How To Identify B2B Website Visitors for Sales Follow Up

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98%+ of visitors to B2B websites don't convert (i.e. fill out a form or identify themselves/raise their hand in some other way). It's critical to for B2B SaaS companies to understand how to identify B2B website visitors for sales follow up.

I'm implementing this for SaaSBoost.io so will take you through the evaluation and implementation process and also report on results to save some of those otherwise anonymous visitors. I'm expecting to get back a list of company names to then add to cold email outreach sequences (after using Snovio/LinkedIN to gather and target the right titles and their contact info).  Later these may be added to ABM and retargeting programs.

Can't We Just Use Google Analytics?

Unfortunately Google Analytics isn't too much of a help in identifying anonymous website visitors. Luckily there is a segment of software sales tools to solve this specific problem of uncovering the company behind a web visit. They have various approaches to match IP addresses of otherwise anonymous web users to identify a company name for B2B SaaS companies and startups to follow up on. It is a tricky problem especially with ISP and VPN traffic so we will never get close 100% match rates (looks like 30% is the top end here). This category can be referred to as 'Visitor ID', 'IP to Company Resolution', or even more broadly as part of web analytics or sales intelligence tools.

Criteria for Evaluating Visitor ID software:

  • Looking for a lightweight, simple to implement tool (should just be javascript tag to head or footer, or via integration) that to identify company names.
  • Freemium pricing - would be nice to get 10 or so free leads a week at no cost (similar to Bombora's B2B Intent data freemium offering which emails a weekly alert of top 10 companies doing research around your keyword). That's not much to work with, but it gives a chance to understand and operationalize the data and test some approaches that might be able to scale. If it's working and website traffic increases, then happy to pay.
  • Daily/Weekly email reports. Right now volume will be low so will do the lead follow up manually to try to test and get some results to start. Not too concerned about integrations and contact enrichment at this point.

The Visitor ID software market:

There are 98 vendors listed in G2 in this category, 11 listed as SMB and 6 with pricing.

Visitor ID Vendors Considered and the Best Visitor ID Software Option:

A top rated vendor that is top of mind for me for some reason or other. Free trial only, no listed pricing (talk to a rep/get back a custom quote = too expensive/time consuming). Pass.

Pricing in 24 hours? Too expensive for this project

There is a 14 day free trial and then pricing starts at $24/month. There's no freemium offer though so will keep looking.

No ongoing free tier

Highly rated and does look promising - maybe. You get a 14 day free trial of the Premium version ('from' $55/mo for up to 100 leads, scales up on volume from there). Premiums includes integrations and contact enrichment. After the trial ends and it is auto downgraded to Light. According to the pricing page, Leadfeeder Light version is free for up to 100 contacts and includes 'data retention' of up to 3 days. Does that mean I have to log into their platform to pull the data out every 3 days (or I guess automate that with a script)? It's not clear on the pricing page but hopefully not - want this at least emailed to me. Worth a test.

Freemium = Startup Friendly

Freemium = Startup Friendly
Leadfeeder features
Lite is good enough for now

Updated - 12/23: Clearbit the "clear" winner as the best visitor ID software for early stage SaaS companies

As the market has evolved, I'm now recommending Clearbit as the best option for early stage SaaS companies to identify anonymous website visitors. Why?

  • Robust free plan - 500 free credits/month
  • Very granular ICP segmentation
  • Alerts (Slack, etc.) for when a target account hits your website
  • Clearbit was acquired by Hubspot, which means the free plan is likely to remain quite valuable (similar to Hubspot's free CRM), and obviously if you are already a Hubspot Sales or Marketing Hub user the data automatically flows through.
  • One downside to Clearbit - since it is owned by Hubspot, the integrations are limited. Zapier is not an option as an example. Depending on the workflow you are trying to set up, this may be a dealbreaker. However if you are using Hubspot (or even just the free plan) it can be a good start.

A good next step to make this first party account data more actionable is to integrate Clearbit with a sales outreach tool like Apollo.io. This allows you to set up an automation to find and reach out to contacts at these accounts that match your buying personas and reach them across multiple channels (email, LinkedIN, phone) to convert them to a lead or demo. See Automating Outreach with Apollo.io Plays for a tutorial on how to set this up, or head to our Apollo.io Services page to have an Apollo.io instance set up for you.

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