Until now the LEADSExplorer web service consisted of providing visiting data and identification of visitors by company name.
The main complaint we got from our customers or ex-customers was: great data and information but we want to do something with it.

Reach your customers early in their buying cycle
As of today the web service allows you to take action towards your visiting companies by helping you to contact your visiting companies more easily and conveniently.
An email sent to interested visiting companies is likely to get more attention as the timing is right and the subject is known by the pages visited or the search terms used.

On the home page the users will find a list of the latest visiting companies that never have visited before. The ‘Interest’ column indicates graphically their visit intensity.

Browse visiting companies
Browse and click one of the companies. Then a pane with more information opens with company website, business information, geographical location, visit data and visited pages in order to qualify the company.

Find contacts and their email addresses
If the company interesting enough then contacts and email addresses can be retrieved from different sources on the Internet.

Using the ‘prepare email’ link will open a popup asking to:
- Paste the email address found
- Select the email content from a number of emails
These emails have previously been created and can be edited on the spot by clicking on ‘create / edit email templates’.

Prepare and select email
By clicking ‘Prepare Email’ the email client (Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird,…) will open in order to allow further editing or personalization of the email and add the senders’ signature.

The actual sending will be done from the email server of the user.

Benefit
Sending an email to an interested company takes out two of the tree uncertainties of email marketing:
- Content is matching their interest
- Timing : the message is timely
This is likely to enhance the interest in products or services.

Saving data and events for future use
Every email sent will save the company, the contact person with his email address to the SALESTractor CRM, including the email.

Additionally an event is created in the communication log which will appear in the activity charts that plot the visits of one company and the communications with this company.

We are proud to bring more features for the same price.
Get a 30 day free trial to experience yourself getting more leads generated from your website.

Comparing conversion rates of online websites is more complex than just comparing the conversion rate numbers of the websites.
Typically B2B websites have conversion rates between 1.5 and 3.0 percent, however some website have conversion rates up to 7 percent (in 2007 before the financial crisis).
That is quite a difference.

Many factors have an influence n the conversion rate from SEO to website design.
However one of the most important factors is overlooked in many cases: where the funnel starts.

The start of the funnel is determined by how and why the visitor lands on the website and where did the visitor originate from with what kind of intention.
In many cases the funnel starts before your website.

Extended funnels
The funnel of a website gets extended by the sites previously visited by the visitor:
- The visitor has clicked on an online advertisement or banner
- The visitor has read a convincing blog post or editorial about your product or solution
- The visitor has investigated in a review of products
- The visitor has clicked on a link in your email from your campaign
- The visitor has seen a print advertising and has taken the effort look-up your website
- The visitor has followed the recommendation of a friend or colleague (word of mouth)

The funnel also gets extended by the intention of the visitor:
- The visitor was actively seeking for a solution you provide
- The visitor is already a customer
- The visitor is a customer of your competitor

Shorter funnels
A funnel should be shorter when the visitor accidentally lands on your website looking for something that is related to your business but not directly the services or products you offer.
In this case the visitor first needs to find and understand your offering and then get interested in them. If you take out this part of the website visit your conversion rate will be much higher as many will leave your website earlier (or even bounce).

Comparing conversions
When you compare conversion rates between different websites it is important to know how or why people actually landed on the website.
If there are many visitors coming from blog posts that promote your products or coming by advertising links, you should extend your funnel as these websites are part of your funnel.
This longer funnel will decrease your total conversion rate to the actual conversion taking into account all those visitors that have visited the other website, but haven’t clicked on the link provided.

On the other hand when most of your visitors accidentally land on your website, even if your conversion rate is low, it is quite an achievement to get any of these accidentally visitors converted into a lead, a sign-up for a free trial or becoming a customer.
These visitors first need to understand what your website is all about and then get interested to stay on your website in order to find out.
Only after having interest generated your funnels starts which can be several pages after landing on your website – or even on a next visit.

So don’t be disappointed if your conversion rate is low compared to some Internet stars with high conversion rates.
These typically have many blog posts or editorials preaching the benefits and advantages of their products or services, whereas your website has to attract and convert on its own.

What is your online conversion rate and where does your funnel start ?

The big ad
In order to attract more clicks it seems logical a bigger ad should do the job.
Simple: more surface – more striking.
However a bigger ad indicates more money being spend on advertising. Advertising expenses need to be calculated into the sales price. The price the customer pays for.
Some people will avoid products with the bigger ads just for that.

