Anyone Use Lead Forensics?

[emmet12375]

Hi JDX_John,
You are right. I have amended my call script. It was very uncomfortable calling and saying, "hi im calling because someone from your company was visiting my web site for 20 minutes a few days ago." So now I just treat it as a cold call to see if I can get someone in the appropriate department. the lead forensics sales guy however says that his customers usually call and say that someone from the company was on their site, so I don't know how to handle this. The other odd thing is, why would someone be on your company web site for 10-20-30 minutes and not fill out any information on the contact page? I would assume that they are on the site for reasons other that wanting to do business with you. Again is this a reason to call the company?
Anyway I will continue with lead forensics for a while longer and continue to call companies that have been on my site for longer that 10 minutes in the hopes that I actually find someone who is interested in our products but was either too shy or in too much of a hurry to fill out any information on the contact page! Any advice from all of you guys is always appreciated.
Love this forum, by the way! Better that LinkedIn!

 

[Andy Harris]

As a direct competitor to Lead Forensics, it may appear odd for me to be almost defending them, but here goes, being as diplomatic as I can ...

We speak to hundreds of people in businesses who have used ours (or others, such as Lead Forensics) products and yes, people can get frustrated at not getting enough detail about the visitors (i.e. getting the company name, not the individual person who visited). However, many people we speak to use a range of different methods to capitalise on that data - it's not all about getting on the phone trying to find the right person.

Focusing just on the principle of identifying visiting companies, it's purely a tool in the hands of a sales/marketing person, who then uses their/others skills to capitalise on that. If someone from a company doesn't make contact, having looked at a website, then there are numerous reasons. Most common reasons are:

1. The website isn't good enough (compared to others they may have seen).

2. The person isn't ready to buy yet (e.g. they're researching the market, which means trying to find a way through to them could be a good idea).

3. They were searching for something from their employers IT system, but the search was nothing to do with the needs of the employer (e.g. someone searching for social media services because they're thinking of leaving their job and are doing their research in their employers time).

We often have dialogue with companies (subscribers) who are from exactly the same industry as each other, but have completely different mindsets to how they approach their website visitors data - just from that dialogue, we can tell who will be the winners, and who will be less successful. It all comes down to attitude, perseverance, and resources.

So, such systems are purely there to help provide some information that can then be capitalised on. They're not a silver bullet. The problem comes if they're promoted as being some sort of magical answer.

If anyone is interested, we produced a blog (Acting on visiting companies data) which provides more insights into this subject. Although the blog refers to our product, the principles can be applied to any other product that works in a similar way. I hope that's useful reading for some people.

 

[Ruler Analytics]

Lead Forensics is a fine product - it does what it says it does, and does it well, as does A1WebStats (hat tip to uchet, above) but we do think that businesses should be aware of their options in this marketplace. Everyone's needs are very different after all.

For those who don't know, Ruler Analytics is a new product for both B2B and B2C businesses that boasts similar company lookup functionality that is seen in both Lead Forensics and A1 as well as detailed visitor-level data that exposes the exact source of every sale, lead and phone call. It also enables call recording and playback. Because of its additional features, we don't feel we are direct competitors to the other companies mentioned, although we are competitors at some level simply because its an analytics product with company lookup functionality.

Here's our Lead Forensics comparison: http://www.ruleranalytics.com/compare/lead-forensics/

 

[Andy Harris]

Ruler Analytics have shown proactivity here in promoting what we think is important - businesses should invest proper time in trialling various analytics systems.

For some businesses, price is the dominating factor, for others, it's the convenience of certain functions that outweigh the price argument. Any business that quickly buys the first 'shiny new thing' that comes to their attention is a business that can later find that their budget could have been spent elsewhere.

Analytics continues to be a growth area as businesses gradually wake up to the importance of using analytics properly (although it's totally baffling how many years it's taking for that to happen). Every day of the week we see website visitor patterns that are scary, are losing companies business, and in most cases can be easily rectified.

