start the follow up telemarketing calls that 90% of the calls we make will be fruitless. This is not only a waste of money, but also a very expensive use of everyone’s time.

So is making phone calls first the best approach? Well the answer here is that it is often the best approach if we combine it with PROFILING.  This is a service we introduced that helps us and our customers make sure that that the contacts we obtain via our websites are of good quality by ensuring they match the target audience we seek. By allowing the contacts we obtain via the internet to be profiled into categories such as partners, resellers, and customers, we find the quality of the CRM database is much improved in size and in quality. In this way, we filter out the emails and telephone numbers we obtain via our website that are time wasters, and focus instead of those that look like probable buyers.

The beauty here is that we can more than double these website contact details with not only the ones that filled in the contact forms, but also with the ones who showed interest on our website, but did not provide their details. These include those that might even have tried to fill in the form but failed. Using our WebleadsB2B services this is possible.

It is then a relatively easy task to call either their head office or department number and to ask for the contact details for the person responsible for managing the problem that our product or service solves. It will deliver a highly improved quality database and sometimes it’s the only reliable way to obtain a useable list.

So which one comes first in your opinion, email or phone call? Let us know by writing to support(at)webleadsb2b.com

E-marketing campaigns can deliver great results when they work well, but if they are not based on a good quality CRM database, they can be costly and deliver worse than hoped for results. PROFILING, we believe, will help solve this problem.

top-10 lead generation ideas

In the last few weeks, I have been calling our customers to look at the different ways they are using WebleadsB2B WebWHO to identify the organizations visiting their websites.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out about the different ways they are using this capability to help them improve their marketing campaigns and improve lead generation.  Below is a top  10 list:

1. It gives me more information about each of our leads
“We use WebWHO with our landing pages. When someone fills in the online form, we can use WebWHO to tell us more able the lead, such as their specific location, and if they have filled in one of our forms previously”.

2. Enables us to better measure our online campaign results
“We put a lot of effort and money behind our online campaigns. We create landing pages, Google Ads, emails, the works. For this reason it was important to measure these campaigns beyond just click and visitor numbers. WebWHO tells us who came to the landing pages, and lots of more information, including which Google Ads work best for our target audience”.

3. Turns company names into telephone numbers you can call
“By combining WebWHO with the PROFILE service, we can map company names visiting our site to emails and telephone numbers of the people we are targeting. The integration to B2B contact lists really is impressive and allows us to create the type of leads we just couldn’t have produced before”.

4. Reduces our online advertising costs
“We use to select “keywords” in Google Adwords based on the number of clicks it was generating, but we were blind to knowing if these clicks were coming from time-wasters or real business-level prospects. WebWHO enables us to judge this now, showing which are the “keywords” our target audience really respond to best. It has saved us hundred of dollars. It even can help us determine which websites to put paid-for advertising banners on – for the first time we can now see who is clicking on these ads”.

5. Helps me measure “market visibility”
“One way we measure the market visibility of our website is to see if our target market, including our customers, are coming to our pages. We use Google Analytics to show visitor numbers, but WebWHO has the business focus we need, enabling us to see how many of our target accounts are visiting us, and who they exactly are”.

6. Speeds up our lead generation process
“Our landing pages generate about 100 to 150 leads a month, so it is important for us to identify which of the people who fill out the contact details are genuine or not. WebWHO speeds up the process by indicating to us if the lead is coming from a genuine business IP address, if they are an existing customer, or a competitor. The quality of leads we now pass on to Sales is now much improved”.

7. Finds out which Google Adwords work best
“WebWHO allows us to see which Adwords are attracting our target audience. Without it, we would be partially blind, looking only at “click through rates” (CTRs) to judge the effectiveness of our Adwords”.

8. Converts business visitors into leads
“WebWHO gives us the names of the businesses visiting our landing pages. With this, our Inside Sales team then hunts down the IT Managers we target and secures as many calls as possible. It’s surprising how many leads we have generated this way”.

