Lead qualification is a marathon — not a sprint

Qualifying anonymous website visitors as leads requires persistence and tactical intelligence.

Find out why it's still worth the effort.

The path from recognized (company) visitors to the website to a high-quality and well-converting lead can be long and rocky. Some B2B tracking users are therefore right to ask the question: Is this effort even worthwhile?

The early bird catches the lead: Identify the need before the competition

Company recognition is the starting point for situational lead nurturing and a tailored qualification process to separate “the wheat from the chaff,” which means: Promising business opportunities must be filtered out of a large number of website visitors with an unclear probability of need and purchase.

Many of the identified website visitors are usually still at the very beginning of their customer journey — and accordingly in the sales funnel. This is an exceptional opportunity because B2B companies get potential prospects on their radar at an early stage through their website visits — ideally earlier than the competition. At the same time, this early stage means that questions about the urgency of the need, the available budget and a specific project approach are usually still unanswered.

On the one hand, thanks to website visitor recognition, you can get in touch with potential customers very early on and win them over. On the other hand, you may be at the beginning of a long, complex sales process.

This process is further burdened by the fact that website visitor recognition only delivers leads with a limited profile, because B2B tracking only ever identifies the organization, but not the specific employee who is surfing the web. Depending on the size of the organization, it can be difficult to identify the appropriate professional contact person. This is particularly true for more conservative target industries, whose employees are only represented to a small extent on business networks such as XING and LinkedIn.

How can you exploit the lead potential of newly identified website visitors?

How can you anticipate the longer sales cycle in lead processing and how do you get reliable and relevant contacts as a first step? The following three tips can help you establish worthwhile lead qualification measures in the long term.

1. Contact research: Tactically use free team capacities

In principle, we recommend that existing resources be included in the research and qualification process to save costs. Are there teams, departments, or employees (for example in administration, business development, or call centers) that are fluctuating? In this case, it is good to temporarily integrate free capacities into lead qualification.

Service or customer care departments are a good example of this. Even though they usually make customer phone calls, there may be less busy times at times. For precisely such phases, it is advantageous if these departments receive new company leads from visitor recognition with the task of researching the appropriate contacts and contacting them via outbound telephony.

Another option is forms of lead nurturing based on consistency, also known as “drip marketing.” According to a previously defined plan, multi-stage print mailings containing brochures, flyers or the like are sent at regular intervals. This is the least legally risky form of marketing communication. It can also be considered to display targeted Linkedin lead ads to contacts from specific companies.

Under which circumstances, for example, lead nurturing emails are justifiable despite insufficient advertising consent, must be checked individually. Only after the “Marketing Qualified Leads” have finally been filtered from the identified companies using lead nurturing measures is it worthwhile to hand them over to sales for further processing.

Such drip marketing campaigns “feed” the upper layers of the lead funnel and thus ensure that they gradually become more “visible” in terms of brand technology and thus better known to the broad mass of website visitor companies. This increases the chance of being enquired exactly when a procurement project becomes concrete.

2. Better classification of leads through diversified content marketing

In order to get to grips with the problem of too large a number of leads with an unclear interest or project connection, it is worthwhile to expand website content marketing.

A multi-faceted website with a differentiated page structure makes it easier to identify which visitors offer particularly high sales potential for which range of solutions. If you work with content of different levels, each aimed at a specific stage in the decision-making process, the first step has been taken. Then build comprehensive internal referral structures that guide your visitors to related or in-depth content and thus keep them on the website. Over time, you can measure more and more precisely which specific offer you are interested in, how much this interest is and how far the procurement process has progressed.

In addition, blog posts that appear prominently on results pages during long-tail keyword searches are particularly valuable. Because anyone who has specific ideas and, if necessary, already active projects searches with the same keywords. These can often be precisely assigned to a specific topic and a specific funnel phase.

3. If the amount of leads is still “too much of a good thing”: Be strict!

Should your own capacities be overwhelmed despite the measures mentioned above, there remains a solution that starts directly in the visitor recognition tool with appropriate page and key figure filters and sets the criteria for the initial “lead” definition more strictly. If there are too many leads in the sales funnel, the conditions for entry into the respective funnel level should be strict enough until the number of leads is easy to handle and the conversion rate becomes acceptable.

An example of narrower criteria is: Product pages must have been visited on the second or third level in order for a visitor to be contacted. Criteria can also be narrowed down or broadened based on the length of the stay or the number of visits and the profile of the target company (industry, turnover, number of employees, technology profile, etc.).

conclusion: Turning the raw material of B2B website tracking — identified company visitors — into high-quality leads and later customers is neither achieved by itself nor overnight. It is a marathon, not a sprint. However, if you are aware of the challenges, you can find reliable methods to overcome them and exploit the full potential of B2B website visitor recognition.