No sales events, no field service. How does your sales team still win new business?

Effective B2B lead generation despite corona crisis

Companies that have so far won new customers and orders primarily as exhibitors at trade fairs and conferences are affected by the situation twice: On the one hand, some of them have to write off significant investments in trade fair preparation, and on the other hand, there is a sudden lack of leads and opportunities that were firmly planned as a result of their participation in the trade fair. The question is how to compensate for this double loss.

How can new customer acquisition work during the global shutdown?

Despite the inevitable bad situation, one thing should not be overlooked: Supply and demand are still essentially still present in many B2B sectors of the economy — but the ways of bringing supply and demand together are currently blocked. In particular, the “physical marketplaces” are largely blocked:

• Dealer and manufacturer bases as well as branches that would otherwise be visited by B2B buyers are closed. Customer events, specialist conferences, trade fairs and roadshows have been canceled or postponed in the long term.
• Personal customer visits by sales must be omitted. The sales force has forcibly become “back office”, with maximum social distance from the “sales front.”

The result: The most important mechanisms of B2B lead generation and business initiation are at a standstill.

However, the web remains available as a place for customer acquisition — i.e. for “matching” supply and demand! On the supply side, all companies that are still able to produce or deliver can take advantage of this fact. They benefit from the fact that there are not only spending freezes on the demand side, but also companies with unchanged or even growing purchasing budgets. Due to the lack of “analog” paths, the selection and decision-making processes relating to these purchases are now shifting (even more than before) to the digital world, specifically: to the providers' websites. The aim of successful sales in times of the corona crisis must therefore be to identify and address existing demand as precisely and seamlessly as possible among visitors to your own company website. One of the most attractive options for this countercyclical sales tactic is B2B website visitor analysis.

The B2B website as an offer center — what Google Analytics & Co. cannot do

Even without an online shop, the company website is the central place where B2B companies present their range of products and services. It is therefore also ideal for lead generation. For sales, the only problem is: While in physical branches and at events it is immediately clear who is interested in an offer — you literally look yourself in the eye — this visibility on the web is missing. Website visitors arrive at the website anonymously and are used to it for a very long time, until just before completing their purchase decision process, to remain in this anonymity. The result: Only a fraction of decision makers interested in an offer identify themselves after visiting the website by telephone, e-mail or form with an enquiry. The rest remains anonymous and leaves the website again. Yet there is a slumbering in this rest enormous sales potential!

Tracking tools that measure the flow of digital visitors from these “nameless people,” such as Google Analytics, are unable to obtain valid leads from the unknown mass. Turning invisible website visitors into visible leads requires another type of software: B2B analysis tools to identify your website visitors.

Identify website company visitors and take advantage of relevant sales opportunities — cookieless and GDPR-compliant

For several years now, B2B companies have been able to systematically (and GDPR-compliant) identify sales-relevant company visitors on their website using specialized tracking tools. This increases the potential for leads that come in as a result of website visits by up to 90 percent.

Here you can see how identifying website visitors can fit into the system topology of your B2B marketing:

Website visitor recognition turns anonymous visitors to your website into identified companies, which in turn enter your CRM system and are qualified there by the sales team.

As an immediately available source of additional leads, the B2B website analysis is literally worth its weight in gold during the Corona crisis, because it addresses the tactical requirements that now exist:

• Quick implementation: The tracking and lead generation process can within a few days be introduced. The acute shortage of new business opportunities is addressed directly; from now on, your sales department qualifies previously invisible prospects.
• Minimal risk: You can see how well this new source of new business works find out without much risk. This is because the manufacturers of the analysis tools offer two or four weeks of free test phases.
• Low costs: The implementation itself requires almost no upfront investments. The use of website tracking software for B2B only causes monthly usage costs, which are moderate and should pay off quickly as a result of the direct benefits.

In our empirical software comparison We have tested three common solutions in this country for you.

The platform form of SalesViewer is our recommendation for this type of website visitor analysis, primarily due to its very good recognition rate and quality.

Many companies are connected to the Internet via static IP addresses, which is why it is possible for analysis tools such as SalesViewer to identify the companies whose employees are interested in your offer. Even now that many employees work from home, most log on to their company's VPN, which is why the identified IP addresses often match those of the company despite decentralized work.

Is that allowed? Legal and data protection compliance of website trackers for cold calling

Tracking companies on a B2B website is possible even without the active or passive consent of website visitors in compliance with data protection regulations and is legally secure under two conditions: on the one hand, on the basis of a balance of interests, since Only companies identified and are issued with company name and details such as address and telephone number; on the other hand due to the fact that specialized solutions such as SalesViewer, Wiredminds Leadlab (Leadlogic) and Leadforensics without cookies work. They therefore do not have to follow the strict requirements of the European Cookie Directive, which, in accordance with the ECJ ruling (“Planet49"), even require the website operator to actively request consent to website tracking.

Would you like to find out more about the legal admissibility of B2B tracking? In our blog post Dr. Thomas Schafft, specialist lawyer for information technology law, explains in more detail about data protection and website tracking.

Great opportunities for sales — Which factors contribute to success

In times of corona, a platform for recognizing website visitors can provide all sales teams suffering from an acute shortage of inquiries with valid leads again. How using this cost-effective type of lead generation ultimately affects your business success depends on various factors:

• Recognize website leader recognition tools — fortunately under data protection law! — only companies, not their employees. For this reason, the appropriate contacts, the “buying center,” must still be identified via business networks such as XING, LinkedIn or via telephone and online research.
• The early identification and contact of identified companies makes it possible to the selection and decision-making process much earlier than influencing competitors in your own sense. This increases the chance of closing a deal enormously.
• Even though production and delivery of goods are faltering during the corona crisis, it is important to think long-term right now and to Fill a pipeline with leads and opportunities.
• For success, it is essential that sales are intensively involved in this type of acquisition trained becomes: The First speech must be done in such a way that, on the one hand, it is legally correct (because advertising often requires an opt-in) and, on the other hand, is not rejected because the interested parties addressed feel “caught” or even spied on.
  
  • Well-proven and functional methods are part of our core know-how here. Do you need advice on this? — Please feel free to contact us!
• The number of sales-relevant visitors to your website directly influences how successful your website lead recognition can be.
• We therefore recommend the targeted Expanding inbound marketing amplifiers, which make the website a popular marketplace for information and interaction relating to purchasing decisions, e.g. through
  
  • Intensifying email marketing to actively draw the attention of existing prospects and customers to new offers
  • Personally addressing dialogue-ready website visitors via live chat
  • Organizing live webinars
  • Building interactive customer and prospect communities
  • Establishment of a company blog for professionals that comprehensively covers their topics and competencies
  • Strengthening SEO measures, particularly with regard to the increasingly important long-tail keyword searches
  • Expansion of online and search engine advertising, e.g. via Google Ads

In order for sales to be able to use the potential of your website leads and implement successful strategies even during the corona pandemic, they must of course be empowered to carry out the entire sales process in the home office via digital channels. A good solution for video and web conferences is essential for this. We've tested and compared seven such tools for you.