Digital marketing and lead generation in B2B

Audio transcription of the presentation in the video:
Thank you so much for attending my presentation. Today, I would like to explain why B2B organisations should rely on website visitor recognition for sales, and demonstrate how this lead generation process can be implemented in daily marketing and sales activities. To illustrate this, I will use our own agency website as an example to show how to work efficiently with a B2B website recognition tool. I will use the SalesViewer solution for this, but most of my advice can be transferred to other solutions. But why is website visitor recognition such an exciting topic? Many B2B marketers and sales managers are not yet familiar with this lead generation option. That is why I would like to start by explaining why I am convinced that, to use a military analogy, website visitor recognition is a secret weapon for marketing and sales activities.
When we talk about visitors We often say colloquially that people end up on a website. We use the English term 'landing page' for websites that are specifically designed for lead generation. In fact, our entire website should be one big collection of landing pages. Let us now imagine that these approximately 100 skydivers would not land on Earth, but instead visit our website. How many of them could we receive and greet by name? Only around 1% come out of anonymity by making an enquiry via telephone, contact form or email, for example. It may be more or less for you, but it remains a vanishing part that applies to all B2B websites. And there are good reasons for that, because purchase decision processes that run via the web are anonymous for ever longer. Visitors only recognise themselves shortly before the final decision is made. Conversely, this 1% means that 9Only 9% of our website visitors step out of anonymity. They leave as undetected as they arrived, remaining unreachable for sales purposes. However, this is changing thanks to B2B website tracking tools. Such tools use the static IP address that companies of a certain size use to access the internet. They then use reverse DNS IP lookup to determine the company's name and enrich it with address data from commercial company databases. As a result, around 15-25% of visitors are recognised. During the current corona crisis, this figure is slightly lower, as many website visitors are not currently accessing the internet from their normal office, but from their home office. There, they are connected to the network with a dynamic IP address. Compared to conventional website analysis tools, however, such specialised B2B tracking tools provide an additional service of decisive importance. Page-related tracking tools such as Google Analytics attach all parameters to pages.This means we can see how many visitors were on a page, how long the average visit was, and so on. Visitor-related B2B tracking tools such as Salesforce and WiredMines, on the other hand, attach all information to individual visitors and visits. For each visitor, you can see which pages were visited, how often, and for how long. This means the tracking we know from Google Analytics, etc., is turned upside down, so to speak, and rotated 180 degrees. But how can real leads and opportunities be developed from this information? To do so, three practical challenges must be overcome. Firstly, company visitors behave differently when they visit our website. Secondly, it is difficult to assess whether a particular visit indicates sales potential. Therefore, it is important to combine all possible information from visits to make sense of it. It is possible to categorise visitors as accurately as possible. The second aspect is that not all visitors to our website are completely new and unknown. Of course, existing customers, prospects, partners and competitors also visit our website, and this information is important for evaluating the potential for new business. The question is therefore how we can categorise visitors as interesting or not interesting in a way that takes into account information from the outset that we typically have in the CRM system. Thirdly, with this type of B2B visitor recognition, we only recognise organisations, which is important under data protection law. The tools mentioned work without cookies, so we can carry out this type of tracking based on a balance of interests. On the other hand, this means that we first need suitable contacts. If we already have the organisation in our CRM system as a customer or interested party, it's easier. With completely new organisations, this is much more difficult. To answer the first question, let's look at how the recognition process can work in practice. I like to call the procedure the 'one-line principle', and here we can see an example from the analysis of our agency's website. We would now simply take a look at Alva Edelstahl, which was launched on 2 June and visited our website for the first time on 4 June. The 'one-line principle' means that I can see the company name, industry and location all on one line. This information alone is very important because it could indicate that I have a blackout point for a certain industry. For example, if we worked exclusively for the travel industry as a digital agency, this company would be of no interest. If we focused our sales area on northern Germany, Aschheim would no longer be in our sales area, so the company would no longer be relevant. We then discovered that this company was on our website again, three quarters of an hour later, which is interesting. We are now taking a closer look at this visit. When we move the mouse over the number 1, we see that the page that was visited represents our CleverReach service portfolio on our website. We also see that the page was visited for 52 seconds. Due to the fact that a visit to this service page is a clear indication of sales potential, the SalesViewer platform is generating interest here. This means that we have stored a rule which states that, when this page is accessed, CleverReach should be displayed in the 'Interest' column. This allows us to quickly see whether there are potential sales opportunities. Another important column in our overview is the 'Source' column. Here, we can see how the respective visitor came to the website. We can see that the first visit came via a Google ad, which we placed to attract visitors looking for a new newsletter or email marketing tool. This is where they clicked. On the second visit, there was direct access to the CleverReach landing page. So, we need to check whether Alva Edelstahl is looking for a new newsletter tool, has introduced one, or is looking for an alternative to CleverReach. This overview provides us with a great deal of information that we can use in future. The question is what happened during the second visit to the website, which lasted 52 seconds. Did the person from Alva Edelstahl who visited our website read through the page, or did they simply call it up and leave it open? It simply closed again after 52 seconds without actually moving on the page. In order to ascertain this with greater certainty, we can watch the visit in a video, which quickly reveals that scrolling and reading actually took place, indicating actual engagement. What other indicators can we use to identify potential? As I mentioned, we not only see individual sessions, but also the complete history of companies that have visited our website, which we can present here using another example. We can see that this visitor has visited our website several times since 2019, and expand on each visit to see which pages were visited. This gives us an overview