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SalesTool Talk Newsletter: July 16 Issue
After reviewing ActiveConversion, I found it as one of the most comprehensive sales intelligence and marketing SaaS applications available today. The solution lets you easily qualify website visitors so you can cherry pick the hot leads from the tire kickers. Then it automatically assigns these hot leads to your sales team based on geographic location or other metrics (such as industry.) It can also cycle through not-so-hot prospects and pass them through an email nurturing system.
How does it do this? Well, first it needs to collect the data on the visitor. It does this by using a JavaScript as part of the footer in your web pages. When a visitor hits your website, this script is loaded in the visitor’s computer. The script calls back to the Active Conversion server, which records metrics on the visitor browsing through your website. Active Conversion then complies a report on the visitor and you can use this report to qualify the visitor.
This is very much the industry norm when it comes to tools tracking website visitors. So there is no secret sauce here, but what ActiveConversion does differently is the level of automation in qualifying leads. This automation lets you understand your leads much better and engage them at a highly sophisticated level. This level of sophistication is very important when you want to develop a stronger rapport right of the bat. The demo video below further explains this.
Sounds pretty good so far, right? Then comes the issue of pricing. The cost of the service can run you into a few thousand dollars per year. The actual amount you pay is based on website usage and the more visitors you’ve got, the more you have to pay. But overall, I think the solution is worth the price tag.
Easily Qualify & Route the Best Leads to Sales
As reviewed by Zaki Usman, TargetinfoLabs
First Let Your Customer Finish Their Sentence Then Ask 3 Questions
Yesterday, I had a discussion with "Mark." Mark is one of the best sales/business development professionals I have ever met. In the market segments in which he sells, he is truly an expert. He's spent many years in understanding the industry, the players, the key issues facing everyone in the value delivery chain. Customers seek and respect Mark's opinion. He's helped customers achieve great things with his company's solutions.
Coupled with that, Mark has a very high level of enthusiasm and energy---it's infectious. Meeting with Mark, or seeing customers with him is always interesting. It's often hard to keep up with the ideas.
Imagine my surprise when Mark asked me for some advice today. While he is the highest performer in his company, he was having some challenges with closing deals. He said he was getting sales to a certain point and
I’ve been tinkering with ActiveConversion since last year. Some of the features I really enjoyed about ActiveConversion include:
- Enhanced reverse IP lookup for business contacts: I’ve seen the reverse mapping engine of several sales intelligence tools and I found Active Conversion had one of the most advanced algorithms as of Q1-2009. It worked very well for North American companies and worked reasonably well to identify European based leads. I’ve had some mediocre success in identifying leads coming from other parts of EMEA and APAC.
- Automatic lead scoring system: ActiveConversion has a nice algorithm to programmatically qualify prospects. This algorithm uses metrics such as: pages viewed, number of visits and view of “goal” pages. What’s best is that it’s all configurable. You can tweak the logic as you go along to correctly identify leads.
- Automatic lead assignment: Once leads come into your inbox, they can be automatically routed based on geographic location or trigger key words (such as verticals) to various sales guys listed in the system. This is an awesome tool since you don’t need to assign leads through human intervention.
- Sophisticated Web-2-lead form capture: Without much coding you can easily capture form entries from your existing web pages and embed them directly in the CRM system provided by Active Conversion. What’s more is that it can correlate this data into Sales Force. So no data re-entry is needed.
Other cool features include the email nurturing system and integration into Google Adwords for PPC campaign management. ActiveConversion’s CEO, Fred Yee, points to integration as one of their major add-ons.
“Our comprehensive lead scoring coupled with auto-nurturing and advanced web form integration, makes it easy to automatically identify, nurture and convert visitors into leads. Those leads then get quickly routed to the right sales person for action, at the right time. This results in 20-40% improvements in marketing spend AND in sales efficiency”.
Zaki Usman is a social media and digital marketing pundit who gets a kick out of sales automation and lead generation. He is the marketing engine behind Severa, a Finnish provider of SaaS project management tools.
He is also the founder of Target Info Labs, a marketing consultancy outfit that helps high-tech companies get to the next level. More on his marketing methods at www.TargetInfoLabs.com.
Then they seem to stall. We were talking about what was going wrong.
Fortunately, I had been on some calls with Mark. I've seen how he interacted with customers. I've also seen Mark in conversations with his peers in his company and we had had many conversations between ourselves.
Mark has a problem---it's a problem I've seen many bright, high energy, and high performing sales professionals have. I noticed that Mark rarely lets anyone complete their thoughts. Mark's mind is racing ahead of the conversation. Before the customer has had a chance to state their issues, Mark knows the answer and is presenting a solution. He's eager to solve the issue, his enthusiasm and energy causes him to interrupt and to start presenting a solution. Read on
