06 9th, 2009| 
I came across Enecto, a SaaS provider of business intelligence tools based in Stockholm. These guys have a standard lead identification and qualification application that uses a little code snippet on your web page to monitor visitors as they browse through your website. I looked at two of their products recently.
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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. Read more… »
DemandBase Stream is a very cool desktop client that can be used for active sales intelligence. The idea behind DemandBase is simple and nothing new, but it’s the user interface that is unique. DemandBase uses a callback snippet that is added on every page of your website. This script lets the DemadBase server know who is visiting your website and how they browse through it. Nothing too impressive, right? Google Web Analytics does the same. Read more… »
I’ve been looking at LeadLander every now and then. I find it’s a very cool product with its ability to track visitors. It does a reverse look-up of the IP address to distinguish between corporate visitors and “home/ISP” users. The idea being that in B2B sales, corporate visitors would count more.
Yesterday, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with Paul Marcus from RainKing. Paul has a strong background in corporate sales stemming from a decade of work at Ipreo and Bigdough. He introduced me to RainKing, an interesting concept that combines old fashioned legwork with online networking to yield a reliable, corporate database housing details of decision makers from F2000 companies.
Have you tried LeadLander yet? Unlike other visitor tracking services which are primarily designed for web analytics, Leadlander is designed with the “sales guy” in mind. The premise behind it is simple. As a B2B company, you care the most about enterprise visitors that bring you revenue. LeadLander filters out the “tire kickers” and lets you focus on the corporate/business visitors. It removes clutter from your web logs to show “sale” interested data.
I’m always on the lookout to improve my lead generation process and add to the arsenal of tools for my sales team. So today, I was very keen to get a call from Chris Scarfo from Zoominfo (ironically he has a Linkedin profile but not a Zoominfo profile *grin*.) Chris is pretty much a straight shooter. He got me to try Zoominfo on a trial basis, with the following goals:
- Use Zoominfo as part of my lead generation program. Use it to generate vertical specific leads filtered by various criteria.
- Use Zoominfo to get additional lead data. Learn more about the lead’s company/boss/co-workers/etc and develop multiple points of contact.
What is Zoominfo?
Zoominfo is a business contacts database. The database is generated programmatically through web crawling of press releases, company websites and interviews. The Zoominfo Engine intelligently parses this content and creates profiles about individuals and companies. To see how good it is, I tried a search string of Steve Jobs. This is what I found:
Zoominfo Powersell :
Since Zoominfo has been able to create over 45 million profiles, its a good source of leads. That’s what Zoominfo Powersell offers. I started on a demo account with it today. I’m amazed to find how easy it’s to extract leads from the web interface based on simple metrics, including:
- Industry/Vertical
- Company size (both based on revenue and employees)
- Contact management level (low, mid or high-level manager)
- Geographic location (regions, states, zip code, etc)
For example, I searched for contacts in small law-firms in the UK. I filtered it further to only show IT related contacts who have updated profiles. The screenshot below shows the filtered leads. These leads can be downloaded in a CSV format or exported into SalesForce.
Unfortunately, my demo account doesn’t grant me access to the SalesForce API. But earlier today, I saw a live demo of how it works. It seems very slick. It offered most of the common Zoominfo capabilities through the SalesForce interface. The advantage was that Zoominfo data could be ported without data entry. A feature most sales guys would love.
Since I started using the service today, I’m unsure about Zoominfo’s lead’s quality or resourcefulness as a sales tool. Over the next few weeks, I’ll keep a closer eye on lead performance and conversions. I’ll let my pipeline funnel speak for itself – I’m interested to see how my little experiment with Zoominfo pans out.