The small ad
A smaller ad might not be as impressive and overwhelming, but could eventually generate more clicks as it:
- can generate more sympathy as the underdog
- will deter less people
- can state the message more accurately using fewer words
- will only focus on the important items

As smaller ads are less costly to place hence more ad space locations can be bought for the same budget.
More ad placements will get more eyeballs which should normally lead to more leads.

Not money – creativity is required
Spending money on a bigger ad is just too simple.
The better investment to make is in your creativity. More creativity should bring an attention capturing headline and a better message. However this creativity will take more time and effort due to more iteration.

Making the ad bigger will not always generate more interests and leads than the smaller ad.

And as with all marketing efforts: test and measure.

Has your company big or small ads ?

Today we launched a new web service for dynamic content targeting: popupbooster

Until now having an existing website to display content tailored to specific groups of visitors was a complex and expensive process.
Popupbooster simplifies this process and allows serving of customized content and messages within minutes at an affordable price.

Benefits

The benefits are multiple:
- serving of relevant, visitor tailored content
- without large upfront investments, major modifications to an existing website – low setup and running costs
- easy customizable
- easy to maintain

Challenging Internet

On the Internet a website has only a few seconds or pages to:
- Capture the visitor’s interest
- Make them stay on the website for more page views: sticky website
- Decrease cart abandonment
- Convince them to make a purchase
- Leave their contact details
- Convert them into leads
- Increase online sales: up-selling, cross-selling, transactional selling

Previously this kind of targeting could only be solved by implementing expensive and complex content management systems (CMS) requiring experienced consultants resulting in hard to rollback changes to the website and expensive invoices.

Popupbooster solves this problem by offering easy to manage, easy to design, flexible popups and overlays that appear on conditions related to:
- The visit characteristics
- The search characteristics
- Reference website
The look, design and feel of each popup/overlay can be specified to your needs.

Beyond popups & overlays

While the idea of popups might trigger memories of spam-infested websites, the rise of these techniques is seen on more than 80% of the top 100 sites where they are implemented as popups, top bars, bottom bars and dynamic overlaying techniques which can range from being very subtle (not recognizable as popup) to aggressive attention-catchers..

Additionally the appearance can be triggered only when certain conditions are met and limiting the number of appearances for avoiding annoyance for the regular visitors while still being engaging to new or otherwise bouncing visitors.

Embedding web services and widgets

Most web services (online forms, surveys, email opt-in), media (Youtube, Scribd, …) and widgets can be embedded with relative ease expanding the possibilities beyond text and images.

Analytics

In order to be able to test different versions of popups and overlays adequate analytics, statistics and click-through recordings are provided.
This instant feedback mechanism and the easy to manage interface allows instant iterations to enhance the message displayed with the goal of the visitor’s engagement.

For more information on popupbooster please visit: www.popupbooster.com where you can sign-up for a 30 day free trial or a limited free account.

The world leader in …
The Fortune 500 companies are our customers.
The company is leading in this business for over 25 years.

You have seen these tag lines on trade shows or used in advertising or even have used them yourself).

Why should any potential customer be interested in becoming a customer as such a tag line doesn’t tell anything about how the company will:
- Solve his problem
- Improve his operations
- Decrease operational costs
- Save money
- Increase potential sales

These tag lines are to impress the potential customer.
However this type of impressing the potential customer will lead nowhere:
- Why should he be interested in the first place as nothing addresses his objectives or solution he is looking for?
- The projected high profile will put off many potential customers due to the high price tag associated
- A vendor dealing with large companies is unlikely interested in small or medium sized businesses
- The past successes are not a guarantee for the future
This type of marketing will not bring in leads.

Instead being humble could generate sympathy for your company.

However after the interest is generated by the main benefits, advantages and other messages, then you can mention:
“We are the world leader in …”
“The Fortune 500 companies are our customers”
“The company is leading in this business for over 25 years”
In order to overhaul the suspect as these will enhance your message by building trust.

Did you ever used such tag lines as first statement?

What Women Want is a romantic comedy film about a man who eavesdrops on women’s thoughts.

What companies really want are paying customers – not more funding.
Venture Capitalists should be able to eavesdrop on founder’s thoughts.

