One of the features most popular with subscribers to A1WebStats is the ability to identify companies who visited the website, including insights into the pages they visited and for how long on each page.
While most subscribers capitalise on that information, we do sometimes get feedback with words to the effect of:
“We can see all these companies that visit our website but we haven’t got time to follow up on them”.
For particularly small businesses, that’s a fair point – especially when one person or very few people are having to cope with the day-to-day running of the whole business. For businesses with more bodies, it’s debatable whether the point is as valid.
Whatever type of business you’re in, we want to explore what A1WebStats is actually giving you and why there’s a case for re-prioritising what happens within the business …
Most people in business have a hundred and one things to do each day and everything seems equally important. But let’s look at one key fact, as shown within the daily companies visited report sent out by A1WebStats early each morning:
Those companies have visited your website and have looked at certain pages during their visit. Some of those companies will have looked at specific product or service pages for varying periods of time, whether that be seconds or minutes. If they haven’t made contact with you, it could be for various reasons but the fact remains: they haven’t made contact and, to be honest, are probably hotter than any other lead generation activity that you have on your plate that day.
Even if you just quickly skimmed through all the visiting companies and picked out only those who looked as if they were genuinely interested in your products or services, that would provide you with sales leads that are worth investing time in.
Admittedly, knowing the name of a company that visited is only the start of turning website visitor data into something useful. Technology such as this doesn’t have a magic probing eye that looks at the person on the company computer, identifies who the individual is, and pops that information into the database, much as people would like such functionality!
The best it can do is tell you which company had visited. What’s done with that data comes down to the mindset of the people using the data.
Realistically, if a large company appears in your data, then it’s going to be a needle in a haystack hope of working out who that visiting individual may have been. The best you can do is think: “ah well, can’t do much about that, but if that company appears again in our data then maybe we should be doing something extra to build bridges with that company”.
If visiting companies aren’t so huge, or it’s relatively easy to narrow down to a particular type of department that the visiting person may work within, then the visiting companies data can be more useful. If the visiting company is particularly small then there’s really no excuse not to capitalise on the knowledge that they’ve been to your website.
That’s a key point – the company has visited your website but they haven’t made contact with you. This gives you a choice:
In some cases, company culture can be a barrier. We have spoken to businesses who are fortunate enough to have people in a sales role, but those same people adamantly refuse to make use of the visiting companies data, claiming that it’s “too hard” to work out who the individual visiting person was. Those same people would however quite happily spend their time cold calling a list of known people within certain roles within companies, who hadn’t actually visited the website.
In such cases it’s difficult to know what to say. What we want to say is “sack your sales people because they clearly have the wrong attitude”, but that doesn’t tend to go down too well. So many times we’ve witnessed businesses that are being financially strangled by sales people who have totally the wrong attitude, and it’s quite sad to see business prosperity being weakened in that way.
Whether you have staff resources or not, you have the same amount of hours in the day as everyone else in business. We’ve spoken with hundreds of businesses who made the decision to allocate some of their time to following up on companies that have visited their website and although no-one pretends it’s easy, when we hear of the successes gained, it reinforces the value of investing that time on following up on company visits instead of spending time on other activities that are less fruitful.
One thing’s for sure – there’s only ever going to be an increase in companies using systems such as A1WebStats (or alternatives) to show them which companies have been to their websites. If your competitors don’t do it now, they will be in time and so it’s the businesses that take advantage of such information who will build future strength through increasing their customer base.
This is just a process of evolution in the same way as it was when some businesses didn’t have websites (or had poor websites) and they fell behind their competitors who were more proactive. Nowadays it’s considered normal to have a decent website, and in time, the new ‘normal’ will be using analytics to better-capitalise on visitors to the website. We have a phrase here: “those who don’t (capitalise on analytics data), won’t (prosper against more proactive competitors).
Array ( [0] => 56 [1] => 49 )
Leave a Reply