Introduction

We’re here to explain a technology that can deliver an unlimited list of leads for you to qualify and work with. With this technology, you can feed your sales team lists (segments) of companies and visitors who have visited your website and qualified as leads.

Q: Why is it important in the process of lead qualification? 
A: It is necessary to identify a potential lead before they can be qualified. 

How does Website visitor identification work?

Website visitor, or Lead identification is based on the IP (Internet Protocol) address of your website visitors. We use a proprietary IP identification engine that connects with multiple data sources to determine IP address owners—a process also called IP lookup. There are billions of IP addresses, and many change ownership daily, making mapping these connections a moving target. Additionally, many IP addresses belong to providers, ISPs, hosts, telecoms, and mobile networks, not to mention VPN’s and browser privacy settings. None of this information is interesting for our purposes, so these need to be filtered out. 

Lead identification is a prerequisite for lead qualification, which helps companies prioritize sales efforts and focus on leads most likely to convert into customers. In other words: save time and resources by avoiding leads that are unlikely to convert.

Lead qualification evaluates the likelihood of potential customers becoming paying customers. The process involves collecting and analyzing data about leads, for example: interests, company profile, budget, timeline, authority, and need. The goal is to determine if they are a good fit for a company's product or service. Once visitors are identified, granular behavioral data is collected to determine when leads are qualified. 

The first step towards qualification is identification. Once companies or individuals are identified, their data can be enriched. Examples of enrichment are firmographic data such as industry, size, location, and website. And once identified, behavior (web clicks, email opens) can be added to their profiles.

Last but not least, a crucial aspect alongside configuring this technology is determining how it will integrate into your company’s workflow. In a nutshell: once identified, leads need to be qualified and sent to the correct person who will act upon the information.

Key Strategies & Best Practices

In this section, we outline some key strategies and best practices you can use to get started and implement website visitor identification. Perhaps the most important distinctions to start with are that:

• Website visitor identification itself is an automated process—meaning that you just need to select the tool(s) you want to use, decide how much to measure (see below), and have them implemented.

• There are different types of tools of course. The most basic tools will just record visitor numbers and deliver anonymous trend and statistical reporting. The most advanced tools will measure all activity.

• If you are looking to identify website visitors, you will need to select identification tools or software. Some marketing automation tools may include the identification of individuals in broadcast lists, for example, but not their behavior (web clicks) or company identification and enrichment.

• There are several different places to consider measuring: your website (sub) domains, and landing pages, login area, and various touchpoints (forms, chat, login areas) and media types (outbound and inbound campaigns).

• And crucially: you must define how you would like the information formatted and how to make it available to your team(s).

To avoid getting stuck in the weeds, it helps to think about what type of output you would like. In other words, the key strategy is to think about what the reports or reporting should look like and reverse engineer that. For example: I want my sales team to receive a weekly spreadsheet with the names, email addresses, and company names of all people who have looked at our product catalogue pages or downloaded a PDF.

Instead of rushing in, a best practice in lead identification is to define exactly what information you want about the leads themselves and, for example, their behavior. Many digital outreach ecosystems, outbound campaigns, websites, and content assets are designed to generate this type of information.

And once a website visitor has been identified at the company level, there are a lot of enrichment opportunities available. As mentioned above, identification is a prerequisite for enrichment. 

Just to keep our eye on the ball, a short recap: the key strategy in website visitor identification starts with selecting a measurement tool. You should start by deciding what information you want about your visitors. The next step is to decide which of your digital touchpoints to measure. Identification is just the first step in qualification. After identifying the visitors, you can enrich their profiles. You must also decide which types of engagement you want to measure. On a website, for example, you have some of the following options: website visits and clicks, downloads, forms submitted, return visits, incoming referred traffic, both organic and from paid campaigns, everything from cold email outreach through to social media platform campaigns. Based on the engagement, you can then segment your audience. In terms of actionable methods and strategies, all of the above can and should be automated. 

The Best Practices therefore, getting all your ducks in a row, look like this: 

1. Pick a website visitor identification tool

2. Implement the tool over as many assets as you think valuable

3. Define what you want to know about your visitors and ensure you are harvesting that information

4. Decide if you want to enrich the data

5. Connect any first-party data such as your CRM or marketing automation tool

6. Determine who in your organization will use this information and speak with them about their workflow

7. Choose the best format(s) for the data, either a login system, or push to a data warehouse, or email notifications and reports

8. Run the measurement for a week or two, for example covering an outbound campaign

9. Look at the results and tweak your measurement and/or start acting on the information 

Common mistakes

In this section, we identify some common mistakes that we come across and provide solutions to the best of our knowledge. Using the old adage ‘prevention is better than cure,’ most of these mistakes can be avoided with a bit of planning. Just to hammer the point again, the expression ‘fail to plan - plan to fail.’ is also appropriate here. 

That said, here are the most common mistakes we see:

1. Not having a plan, not putting a plan in place, in other words, just inserting the website identification technology without a clear plan on what will happen with the resulting data

2. Being overwhelmed with the list of leads, and failing to act on them

3. Inbox overload, resulting in emails and notifications piling up and going unheeded until eventually guilty feelings take over, and the emails are forgotten and never opened

4. Not getting Sales involved and 

5. Not getting Marketing involved.

6. Skipping planning altogether due to excitement

7. Using the technology as vanity-ware, although there is nothing necessarily wrong with this, it means that the results are not inserted into a workflow.

8. Not talking to us or to an implementation partner, about the possibilities and planning to ensure that everything is properly configured and implemented.

9. Not committing to a semi-regular Customer Success call, even if only once a year. Customer Success calls are actually an extremely valuable use of your time and are there to ensure that you get what you need. Especially in the context of dynamic content and changing campaigns and offers. A good Customer Success call will tell you how to improve both data and workflow.

The solutions to the above are pretty straightforward - you can reverse engineer all these points by planning for your desired outcomes: decide what type of information you want to be made available to your organization and let visitor identification specialists configure the reporting for you.

To summarize, the best solution to avoiding the most common mistakes made with regards to the lead identification stage of lead management is systematically getting your strategy in place. Talk to your stakeholders who will act on the information, as well as to the stakeholders who generate the assets that attract visitors, like your website, your social and PPC campaigns, and newsletters. ‘Getting your ducks in a row’ will force you to think the process through and reverse engineer the outcome you want (a weekly list of identified visitors from targeted industries and regions).

In order to avoid the most common mistakes, take some time to define your strategy. That consists of discussing your specific requirements in terms of output (reporting), and reverse engineering this by measuring the touchpoints that will generate this data. If they are not already in place, build the touchpoints, for example, downloadable case studies, or a newsletter. Then identify the tool(s) you want to use and get them configured. Run a few tests, make sure everyone on the team is comfortable with the reports and understands what they are looking at. Ask them if it’s the right information or if they need more. A few practice rounds (prospecting) will help, in other words, a feedback round.