9. Identifying new leads through the top 10 visits list
“One of the many reporting features it provides is the top companies visiting our website. We check if our sales colleagues are contacting these companies, and ask them how many of them look like interesting prospects.”

10. Immediately alerts Sales about key accounts
“When we are working on key accounts, we want to know all about them. Sometimes it can be the difference between winning and losing the deals. WebWHO allows us to find out when these accounts are on our sites, and what they are looking at and requesting. This way we avoid slow responses to any material they are requesting, and generally allows our team to keep on top of managing these accounts”.

We hope that this video gives you a clear overview of some of our services. If you have any questions, please add them in the comments field below.

It defines Post-click marketing as an emerging practice that aims at improving sales and marketing results by focusing on website visitors when they respond to online marketing activities such as PPC advertising, emails, or paid searches with the objective of increasing conversion rates.

You can understand how many might view this as something Web Analytic tools such as Google Analytics, Webtrends or NedStat can do, but Wikipedia in this case does a decent job of explaining the difference between such analytic tools and software specifically aimed at helping post-click marketing efforts.

For one, they explain that, unlike Web Analytic tools, post-click marketing technology supplements IP addresses with data from third-party sources, enabling marketing managers to view the name of the company visiting their website, their location, and the industry they are in.

All good stuff, but why is post-click marketing so important? I would appreciate the views of our blog readers on this, but here is one take on it based on a recent visit I had with a prospective customer.

We started by looking at how much money they were spending towards online marketing. Like many others, they use Pay-per-click advertising, such as through Google Ads or Yahoo, and it has become a stable feature within their marketing annual budget. Investments were also being made on web banners, the purchasing of email lists, SEO, and improvements towards how web sites are updated. At the end, we estimated about 15-20% of their marketing budget was being spent on getting visitors to their site. So far, so good

I then asked him, “how much money and resources you are spending on converting those visitors into leads?” First of all, I got a blank stare. After further discussion, we agreed that it did seem a bit ludicrous to be investing so much in getting people to visit our websites, yet so little in ensuring that these visitors are converted into leads.

We agreed with data coming from sources such as Marketing Sherpa that the average conversion rate of a web visitor, attracted to your site by a Google Adwords or other online advert, is around 2% to 5%. This means that 95% to 98% of this prospective customer’s marketing budget spent on online advertising was not being quantified (other than in “click” numbers) and not leveraged for any other purpose.

I then explained how post-click marketing aims to solve this by not only telling you more about the 2% to 5% you converted into a possible lead, but also giving you more details about the invisible 95% of visitors that, up until now, where unknown to him.

So let us take a first look under the covers at this 95% of these invisible visitors. Can you assume that these visitors who have spent some time reading your online web content, but who did not go on to fill in a registration form or phone you, are not interested in your product or service?  We agreed that not all visitors would be prospective buyers, but also agreed that anything from 10% to 25% could be prospective buyers, especially given the niche area this prospective customer was selling in.  Lastly, we generally concurred with market evidence, such as from Enquiro Research, showing that as much as 93%
of buyers use the internet to research a B2B purchase decision.

The bad news for my prospective customer was that they were ignoring these potential buyers, focusing instead on more typical marketing activities such as buying email list of people who have probably never heard of you and never visited your website.

Isn’t this a little crazy? If you were a shop owner, which one would you focus on:

• The visitors in your shop
• Or the people out on the street who are by chance walking by?

Surely it makes more sense to pay attention to those in your shop than the people walking by.

And that is what post-click marketing is all about, and why it’s so important. They actually present your biggest market opportunity today.

WebleadsB2B has years of experience in helping companies generate sales leads. We are specialists in helping customers develop fast and effective web lead generation strategies and campaigns in business to business (B2B).

We take away the complexity of using technology to generate more leads for you. Our software-as-a-service (SaaS) model solves all your hardware and software needs at a single stroke. Let us do the work for you by providing the key information you need to drive internet lead generation.

Focusing especially on the B2B market, we assist businesses in maximizing their investments on the Web.