Alexis Kestler
1. Forms
In most cases you want your website to have a way of collecting your lead’s information. The easiest way to do this is usually through a form. By gathering your lead’s contact information you’re able to stay in touch and contact them throughout the sales cycle.
Although you may have a ‘contact us’ page already, this isn’t necessarily enough. In most cases, customers won’t contact you unless they have an immediate need. Instead, give your website visitors a reason to provide their contact info even if they are early in the buying process.
In order to entice your potential customers to fill out your form, it helps to sweeten the deal. Have your form easily accessible on your website and once leads give you their contact information, pair it with an offer like a free white paper, eBook, webinar, demo, or trial. That way you get his/her information while he/she gets to start exploring your service on his/her own.
Traditionally in B2B sales, a buyer would need to get in touch with a salesperson early in their process. Now with the Internet, buyers are able to find a lot more information on their own before they need to contact sales. So when leads come to your website, capture their information! Then you’ll be able to get them on your email list and be the first voice in your lead’s decision-making process.
2. Chats
Using a live chat that pops up on your website is a great way to start building that coveted one-on-one relationship in real time. It’s also safe to assume that if a lead talks to you via chat he/she is already a warm lead.
Luckily, website chat boxes have advanced beyond just a simple popup box. The chat service Olark not only enables you to instantly speak to a lead visiting your website, but also provides you with other valuable information like his/her IP address, what he/she is looking at on your website, and his/her location.
By using this kind of service you’re not only able to quickly qualify leads, but also provide great custom customer service. Thus, if you have the manpower, it makes sense to have someone available to hop on these chats when a prospective customer does have questions.
3. Don’t Ask Too Many Questions
You want to understand who is coming to your website, but you don’t want to scare them away by asking too much of them. While I’m sure all of us would be very happy to know what our lead’s company revenue is, or what their budget is for our service, or how many people work there, where the company is located, it’s not feasible to ask all of these questions upfront.
So the goal is to ask as few questions as possible, and then fill in the missing holes on your own. Fortunately, there are a few applications that can help you. One of Socedo’s clients, Matt Heinz is able to grab a few bits of information from potential leads who visit his website and then, through Salesforce, use a LinkedIn connector in order to fill in the missing pieces from the lead’s professional profile.
Demandbase is also pretty amazing as it is able to identify what IP address someone is using when they access your website. With that information Demandbase will know what company the lead is from, and how many people work there.
If having a tool that hunts down someone’s IP address seems a little too intense, Full Contact helps you find your potential lead’s social profiles and fills in the missing bits of information you weren’t able to immediately ask.
The point is, there are a lot of tools that enable to you discover more information about your client without having to hound them for information or set up long forms on your website that will scare them away.
By integrating these services you’re given an effective under-the-radar way of obtaining lead’s information that will help you determine if they’re viable or not.
4. Survey
Above we talked about asking questions, but not so many that it’ll scare away potential leads. A quiz or survey can help you do that if the tools above aren’t within your budget. By using a service like Qualeroo, you’re able to ask easy-to-answer questions that will help you understand what exactly your potential customers are looking for out of your service.
An example of a question we would ask at Socedo would be, ‘what’s more important to you: traffic to your website or conversations with your customers?’ Based on the response Socedo would be better equipped to structure our service around what that particular customer is looking for out of their experience.
There you have it. Four aspects that deserve intense consideration as you try to create a lead-friendly website. They can be combined, in pairs, or separate, but each work towards making your lead’s experience with your website positive, while providing your company with as much information as possible in order for you to make an informed decision about the quality of your leads.
