Tag Archives: maxmind

Sales Intelligence: Track (Down) Website Visitors

The Challenge: you’ve invested in PR, Search Engine Optimization, Pay-per-Click ads to drive people to your website. A lot of people visit, they read a couple of pages, and then they leave. A lost opportunity…

ActiveConversion, an SMB lead management automation vendor, has a solution.  I stumbled upon their press release offering free Jigsaw data, and Fred Yee clarified: “If company ABC comes to your website, a simple mouseover in ActiveConversion will display ABC’s revenue range, employee size, industry etc. There are 2 million data records for companies in Jigsaw’s database, so it covers a lot of companies.”

And then you can decide to search Jigsaw to buy actual contact data of people with the right job titles within company ABC. For those who don’t know Jigsaw: it’s a business card exchange service, so their users contribute and rate the contact details. The result is that the data is reasonably up to date, they have a lot of different job titles (not just C-level and VPs) and it often includes direct-dial phone numbers and email addresses.

How does ActiveConversion know the company name of website visitors? Actually, the IP address of website visitors gives away more information than most people realize. Maxmind’s GeoIP product, for example, can identify the city, company name and even the connection speed, all based on the IP address. Try it out yourself: go to whatismyipaddress.com, copy your IP address and paste it into the box on maxmind.com, then press “get location”.

One of the first companies that offered daily reports of companies visiting your website was Leadlander. They can send your sales people a daily email with a list of company names and location. The main challenge that remains: you don’t know which person is on your website, just the company name. So who are you going to call?

That’s where the Jigsaw data can help. It’s still a bit of a guess, but at least you have names, job titles and phone numbers.

Demandbase Stream Another vendor is this space is Demandbase. Unlike ActiveConversion they don’t have a full lead management system, but they specialize in identifying anonymous website visitors and providing contact data for people within those companies. They use multiple data sources, like D&B and Hoovers. I’ve not been very lucky finding useful contacts myself: they seemed to have a bias towards C-level and VP-level executives, but I could be wrong.

However, Demandbase offers useful filters so you can focus on those website visitors that are important to you. You can enter specific company names or territories. I’m not sure if Demandbase offers this, but  it would also be interesting to filter by pages visited and search terms used in Google: that’s all part of the “Digital Body Language”.

Still I wonder how actionable the information is. Regardless of whether you get it through ActiveConversion and Jigsaw or through Demandbase: what is the chance that you can actually locate and contact the right person? My gut feeling is that it’s a very low chance.

Why don’t they offer an option to chat while they the visitor is still on the website? That is a proven methodology in the consumer space that I haven’t seen very often in the B2B space. Maybe because it’s hard to ensure timely response. As a matter of fact, I used chat on the Jigsaw website last week, and nobody responded, and I waited for 30 minutes. I had a better experience on the Hoovers website, with immediate response and good-quality answers.

Alternatively, you could put more attractive offers on your website and promote those more effectively: this will increase the number of registrations. I have seen very few B2B companies actively test and optimize their online conversion rates (other than for PPC landing pages). So that may be a relatively quick win, rather than try to call people who may have visited your website.

My feeling at this time: first try to get more people to register on your website by improving the call-to-actions, then add chat if you have enough people to staff it, and only then I would consider real-time lead monitoring. At this time, it’s just not actionable enough.

What is your experience with Leadlander, Demandbase and ActiveConversion? Did you actually identify opportunities that you would have missed otherwise?