We welcome the expansion of players in the analytics software market becuase it will drive awareness of how much of a difference it can make to business success. Everyone will have been pitched 'SEO' over the years and if nothing else, it highlights the fact a company should be considering SEO. The same will apply with analytics, as businesses won't escape the numerous different companies that are offering such services/systems.

We give it 12-18 months before the analytics market is saturated with offerings, and by 2016 consolidation will be starting. Some analytics businesses will buy others, and some will go out of business because they haven't carved their niche in the market.

For now though, the market is massive - with few exceptions, every business should be using analytics more intelligently in order to help them push ahead of their competitors. For any businesses reading this, please please consider this - companies will wither and die if they don't pay proper attention to analytics.

From our own viewpoint, we continue to view smaller businesses as being the catalyst for economic growth IF they are doing the right things, of which analytics is one of them.

 

[Social Management Pro's]

This is just remarketing which is big now in the display advertising world. It depends what you plan on doing with the inforamtion really?

 

[webgeek]

Lead Forensics is exceptionally good at doing what they set out to do. Namely, to help you identify specific users who are on the site, where they are from and what they are interested in.

Personally, I like the intel this gives, especially on sites with long sales cycles, high purchase prices and complex relationships, where having the sales team engage too early would be a sure fire way to blow a relationship/sale.

One step beyond this is the marketing information software from the likes of Pardot or Hubspot. They give the forensics details, plus score the leads based on activity on social, the website and email messages, then help to automate the delivery of follow-up messaging, based on what the prospect has shown an interest in. Once they hit a certain score, and are deemed 'sales ready leads', they are then passed to the sales team who will have a full history of the types of content they were viewing and spending time on, downloading, socially interacting with and about, and be prepared to discuss the appropriate product/service levels and applications before the call, rather than as a result of the call. Forewarned is forearmed (or something like that).

Overall though, I believe Lead Forensics can give many businesses an advantage by identifying and helping to prequalify prospects who've been on the website.

 

[marklew]

I think this is also quite dangerous. A company using this type of software has just got through to our reception, followed it with an email along the lines of 'someone from xxxx company has accessed our site, just wanted to make sure that you got the info you required or if there is any thing we can do', with the sales pitch attached. Our reception has then forwarded it to all senior management in my company to see if anyone knows anything about it.

It was fairly innocent (I think), but this could be someone researching out sourcing someone's job, someone researching a company for a new job, someone doing personal things in the office etc and could raise a lot of questions, and cause trouble.

 

[webgeek]

For those users on a corporate network, if you visit a site that has Google Analytics, the domain name associated will appear in the stats. It doesn't take much to search online for the company website and dial up the receptionist.

You can get a lot more/better information from a forensics software than GA, but if this is how they're using it, sounds like the people who called the company above aren't going to get far with any package.

 

[whoisvisiting.com]

These tools all provide exceptional insights. IP tracking software such as Lead Forensics , Pardot and Hubspot all go the extra mile in delivering actionable leads from tracking software online. As I believe some previous posts have alluded to, some of these softwares are extremely comprehensive and therefore reach out to certain customer demographics.

These softwares are particularly complimentary when operating marketing campaigns which have CPA's to the lead associated. Identifying companies in addition to your CPA reporting has the obvious benefit of further enhancing the performance of all marketing activity you do online.

Whoisvisiting.com is an extremely simple solution. We provide raw data and enable you to manage, consolidate and action leads yourselves. This SaaS style model allows us to pass savings onto customers hence the reason we start at £29 per month.

We offer a 14 day Free Trial with no obligation so do give us a try.

 

[lorr1e1]

Google Analytics will provide similar information and for most people it’s free. Here’s how:

Login to Google Analytics and click on Standard Reporting at the top. Then click on Audience on the left hand side, then expand Technology then click on Network. Choose a date range in the top right hand corner (e.g. Yesterday) to keep the results manageable. Then review the list of Service Providers at the bottom of the report (you made need to change the Show Rows drop down at the bottom of the page to see them all).

