Sales gurus strongly promote the role that sales intelligence plays in revenue growth but where does the intelligence come from? Typically these are the CRM, LinkedIn, Social Media, blogs, public records, news, and press releases. Unfortunately, none of this is real-time intelligence, or the what, when, where, why, and how in the context of your product. For that, we need website intelligence - a rich collection of up-to-the-minute sales intelligence relevant to the visitor's needs.
"The best salespeople are armed with sales intelligence that empowers them to engage, educate, and empower customers" - Jill Konrath
The behavior of website visitors provides powerful real-time insights into exactly what they are thinking when they submit a call to action. Typical intelligence includes:
This post looks at five powerful ways to use this intelligence when it becomes available in a CRM lead record.
Lead Qualification, Prioritization, and Assignment
Website forms attract armies of humans and AI bots that troll the Internet looking to promote their agenda. Whatever you do, unqualified leads will end up in your CRM at the top of the sales funnel.
Action: Bad leads entering the CRM can be identified, flagged as bad, or auto-deleted in the CRM using website behavior and workflow. Workflow can apply simple rules based on the visitor's website behavior to ensure the visitor has achieved a minimal level of activity on the website. An example is to delete a lead if the page count is one, or a product goal has not been attained.
The same logic can be applied to prioritize, categorize and assign leads to members of the sales team. The wealth of available intelligence makes it easy, for example, to categorize the lead as Marketing Qualified (MQL):
Email Response
The lead submission acknowledgment email begins the relationship-building process. It needs to be automated, to quickly confirm the submission has been received, and personalized, to create a stronger bond and improve the conversion rate. The acknowledgment email would typically contain:
Action: The visitor behavior intelligence can be leveraged to create a compelling automated email. Email automation systems, like Salesforce Marketing Cloud using AMPScript, inject different passages into the email content when encountering a script tag or function. The selected passage can be chosen based on a visitor behavior attribute in the CRM. Some examples of what you might inject into personalized passages based on an attribute are:
The lead acknowledgment email is a crucial part of the lead nurturing process, helping to establish a positive rapport and build trust from the outset.
Sales Call Planning
Call planning is the preparation a salesperson undertakes before making a sales call. This typically includes researching the prospect, understanding their needs and pain points, identifying potential objections, planning the talking points, and developing a personalized sales pitch. A good call increases the likelihood of a sale and advances the sales process.
Action: Website behavior provides powerful insights into visitor thinking. It is up to the minute and relates directly to the products being offered. The key learnings include:
Sales intelligence enables sales calls to be personalized for maximum impact.
Segmentation
Website behavior intelligence provides new ways to individualize customer communications and this is good news for sales and marketing teams. A Bluecore report suggests a 139% improvement in the click-through rate of personalized emails.
Action: Website behavior intelligence provides impressive personalization options not possible without it. CRM reports and campaigns created from the website activity attributes are then shared with an email automation system for despatch. Examples of email campaigns personalized on:
Using the time-sensitive attributes of sales intelligence introduces new ways to connect with prospects and customers, precisely during moments of maximum relevance.
Visit Notifications
Last, but definitely not least, website behavior intelligence can be used to reveal when a key visitor returns. This alerts the sales team to renewed interest and the reason can be determined by analyzing the visit behavior. Typical reasons are that the visitor:
All these reasons present an opportunity to follow up, either casually or as an explicit response. The notification alerts provide insights into real-time interest.
Action: Use CRM workflow to automatically send a notification to an assigned salesperson. A manual alternative is to run a regular report that lists recent returnees.
Most CMS vendors are either not aware of or not interested in providing sales intelligence to the CRM. This is likely because CRMs use different technologies and this would require the CMS vendor to become proficient in it - something that distracts them from their core skills. Some don't deal with behavioral data while others compromise and make the data available in the CMS or expose it in CDP. These solutions are not convenient for the sales team who need the data in the CRM where it is actionable.
Organizations need to look for specialist integration experts for a complete solution. For example, for those customers using Salesforce CRM, and turn to FuseIT (and Send2CRM) to capture website behavior in Salesforce.
It's clear that exposing the website behavior intelligence in the CRM has immense value to sales teams. It provides powerful real-time insights into exactly what the lead is thinking when they submit a call-to-action. This knowledge enables deeper engagement, more conversions, and ultimately better customer retention.
In reality, this is only half the story! Watch for our commentary on the benefits of enabling salespeople to personalize and control the website from the CRM and the tremendous power of doing this during the sales cycle.
FuseIT specializes in CRM integration. Our enterprise Send2CRM connectors enable the real-time exchange of data from a wide range of website technologies to Salesforce. Please contact us for more information or to see a demo of these in action.
Has this triggered any questions, and want to keep the conversation flowing? We'd love to talk.
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