Additional funding can come in handy to:
- spend more money on marketing events and efforts
- have more salesmen
Both with the final goal to get paying customers.
Additional funding is not the goal.
Funding is just to speed up the development of the company as it allows for increasing marketing and sales spending.

Customers instead of Venture Capital

Investors, Venture Capitalists and Business Angels mainly think of investing whereas the main problem is getting the customers. Money doesn’t imply a company will get paying customers or increase revenue significantly.

Especially in the business of web services the investment to get a service up and running is fairly low as Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins says: Maybe Web start-ups don’t need venture capital. The start-up and operation costs are fairly low compared to the marketing and sales costs.
In the extraordinary case the company has the luck the solution is picked up by bloggers and reviewers, the marketing spending requirement can be very limited too as this will give major exposure money can’t buy.

Conversion from visitors to customers

In most cases the main problem is the marketing for exposing the solution and generating the buzz around the products or services. Letting the potential customers know the solution to their problem is available.
The marketing, social media marketing and SEO should generate traffic to the website, generate interest and stimulate the demand.

The next problem is the conversion from visitors to leads and eventually to customers.
The funnel is a long or slow process that in most cases cannot be speed up.
Marketing and sales need to cooperate to achieve the conversion from lead to customer.
This costs more money or creativity.

Money is a tool – custmers are the real thing

In any industry the paying customers are the real goal.
Getting there can be helped by taking money from investors (at a cost or company control) or as a loan (interest). Money is just a tool.

What does your company need the most ?

We all have heard and know about the gap between marketing and sales.
Marketing has good intentions by creating awareness and generate leads, whereas sales is blamed not to follow-up on the leads provided.

There is clearly a misunderstanding between either departments or the people of those departments.
- Marketing is paid to create brand awareness and leads.
- Sales are paid to bring in revenue or close deals.

In many cases the leads generated by marketing are not considered serious or valuable enough as sales has had already too many worthless leads from marketing. A waste of time.
Salesmen prefer to get inbound calls or find their own leads.
The gap seems to be ever becoming greater and seems impossible to solve as B2B businesses have been failing on this since almost ever.

Paranormal activity needed ?

It seems that some kind of paranormal activity is needed to bound marketing and sales together as they don’t seem to match up.

The activities of both departments need to be synchronized and adjusted to each other as the current method of working is spilling money, efforts and wasting time.

The real life feedback
For a start marketing people should start their job in sales first in order to learn about the real business and real customers. If someone just stays within the sophisticated well pampered boundaries of Marketing, he will never get confronted with real life: the real struggle of salesmen facing the customers or chasing leads.

The recurrent feedback
Next salesmen should be able to give feedback on the leads generated by marketing and the effectiveness of those generated leads.
How many actually become customer and why and where they exit the funnel?

The interest level feedback
Sales should not only give feedback on the lost leads or customers, but as they are feeling the pulse of the market every day, they should give feedback on changes or trends the encounter or see in the market with their customers and leads.

The feedback on marketing efforts
Marketing can claim great results with their statistics about their successful marketing campaigns; however these are company/market wide statistical data.
Sales should have the opportunity to give feedback on how leads and customers respond to these marketing campaigns. How did they react upon marketing efforts? What was the perception?
As long as Marketing keeps on believing their statistics and analytics, Marketing can retain its’ self-fulfilling prophecy.

Marketing should serve Sales like a customer

In the end Marketing should server its’ customer that is Sales (and the Salesmen) and not the CEO or Board of Directors as they are far away from real life.

No paranormal activity needed between Sales and Marketing, just sales providing the right feedback and Marketing listening and learning from Sales.

How many times have you been able to give feedback to your marketing ?
Was it effective ?

If you want to score quickly using social media in B2B or B2C, forget about it. It won’t happen!

In social media marketing blogging is the most used channel.
In the past people just started a blog and hoped to get readers and subscribers.
However social media like blogging, micro blogging or even just posting comments is almost like creating a complete product that requires market research, then it needs to be designed, developed, marketed, deployed and “sold”.

The goal:
Before starting anything the goal(s) need to be set and defined.

The market research:
The market research: what do your customers or leads want to read?
What is your market target? Market segment?

The design:
The concept: what are the subjects or topics?
The format: blogging, micro blogging or posting comments

The development:
The packaging: the layout, colors and fonts used
The type of illustrations or images to be used.
The setup of the RSS feed.