I have looked at this but this only shows you the isp comapnies it does not show you the companies, i think it is shown elsewhere in the report but cannot remember where it is.

I thihk i am going to go back to the other website stats analyser that does give you the ip addresses of who came to your sit. This is free its called awstats . org its available from sourceforge which is open source.

 

[mwakeham]

!! KEEP WELL AWAY !!
Not a company I would recommend dealing with.

 

[Virtu_ddp]

I had a bad experience with Lead Forensics! I actually had to call the MD to get them to stop calling. They seemed to go a little over board with the hard sell which for me was very off putting.

I decided they were not for me, but as a service and if they are good I can't comment.

Good Luck,

Luke

 

[Sarah Judge]

I am in the middle of our initial "free trial"- and so far they have worked hard to sell this software. I do think that there will be cheaper alternatives. I think I will get my skates on and do some market research before making any decisions- it all seems a little sneaky.
I think that by the end of this week I will be a little tired of the "daily telephone update"...

 

[Import Expert]

Hi have not gone through every reply to this post so please excuse me if I'm covering old ground. We trailed Lead Forensics and are still looking at whether this is worthwhile for us, however I would like to just add to some comments made above that the visitors data provided alone is worthless unless you use it wisely.

For instance - The last thing I would want our sales team to do is to ring someone up and say 'I saw you looking at our website...'. That's essentially being a pest and unless you get very lucky is only going to have an adverse effect.

What you should be analysing from a sales point of view is exactly what part of your site they are visiting and why. For instance, we are a Global Freight Forwarder - If using this software we saw that a potential customer that we know trades internationally has spent some time looking for instance at our seafreight services from the USA, but never got in touch, I would like to see this followed up with a call asking whether they import from the USA, Can we help and We have some great pricing at the moment, etc. I would not even want the fact that they had visited our website mentioned. This approach obviously means that the number of people you will be calling are less, but the chances of obtaining them as customers are much higher.

If you have an ecommerce site are you getting a lot of people looking at a particular product but not buying - If so are your prices too high? Maybe you can follow this up with an offer on that type of product or offer a discount code.

You can also look at analysing more generally what people are looking at and why to see if there are certain trends you are, or are not picking up on.

Oh and you can see if your competitors are having a peek too...

There do seem to be a lot of companies offering this kind of service now, but Lead Forensics were recommended to us by a number of people. I would however also concur with one of the comments above that their sales tactics can be a bit OTT.

 

[Ed B]

Went to see them at their offices last year - professional outfit with a very smart CEO

 

[Digihound]

For me the key metric wouldn't necessarily be so much about tracking a visitor down to be able to do a follow up call but more importantly about the % of visitors that are likely to convert as a result of being followed up!

Not sure if there are any definitive studies around that show that?

 

[macmacman]

LF are a massive rip off considering you can get the same service from about half a dozen other providers. LF are excellent at selling their service and plenty of unaware companies have signed up to them for over a £100 a month!! Sorry but if you give them a go you are setting yourself up from the start. Isn't it obvious they are wide?

 

[Danny Howells]

You've got to admire Lead Forensics selling ability. It is not surprising, as Market Makers (telemarketing company) is the owner.

There are much cheaper alternatives that are just as good out there. Our business has trialled a few, but our preference is a competitor of theirs, as their pricing and product suit our budget, we are a Digital Agency and we give this away to our suppliers for free - it is so cheap. The cost 90% less than Lead Forensics.

Lead forensics sell this product as LEADS. They are not LEADS, they are website visitors. Do not be fooled by this. Their hard sell is this:

1. Cold Call you
2. Give you 7 days data (PDF - not system access! - I wonder why!)
3. Hard Sell you to a close
4. Contract you in (wonder why?)
5. You then realise they are not leads and they get £3000+ from you

Great Sales company, products just way way over priced. Go elsewhere - google Lead Forensics Alternatives, you'll see at least 3 who will be able to help for much less

 

[JandJC]

You've got to admire Lead Forensics selling ability. It is not surprising, as Market Makers (telemarketing company) is the owner.

