This is a guest blog post by Quru’s CEO Steve Jackson. Steve is one of the top digital marketing gurus in the Nordics. He has founded several successful companies and is a highly sought-after keynote speaker. In this post Steve describes Quru’s complex sales process and explains where Leadfeeder fits in.

We’re often asked by our clients how we go about finding and closing new Business opportunities. Our deals are usually a complex sale, which means we tend to do a lot of education before selling anything.

It’s a constant effort to qualify businesses and find the correct individual to talk to, so anything we can do to make this process easier and faster is welcome.

How do we collect and qualify leads?

Leads come from a variety of sources: newspapers, word of mouth, LinkedIn, likes or shares of blog posts, paid campaigns (such as search engines, social media or Display) tender-requests from government-run websites, and finally employment sites when we see that companies are looking to hire people in our field.

We also have white papers and downloadable documents on our website that help us to capture email addresses. If someone wants to read the documents on our site, we ask them to supply an email address so we can send it to them.

“Leadfeeder is very valuable because it saves a lot of time and effort.”

Once we’ve collected the leads (we set a company-wide target per week) we then have to qualify them. In our experience if a company is too small in terms of revenue then they aren’t going to be able to afford our fees, or if they can it’s possible our advice would be too difficult for them to implement. So we score based on how big they are, how good a fit our service would be for them and whether they have shown any interest in our services at all.

If the company is too small we don’t tend to contact them at all. However if they fit our target market we will put the company into our CRM system as an idea for a lead.

We also collect and qualify leads from our website using Leadfeeder. Leadfeeder is a tool we’ve discussed before and the main point is that it allows us to connect Google Analytics data to a company database. So if a company comes to our website Leadfeeder identifies the company. On top of that if you’re logged in to LinkedIn Leadfeeder will tell you who you know at that company.

Connecting Leadfeeder to our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool

One of the cooler aspects of Leadfeeder is that it can connect with your CRM or sales system. So if you’re in sales you can log into your CRM tool and see directly which companies have come to your website. We use Pipedrive.

As the screenshot example shows, you can see:

• a list of companies that have visited your website
• their latest visit date
• the amount of people you know from this company in your CRM
• the number of open deals for this company, and
• the number of completed activities by people in your company

In the case of Prospect company 1, whose latest visit happened recently (Nov 6), and where you know seven employees but you have no open deals, then you could say that this is an opportunity to get in touch.

Looking back into Leadfeeder might reveal they haven’t visited very often, or that they aren’t part of your target group. On the other hand it could be a hot new prospect that has been back to your website 5 or 6 times during the last week. They might be checking out various pages or sections of your website and reviewing product pages – Leadfeeder will reveal this.

Follow-up

Once we’ve done all the pre-work and have the lead idea in our sales funnel then it’s up to our sales team to follow up. We usually approach the person via phone and ask if we can meet.

If we know because of Leadfeeder that their company has been visiting our website and looking at certain pages we’ll ask them if there is anything that might be worth discussing. If they have downloaded one of our white papers or documents and they fit our customer profile we’ll email them asking them if we can be of further help.

The main purpose of this first point of contact for us is to find out if we can do a free business evaluation . We only want to work with customers we feel we can really help, so prior to doing any work with the customer we’ll ask if we can get access to their analytics tools. This allows us to evaluate not only their analytics set-up but also if working with us would have good potential.

So if, for instance, we find a business that isn’t doing as well as it could be online we’ll show in terms of euro value what we believe is viable. If we can’t find any real potential lift points within your business we won’t take it any further, so this is a quick way to not waste anyone’s time.

Time is valuable

We appreciate that the companies we sell to are short of time like we are and that’s why a tool like Leadfeeder is very valuable because it saves a lot of time and effort. We can qualify leads, formulate ideas and evaluate opportunities far more effectively using this automated system.

What do you think of this approach? Does this sound like something that could benefit your business?

Connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn if you’d like to discuss Leadfeeder or what Quru can do for your business.

About Quru: Quru is a digital analytics company with a single purpose: to make €1bn revenues for its customers. In order to do that Quru uses advanced digital marketing strategies bringing on average a 10:1 ratio of money earned to money spent. Quru has also established partnership with Leadfeeder providing their customers more value out of lead generation - not to mention the value Leadfeeder adds to their sales.

Guest Blogging: If you’d like to reach a new audience with a guest blog post for Leadfeeder then just drop a message to [email protected].*