Using website statistics to turn visitors into customers - over the telephone

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Oct 28, 2006

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Telephone cold calling is one of the most frustrating activities that salesmen and entrepreneurs must do when growing their businesses. In my career, I’ve used two cold calling approaches - buckshot and rifle. The buckshot approach is purely a numbers game; I call up to 30 prospects a day from a targeted leads list that I purchase from various trade associations and list brokers, with little research about each prospect. The buckshot approach is effective, but is also tiring. In contrast, when using the rifle approach I may call only three to five prospects in a day, but I research each prospect in depth before my call. The rifle approach consumes as much time as the buckshot method, but results in higher close ratios and more profitable sales. For the past three years, I've exclusively used the rifle approach with high success. One of my favorite tools for building my “rifle list” is the Visitor Detail report from one of the three analytics applications that monitors our website traffic. With this data, I can easily build a list of prospects who have visited our site, even if they do not contact me through our website.

We develop custom websites, software and hosting solutions for businesses, usually those with between 25 and 500 employees. In most instances, the marketing or information technology department executives are responsible for hiring us. Usually we’re one of several firms they’re considering and almost always they’ve researched us and our competitors online. On average, they visit our site three times before contacting us.

So why is all of that important? Because the process I use to turn website visitors into customers will only work if:

• you market to businesses
• you know who in that business is likely to need your service
• those people are using the internet to find you

Using the Visitor Detail report in the WebStat.com application, I easily build a list of five to 10 potential prospects for my rifle list each day. The report shows me:

• Name of the company
• Country and state where the company is located
• Visitor’s navigation path on our website
• Time spent on the site
• Which site linked him to ours, and if a search engine, what keywords did he use

The screenshot below provides an example of a recent visitor detail report from our website. I’ll walk through the process I used to turn this visitor – who did not contact us – into a successful cold call.

First, I want to know which company this visitor works at. The WebStat system tells me both the ISP and the company that the ISP has assigned the connection to, in this case XYZ Company.

My next step is to learn how the visitor found our website and I’m always excited when it’s a search engine. When a search engine is the referring source, I learn what terms the visitor searched for, which search engine he used and which of my competitors’ sites he probably visited. This person was searching for “asp developers [in] Michigan.” So far this person appears to be an ideal candidate since we are, after all, ASP developers in Michigan.

Now I perform my own Google search to find this company’s website. I learn that its a large appraisal company in Michigan. The company's current website runs on a Microsoft ASP platform and it offers online services to its customers through a secure portal on its website. I learn a few additional details from the About Us and News pages to determine that this company is a good candidate for us.

I’m going to call this company, so now I need to learn what information the visitor was looking for on our website. This visitor spent most of his time reading about our custom programming and ASP website hosting services, as well as playing with our CSS style switcher. He also visited several pages in our About Us section, which I consider a good sign since it indicates to me that he wants to know who we are and what we’re about. He spent roughly 12 minutes on our website; that’s a pretty good stay for a website as small as ours.

Based on the search term he used and the pages he visited, I’m making the assumption that this person is either the owner of the company or in the Information Technology department. Regardless, I have to start somewhere, so I’m going with the owner this time. When I call, my introduction is usually pretty much the same, “Hello Joe, I saw that someone from your company was searching on Google for ASP developers in Michigan and this person visited our website. Do you know who this might be?”

My introduction usually yields the same few responses:

“Who are you?”

“Yeah, that was me. Who are you and how do you know that I was on your site?”

“No, I have no idea. Who are you?”

Any of the three responses is fine, but obviously I prefer the second. WIth this approach, the caller almost always asks me who I am, so I usually get the opportunity to tell him and ask at least one additional question. In contrast, when using the buckshot approach, the caller rarely asks me to introduce myself nor does he enter the conversation in an inquisitive mindset.

Sign up for a webstat.com account (or any analytics application that provides this type of report) and try it out. Know of other analytics providers that provide similar or better reports?