There are much cheaper alternatives that are just as good out there. Our business has trialled a few, but our preference is a competitor of theirs, as their pricing and product suit our budget, we are a Digital Agency and we give this away to our suppliers for free - it is so cheap. The cost 90% less than Lead Forensics.

Lead forensics sell this product as LEADS. They are not LEADS, they are website visitors. Do not be fooled by this. Their hard sell is this:

1. Cold Call you
2. Give you 7 days data (PDF - not system access! - I wonder why!)
3. Hard Sell you to a close
4. Contract you in (wonder why?)
5. You then realise they are not leads and they get £3000+ from you

Great Sales company, products just way way over priced. Go elsewhere - google Lead Forensics Alternatives, you'll see at least 3 who will be able to help for much less

I would be interested in learning who you went with, please private message me their details as it would be very much appreciated.

 

[HazelC]

These people phoned me everyday for 3 weeks, even when I said I wasn't interested. I then had to block them as they kept calling back. - that put me off them, fullstop!

 

[Deleted member 244558]

Been using LF for the last year or so with a company I work with, They have a slick sales process, their account management and support is also very good and they do a very good referral scheme. The product paid for itself in the first year. Very handy tool, but It has some flaws - it will only resolve company IP information and page data from a static domain which means when people use wireless or mobile technology you won't know about it. It's awesome for tracking email campaigns though...

 

[Daniel Parker]

We've tried lead forensics and whilst their product delivered the main issue was the annual contracts and premium pricing we now utilise whoisvisiting for all of our IP tracking extremely happy.

 

[H22SolutionsLtd]

We can only match about 55% of the traffic from your site as we can't pick up dynamic or static IP which we wouldn't want to anyway."

Like everything else with Lead Forensics, this statement is misleading.

They probably do track 55% of businesses with fixed IP's, but in reality, they only track less than 1% of your B2B traffic as not all businesses have fixed and registered IP addresses.

In today's world of mobile where a large proportion of traffic is mobile, this product simply does not work.

And let's not forget the false positives

All in all, very disappointed.

Support - I'm still waiting for the phone call from 6 months ago. We rearranged in March and again no phone call ever came. Finally, the customer services manager gets in touch a few weeks ago - Great! .... He has now dropped off the radar and is not returning emails. Hmmm...

 

[Andy Harris]

Like everything else with Lead Forensics, this statement is misleading.

They probably do track 55% of businesses with fixed IP's, but in reality, they only track less than 1% of your B2B traffic as not all businesses have fixed and registered IP addresses.

Totally agree Terry - in our view, any software that focuses primarily on tracking companies by IP address is still going to miss out on a hell of a lot of 'unidentifiable' companies that have visited.

Here at A1WebStats, we do offer that companies-tracking functionality but we're also quite vocal about what really matters. This is taken from our [link removed]

Tracking and then contacting companies that have been to your website is a bit like someone looking in your shop window (your website), not being ready to engage/not being impressed enough, and walking away, followed by the shop keeper (you) running after them down the road to see what you can salvage.

Therefore, although A1WebStats does give you the opportunity to try and salvage something from that company visit, the majority of the A1WebStats system functionality is designed to help you make positive changes to your website and the way it’s visible online, so that those companies have more reason to ‘enter your shop and speak to the shop keeper'.​

Although Lead Forensics aren't alone in this (it could equally apply to many other services/products), sometimes a 'solution offered' is only a sticking plaster approach. Yes, there's obviously some value in knowing which companies go to your website (depending on how geared up you are to do anything with that information), but so many companies will not be identified. The answer (in our view) is to do what most businesses unfortunately don't do, which is to get deeper into analytics, and work with their developers to make their websites strong enough to convert those 'company' visitors (identifiable or not) into enquiries.

