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

What is Website Behavior Intelligence

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:

• How many visits has the visitor made?
• What is the duration of each visit?
• When was the first visit and last visit?
• What pages did they view?
• What did they not see – like upsell product or warranty extensions
• What search phrases did they enter?
• What goals and segments were they allocated?
• How did they find the site (referral source)?
• What was the call to action (web form, email click-through, etc.)?
• What journey led them to the call to action?
• What is their country, language, and culture?

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):

• Had multiple website visits
• Downloaded a white paper
• Attended an online webinar
• Requested a product demo

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:

• Confirmation of receipt
• An expression of appreciation
• Personalized message (this is challenging from an automated email)
• Next steps and a Call to Action
• Privacy and opt-out choices
• Company branding

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:

• "Visit Count" is greater than three: "As a valued visitor to our website ..."
• "First visit date" is greater than one year: "Our new products since your first visit are ..."
• An upsell page was visited: "Until 30 May, we are offering a 10% discount on ..."
• Goal "Big Budget" was attained: "Schedule a call with our product expert ..."
• The referral source was YouTube: "YouTube subscribers are entered into a monthly draw ..."
• The call to action was a "Walk-in lead": "Thank you for coming into the office ..."
• Their language was French: "Merci de visiter notre site ..."

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:

• Determine their level of engagement and enthusiasm
  * Visit statistics reveal the required planning effort
• Determine their specific interests
  * Product interest and knowledge
  * Fringe interest in up-sell or cross-sell products
  * View the search phases
• Determine the possible budget
  * Based on the pages visited and click events
• Learn about important content the visitor did not see
• Identify the visitor's language, location, and culture

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:

• The visit count reaches three
• Onsite duration reaches 30 minutes
• The last visit was in the last 24 hours
• The visitor viewing the "Partner with Us" page
• The goal score reaches 100
• Segmentation is set to "Big Budget"
• The website was reached via a clickthrough

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:

• Actioned a clickthrough in an email campaign
• Has renewed interest after a period of time
• Is interested in an upsell or cross-sell product
• Has an issue with a product or service
• Is seeking contact information

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.

Mechanisms for Success

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.