of this company's involvement with public care so far. We can also see which pages were visited and how often. We will review all sessions so that we can identify areas of interest and, in turn, take this into account in our contact strategy. The plethora of visit indicators — where the visitor came from, which pages they visited and for how long, and which meetings took place in the past — creates a good basis for deciding whether or not to qualify this as a lead. According to this decision, you will either mark the visiting company in Celsius with an asterisk if it is a lead, or with the one-way street symbol if the company is not considered interesting. For categorisation, however, it is helpful to know if the visitor is a new contact because, if there has been a customer relationship or sales contacts in the past, this can significantly change the assessment of the lead's potential. You would usually contact such companies if the visit only vaguely indicates sales potential because it is much easier to get in touch with them than with It is a previously completely unknown company that doesn't even have any contacts yet. The larger and older your B2B company is, the more difficult it is for an individual employee to know who a customer or interested party is because there may be thousands of customers and prospects in the CRM system. In short, it would be very helpful if you could see directly in the B2B recognition tool whether a visitor is a customer or an interested party. The SalesViewer feature that we use to make this possible is called 'offline campaigns'. Here are two examples of offline campaigns that incorporate this additional information into the solution. In the first example, we formed clusters of customers and prospects. I-OEMD stands for interested parties in the Category D OEM sector — i.e. rather unimportant interested parties — and K-NDA stands for customers, namely Category A end customers — i.e. the most important customers. In one case, we registered 377 companies — simply the company names.The complete company name is used in one case, and 363 companies are used in the other. The recognition tool now checks whether every newly identified visitor belongs to one of the stored offline campaigns, and enters the corresponding campaign name in the source column. In this case, we can see that Krüger and BASF Business Service are both Category A end customers. Another purpose of offline campaigns is to allocate sales assignments directly. In this case, the respective customers for whom Mr Rose and Mr Ruge are responsible were stored as offline campaigns: 16 companies in one case, and 107 companies in the other. Again, matching shows which company belongs to which sales representative. The offline campaign option can also be used for many other scenarios. For example, companies to which a print mailing has been sent can be stored, and then it can be checked whether a website visit was made as a result of the mailing.The same goes for trade fair leads recorded at a trade fair or other offline contacts. Once the leads have been categorised, the next question is who should process them. Here, too, solutions such as SalesViewer offer the option of storing the relevant sales area and responsible sales representative as keywords. For example, this can be done by comparing the postcode on the fly. In this example, an Excel list containing the relevant postcode areas has been stored in the tool. When the postcodes are matched, the keywords automatically appear in the corresponding company's data set and are therefore also available for filtering. But who should be responsible for visitor evaluation and lead processing? In my experience, there is no one best solution, but it should be set up in a way that fits the sales process and leads to good results. Here, I will show two prototypical organisational approaches. In the example on the left, we have an InsightSales team, or you could also call it a sales department, in which a specialised team The initial categorisation of visitors is carried out in the visitor recognition tool. Based on this categorisation, the leads and perhaps also customers that have been correspondingly marked go to the sales managers, who then evaluate which of these pre-filtered companies should be processed by the individual sales representatives assigned to them. We also find companies where the sales managers themselves take on the task of categorising and then routing the leads to the appropriate sales representatives. A third option would be for the sales representatives to process all their own leads in a democratic, grassroots manner. How can these processes be set up? For an efficient lead processing process, it is important that everyone involved only sees those visitors and leads that are relevant to them. Similar to many other solutions, this is achieved in SalesViewer using filters that enable customised views according to any criteria. Our example shows the filter of the seller Cheminski, who is responsible for a specific postcode area in Austria. In the same way, this Customer-created filters are now used for tailor-made daily email reports. In this case, these reports are not sent to individual sales representatives, but to the regional sales managers who supervise them. Divided by employee, you can see which sales-relevant visitors were on the website the previous day. On this basis, you can agree with each sales manager individually on the sales approach they will use to contact the respective website lead. Here is an example of such an email report, not from the Austrian company, but from our own website. This daily report tells me which visitors viewed the pages on our website the day before where we present our CleverReach and Mailchimp services. Let's move on to the third and final topic of my presentation today. It's about the challenge that B2B website tracking platforms only recognise organisations. Therefore, here are some tips on how to identify suitable contacts within the respective companies. Getting in touch It is easy to find the right contact person for a good proportion of visitors to your website, because you usually know who the contact person is for existing customers or interested parties. Although you often don't know who the specific visitor to your website was, a clever, thematic approach will usually lead you to the right contact person fairly quickly. Because the visiting company has not yet been on the sales radar, the first step in finding contacts is usually to search for them on Xing or LinkedIn. You can often find what you're looking for there. If this is not the case, for example if only a few employees from the company or the appropriate department are represented on Xing or LinkedIn, try a Google search. This often produces interesting results, such as people from the target company who have given a presentation on the sales topic. Another point of contact is the website of the company that visited you. Especially for smaller companies, it is astonishing how openly contacts from all specialist departments are listed there, along with extension numbers and email addresses. If absolutely no one can be found, the only option left is to search for the responsible contact person by telephone. The knowledge you gained from visiting our website can help you navigate the telephone exchange. If you have identified a large number of potentially suitable contacts, consider using print mailings to avoid exposing yourself to high risks in terms of GDPR requirements. With that, I will conclude my presentation today. Thank you, and let's keep in touch.

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