The production:
The daily content generation.
This is the real operational work.

The marketing:
Without any marketing the blog or micro blog will not be read.
- You need to submit your RSS-feed to all possible feed websites.
- Advertising
- Emailing
- Commenting on other blogs
- Getting links for your posts from other blogs
- Writing guest blog posts
- Getting other people to write on your blog

The goal is to build a group of followers or a community that follows your blog or micro blog.

The sales:
This is the final goal: generating traffic that brings interest for the advertising on your blog (page views and clicks) or your product (selling).

A blog is not just something you start and hope it becomes successful. As with any other product or service it needs to be designed, conceived and created with the end goal in mind.
Blogging into the wild will not lead to your goal.

How is your blogging going?

Do you know where your leads and customers are coming from?
How did they find your company or products?
How did they end up contacting your salesmen or sales team?
What was the first contact or who established the first contact?

You should ask your salesmen, sales team and marketing how leads have really found your company or products.
Asking leads and customers directly would even be better.

The CEO prejudice of leads origin
Most CEO’s and managers make many assumptions and take for granted what they believe is the truth. They have a certain prejudice: like they believe leads are generated on trade shows or by print advertising.
The only way to find out is to ask how they found your company or how they became aware of your products.
You need to register the origin of leads.
If you don’t measure you will not know.

Statistic analysis of marketing channels
Not knowing the origin of your leads, means you will be wasting time, money and effort on channels that don’t or hardly bring revenue.
The number of leads and customers a company has is limited, hence it should be feasible to review or ask every single one of them in order to make a statistic.

The ration of the amount of money spent on a marketing channel, events or efforts over the number of leads generated or customers acquired will show the best lead generation method for your company.

The lost leads analysis of your funnel
As a matter of fact the analysis should be taken one step further: why or what was the reason the leads left the funnel? Why did you loose those leads?
Again this should be grouped by lead source of marketing channel in order to find out when and where the biggest churn happens and the marketing channel that is the least successful in the sales process.

What holds you back not investigating in the origin of leads?
And where they left your funnel?

When product management or company management is convinced they need a “Me too” product or solution, the company is doomed for failure.

In most cases most businesses or companies have one product or solution that generates the most revenue and the most profit.
In order to:
- Expand into other parts of the market or business
- Shield off competitors entering the customers
- Protect a part of the market
Decision makers will decide to resell or develop a “Me too” product or solution.

The “Me too” problems

The problem is multiple:
- Motivation can be or will be low due to lack of inspiration
- Engineering development time will be invested
- Purchase time will be spend on searching vendors
- Support needs to know the product requiring training
- Service needs to serve more products requiring training
- Product management needs to create supporting content
- Marketing spending is needed to promote it
- Sales needs to be trained to sell the product
- Partnerships will have a time to get partners supporting it
- Business development will seek new business opportunities that are likely not interested.
- Administration will have additional overhead costs due to the new product or solution

The management reaction increasing the spending

After one or two years being in business with the “Me too”, company management or the Board of Directors will match or compare the results with the profits realized with the main product or solution. The conclusion will be negative.
Management will urge to sell more of the “Me too” in order to recoup their investments, which will lead to:
- Public Relations will send out press releases that generate no real interest.
- Marketing will set up pointless campaigns to promote the “Me too”
- Lead generation will demand lots of efforts without much response
- Sales people will put much effort in it without much success.
- Partnerships will waste time to convince partners to support the “Me too”
- Business development will engage into conversations with companies for non-existent or non-feasible opportunities.

As capacity is a limited source in any company this is double waste of time and money as all people involved could have been working for the successful product or solution instead.
Focus is what counts in sales, marketing, partnerships and business development. There is no time to waste and competition is fierce even for a market leader.

In only a few cases the “Me too” will serve its’ purpose: keep competitors out of the customers. Even in those cases the ”Me too” will probably not be really profitable itself.

Thus once the company has made the decision to have a “Me too” the result to expect is a death spiral.

Innovate instead

Instead of creating, developing, marketing, lead generating and selling a “Me too” product, a company should try to develop an innovative product that the market really wants and is a leap forward using new technologies or a new approach.
In that case your company has a story to tell to the market.

How many “Me too” have you been through in your career ?
Has any been successful ?