On that subject (website visitors conversions), we've done a guide on [link remove]. Although that guide refers to how to use our system to pick out key data, the principles can be applied to other analytics system (Google Analytics etc.). I hope that's useful to some people reading this.

 

[kezzahayles]

I managed a relationship wit a client that included using Lead Forensics. Overall, I found it a waste of time for no return I could not have delivered for a much lower cost.

 

[AvalonMist]

Support - I'm still waiting for the phone call from 6 months ago. We rearranged in March and again no phone call ever came. Finally, the customer services manager gets in touch a few weeks ago - Great! .... He has now dropped off the radar and is not returning emails. Hmmm...

It's the same for us ... We're several months into the Lead Forensics contract and haven't had a single order that has come through our £200/month contract ... not that that bothers them!. We should have done more research before signing up with them and feel we have been well duped. When we finally accessed the level above the floor management team they wouldn't answer our lengthy list of questions and have now dropped off the radar by not replying to our emails. Is there anything we can do, because I'm sure we are by no means alone?

 

[Emu]

Didnt read the whole load of replies but I know this software, system and the sales people inside out so let me know if you have any questions.

In scanning the replies one of the biggest problems you will have is already stated, imagine seeing someone from the NHS has an interests in your site, you even find out they are based in sheffield, you cant really use that data. If your customers are small time businesses then you might be able to make use of it.

It is done via IP fingerprinting and there is a manual element to it too so it wont work on mobile

The contract get out terms are a nightmare

 

[Emu]

Didnt read the whole load of replies but I know this software, system and the sales people inside out so let me know if you have any questions.

In scanning the replies one of the biggest problems you will have is already stated, imagine seeing someone from the NHS has an interests in your site, you even find out they are based in sheffield, you cant really use that data. If your customers are small time businesses then you might be able to make use of it.

It is done via IP fingerprinting and there is a manual element to it too

The contract get out terms are a nightmare

 

[Mail Workshop]

A1WebStats is pretty good and has excellent support, although we haven't had chance to compare side-by-side with Lead Forensics. Difference in price is enormous.

 

[altwebdesign]

wow... this thread took off in a bit of detail, I hope it helped people make some good decisions regarding Lead Forensics.

Im not a fan of lead forensics, they used to call me all the time.... I managed to find something similar:
https://www.traffictruffle.com/

I've been using it on the free 30 day trial and found some good results.

I really like the way you can tag pages as warm and cold and the wya it connects with Linkedin to find people in the organisation that have viewed your website....

Pretty good piece of software!

 

[rlsltrd]

Think very carefully before signing up for Lead Forensics. The sales pitch is very good, however once you sign on the dotted line they will not let you out of your contract even if the system doesn't work for you and you haven't even logged in to use it for 6 months.
We made that mistake and they wont let us cancel early without paying an upfront fee. Absolute disgrace of a company with very poor ethics. Avoid them if you are not 100% certain it will work for you as they wont let you cancel without paying for it.

 

[Andy Harris]

Echo what rlsltrd says. We cover the subject of the Lead Forensics contract within Reason 4 of our page http://www.a1webstats.com/resource/...ll-get-you-more-business-than-lead-forensics/. Ignore the fact that the page is comparing us to them and please don't take this as a sales pitch. Within that same article, within Reason 7 you'll see a video that clearly shows how they view a customer - as a sale, complete with bell ringing. If you read through the rest of that article though, it'll highlight various reasons why spending that budget on Lead Forensics could cost you in various ways.

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Like any service, get a demo first. LF tracked leads for me and, in 2 weeks delivered 2, both of which had no relevance to me.

I can see it being useful to some, but, like any tool, make sure it is right for you first.

they will not let you out of your contract even if the system doesn't work for you

- caveat emptor!

and you haven't even logged in to use it for 6 months

- how is that relevant?

I guess you have an issue with them?