This post is the 2nd in a series that explains the world of website visitor identification and tracking. The first post laid out what’s not possible when trying to identify website visitors. Now we get into what is possible in a business to business environment (the next post will discuss B2C and more on the B2B side).
Certain B2B sales and marketing organizations have a leg up when it comes to using a visitor tracking system to identify website visitors. Why? Because in a lot of cases it’s possible to instantly identify the companies that visit your website using just an IP address. The website visitor doesn’t even have to fill out a web form or otherwise identify himself at all. The instant a visitor comes to your site that visitor’s IP address is available to you. Many IP addresses are easily associated with a company name and location. Professional visitor tracking systems make that association for you and go much further, detailing exactly which pages were viewed by that visitor, the search engine they used, even the exact search phrase they typed so that you know exactly what they were looking for (this allows you to easily identify qualified vs. non-qualified prospects).
Here’s the rub: not all companies are identifiable via their IP address. As a general rule, companies using a decidedly “business-class” internet connection (think T1 or better) are readily identifiable, while companies using “residential-class” internet connections (think DSL or cable modem) are commonly not. This dictates that if a reasonable percentage of the firms your company deals with are large enough to have at least a T1 internet connection you may well benefit from implementing website visitor identification software.
As I said in my previous post on this topic, nothing can be done at this stage to identify the name, email address or phone number of the individual that visited your website. Despite this, many organizations generate more leads and close more business by identifying and monitoring the activity of prospect companies on their websites. Can your company be one of them? Well that depends on a few things…
The companies that stand to benefit most from this level of visitor identification not only deal with “larger” companies (primarily medium to large sized organizations, but some bigger “small” ones as well), but they also sell a product or service (as a manufacturer, distributor, professional services… etc.) that is “relatively expensive” or generates a “substantial” amount of revenue per sale. This is because the value of any given lead increases with the size of the potential sale. “Relatively expensive” is (obviously) a relative term. I’ve seen companies that generate $5,000 per sale do very well with visitor identification. Start adding zeroes and the results continue to improve.
I sometimes come across people who question the value of visitor tracking systems (mostly people who’ve never used one). I often find it useful to point out the costs of not using one (like, say, letting great prospects go unnoticed, turning your back on a distinct competitive advantage). Allow me to illustrate what happens every day when you don’t leverage visitor identification and tracking. Here’s the story of how I came to invent my first visitor tracking solution in early 2003.
My company was developing a website for a distributor of industrial gearboxes (exciting stuff, I know). These gearboxes sell for as much as $40,000 each and generate gross margins near 40%. I was looking through the log files on their web server one day (I’m a geek, we read log files) and saw that someone had searched Google for a specific gearbox by model number and visited my customer’s website. The visitor had looked at several pages (including the “Contact Us” page) before moving on. It occurred to me that there aren’t many people proactively searching for industrial gearboxes who don’t need them (Note the eloquent use of the double negative. Don’t hate me, it’s a born skill). I told my customer about the website visit and asked whether they’d heard from the prospect. Answer? No. Nothing. No phone call. No form was filled out. No email arrived.
This made me absolutely nuts. I realized that the web is the only place in sales where we leave it to chance and hope the prospect will contact us. We spend time and money building a website, driving traffic to it, making sure the message is right and then… hope. Hope they’ll contact you. Hope the website looked good enough to them. Hope you’ll meet your targets for the quarter while you’re at it.
You’d never do that at a trade show. You’d never do that on the phone. A good salesperson believes they can close any qualified prospect, all they want is the chance. Well here was a chance: the prospect searches the web for the exact product my customer sells (by model number!), visits their website, looks at the product, learns how to contact them and then nothing. That guy is buying a gearbox from somewhere, it just won’t be from my customer.
The bottom line: B2B sales & marketing teams can leverage visitor identification and tracking tools right out of the box with almost no additional skills, knowledge or change in existing business processes. Here comes the teaser: Identifying & tracking website visitors at the company level via IP address barely scratches the surface of what a modern piece of software is capable of. The plot thickens…
