Lead Forensics, WhoisVisiting, or ____?

[webgeek]

The poll question asks it all... if you are using a lead intelligence software platform to know who is looking at your website content - what platform are you using?

If you are using any solutions, are you happy with them? Why or why not?

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The case for lead intelligence is an easy enough one to understand, but if you haven't heard it before, here's a possible use case.

Suppose you have a team of 10 salespeople calling 100-200 people a day, each building a pipeline of 50 or so deals potentially in motion. That puts 500 key prospects on your 'watch list'.

It could be months, or never, before these people re-visit your site, or before they are ready to buy from someone. If they are interested in your solution and they visit your site, viewing product pages and checking out your pricing page - you need to know about it, to re-ignite the sales conversation.

If you don't catch them at that time, they probably are also visiting competitor sites and could potentially buy from the first salesperson to taps into their pain, pushing a solution in their path.

If a deal is worth 2 quid, this lead intelligence isn't worth much. If it's worth £10,000 (sale value or lifetime value) then letting them slip away would be a tear jerker.

One function of lead intelligence is knowing who is on your site (the company they're from anyway) and what pages they're looking it. This information can help you instantly determine if you need to call someone back, start a conversation or fix an issue with your sales presentation/website.

So, if you're a B2B sales organisation or department within a company, why don't you have a lead intelligence solution?

 

[Martyn_sa]

Checked WhoisVisiting in the survey as it is the package we've used most, but we've also used Canddi (terrible name, but a decent tool particularly if you do B2B email marketing), Lead Forensics and Wow Analytics.

WhoisVisiting's dashboards don't look great, but the information captured was very similar to that captured by the more expensive Lead Forensics when we trialled them side-by-side. That might not be the case across all results, it may just be in the section of the engineering market we trialled it in.

For high-value stuff, using one of these systems makes sense. Trawling through the results can initially be a frustrating task (endless ISP and security listings) until you have triggers and exclusions set-up, but you can get some really useful leads.

 

[webgeek]

Thanks @Martyn_sa !

Are you using it for initial prospect identification only? Or are you also using it to identify which previously pitched leads need to have conversations restarted/accelerated based on recent visits to the site (showing interest in particular products/features/pricing)?

 

[Martyn_sa]

I work for a marketing agency, so it's a case of how our clients use it. Most use it largely for prospect identification (particularly those targeting export leads), but some monitor it closely through the sales cycle and, as a result, are more proactive and get more from it.

I suspect that a lot of the time people don't have a set procedure for using it, so it's a case of spotting a company name in the results and remembering that there hasn't been any contact recently. The subsequent phone call / email can be much less speculative.

 

[webgeek]

I think the types of pages the prospects are viewing - being mapped to their likely objection, is a great use that most overlook.

If you've had the conversation, done a demo, trial, proposal or whatnot and have been put on the perpetual hold queue, then see that prospect revisiting the site afterwards, their pages viewed give great insights into what they're really concerned about.

Viewing the about us page? Often a lack of trust, typified by also viewing the testimonials and customer case studies in conjunction with the about us.

Viewing the pricing page? Unsure of the ROI and what the value really is, as compared by their cost outlay.

Viewing the comparative pages? These are the ones which show your product versus brand x. Typically these are close to a buy decision but haven't spent enough time looking elsewhere and feel they could be missing something. They're needing some reassurances about the product guarantee, feature set fit for their needs and support.

Viewing the terms and conditions? If done in conjunction with the product page again, they're one small nudge from signing and need a touch base call just to confirm the details of the agreement.

Note that these aren't always the case, but after having mapped enough visits to conversations, they seem to have a lot of truth in the objection-pageview map.

 

[Chris Needham]

I like whoisvisiting, it is much cheaper and the sales team are far less pushy.

 

[Sorodo]

Used Leadforensics in past agencies - we even had weekly sales calls from them even though we had a 12 month contract running...

 

[fisicx]

Used Leadforensics in past agencies - we even had weekly sales calls from them even though we had a 12 month contract running...

Read the reviews - they don't have that good a reputation.

 

[Oliver King]

Lead Forensics have incredibly aggressive / pushy sales teams, which has put me off using them in the past as it didn't feel like a professional company. They also, in my opinion tried a cheeky trick of saying that they could identify 100% of the companies - but they actually said they could identify 100% of the companies that they identified - which is something completely different!

I would recommend Canddi - their team are really good and what makes them better is that they will actually work with you to ensure the system is utilised best - On more than one occasion they created custom reports etc to make sure they supplied the information provided...

Generally though, I think it is important to bear in mind that you only get out what you put in (cliche time!) - If you don't commit to using the system, getting the sales teams on-board, putting in adequate resources into both inside sales and your website (to encourage people to visit your site) then you just won't get the results.

 

[Vigilion]

Lead Forensics have incredibly aggressive / pushy sales teams

I concur. They are very aggressive - we did a trial, they wanted to lock us into a multi year contract.

I now use Clearbit reveal with Google Analytics integration - it is a monthly plan and I can slice the data with the rest of my analytics data in one interface.

 

[HelenCope]

I used Lead Forensics for a while their marketing tool is just an aggregation of all the Google tools and as mentioned above they are incredibly pushy and only focused on sales.