Colin McKellar, Director at Every Cloud Digital writes
As many of my contacts will know, I launched Every Cloud Digital around 6 months ago and I am more than happy to admit, I was scared. All of my working life I have been employed and the thought of no regular salary filled me with trepidation.
I’ve been in sales for over 20 years and have done my fair share of cold calling from newspapers and Yellow Pages (remember them!). I will never forget the feeling of despondency if you had the temerity to tell your sales manager that you had no leads only to see a huge phone book being thrown in your direction, it’s pages already well thumbed.
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To all intents and purposes things haven’t changed at some businesses. A huge number of businesses with a B2B sales function still rely heavily on cold calling to generate leads and sales. I mean, what could be easier??
Sales People have the world at their fingertips now, sourcing leads should be easy, right? Well, sourcing leads is easy, it’s the cold calling that is becoming more difficult as the B2B advertising market becomes saturated with every man and his dog proclaiming to be digital marketing experts whilst offering pretty much the same services, albeit with varying degrees of success and professionalism. How do you make yourself stand out in this crowded market place?
Fortunately for me the answer to my cold calling issues came, more or less, as soon as I launched my business. I was contacted by an English guy called Hamish (weird) from a company called Lead Forensics. Now I had heard of them before but had never really paid much attention, however his message piqued an interest in my new business owners’ brain and I decided to get in touch. This one message would change my business for good.
Hot leads are hard to come by, unless of course you have the budget to advertise and generate them, and, let’s face it, few small business owners have that luxury. However, your website is still getting traffic. Who are these people visiting your website with absolutely no prompting from advertising? OK, it’s probably your Mum showing her friends your website with a mixture of pride and bemusement. Well, in fact it’s not, and we found this out by taking up Lead Forensics on their free trial.
http://lead-generation.leadforensics.com/newslettered/
Inially we were sceptical as we didn’t believe the traffic we were getting to our site held any value. Lead Forensics were great and told us they would give us the weekend to think about things and come back to them. The more I thought about it the more it began to make sense, so I called Hamish back at 4pm on the Friday and told them to go ahead and sign us up, we didn’t have time to waste thinking about things.
We inserted a piece of tracking code and then waited for the results. We didn’t have to wait long. The very next day we had a list of 3 companies who had visited. I was shocked, we’d only launched 1 month previously! Now, being a sales person, I’m not shy at picking up the phone. So, I called the business and actually had meaningful conversations with people that didn’t involve “Can I speak to the person who deals with your digital marketing?”
Since we started using Lead Forensics I have had numerous conversations with potential customers I would never have thought to call, had I not been able to see that they had visited my website. I was also able to see which pages they had visited and therefore get a rough idea of what services the client may be looking for before I even picked up the phone!
Most importantly, we now have 2 new clients on board. One of these clients has close to £1 million advertising budget to spend in the next 12 months and Every Cloud Digital will be managing this for them. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that, when I launched Every Cloud Digital, we would be in this position, this early, but we are. Thanks to a tiny piece of code we inserted after having a conversation with an English guy with the most Scottish name I’ve ever heard.
Don’t take my word for it though. Click the link below and start your free trial. That one click could take your business to the next level and beyond.