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Ask HN: How to identify and prioritize high-intent leads from website visitors?

1 points by msnkarthik ↗ HN
How do you do it currently? What challenges do you face? What tools do you use and how does your sales/marketing team qualify these leads - do you track their website behavior?

3 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 15.6 ms ] thread
gregjor
All visitors start out anonymous to you, so you identify potential leads by trying to engage them, getting their name and email or phone number. Usual techniques: invite to chat, request more information, request contact, sign up for newsletter, etc. Until you get contact information you can't call them leads or qualify them, they remain anonymous website traffic.

You can automate all of the ways to funnel and convert visitors to leads, so you try with every visitor. Maybe your code waits for 30 seconds on the site, or a click into an internal page. You have to experiment, finding the line between annoying visitors with pop-ups and forms to fill out, and getting actionable sales information.

msnkarthik
Thanks for your insights - what tools do you use for tracking all this? I started used RB2B plugin in slack which identifies linkedin and email ids of website visitors. And I have my own tool Zipy.ai which captures user activity session recordings on the website. So we map both of them to identify users and see what they're doing. Planning to build an integration of both the tools soon. What is the tool stack that you use?
gregjor
Maybe I misunderstood your question. I think of a "visitor" as someone browsing a site anonymously. Unless/until they give contact information somehow -- a signup form, a chat request, etc. -- they remain anonymous so there's nothing I can do to qualify or follow-up.

Once a visitor has given their name, email, phone number, etc. they count as a "lead" and sales people can contact them and follow up. Whether Slack is a good tool for that or not depends on the organization. The companies I have done this kind of work for use a CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce, with leads from their web sites going into the CRM for qualification and follow-up.

I have never found website activity useful for sales, but my customers usually have Google Analytics or something equivalent (they mostly use GA) to see patterns of activity and get aggregate reporting. You can drill down to individual user sessions but the goal of lead gathering is to get name and email, not necessarily to track otherwise anonymous activity on the site. Analytics can tell you how many visitors you converted to leads (or didn't) and help with getting more visitors to give contact information, but I don't think an IP address helps much with prospecting.