Insight Analytics Part 2 - When Is a Cold Lead Not a Cold Lead?

Don’t you just hate it when a lead goes cold? You have a great conversation and then…nothing. But what if that lead wasn’t really as cold as you thought?

This is the second in a series of posts about how we use CANDDi Insights within our own business (Part 1: How Old Data Enriches New Enquiries).

And use it we do: this example has helped us close more than one deal, and we know of multiple examples from our customers of the same experience.

Here’s how it goes.

A prospect - let’s call him Dave - comes to our website. He looks hot straight away. I don’t mean he’s Brad Pitt. I mean his activity immediately makes you think he’s a good lead.

He lands on a blog post. Spends time browsing the site. Downloads a white paper. Then goes straight to the enquiry form

BINGO!

I do the usual follow-up activity. Check out his CANDDi profile. Give him a call. We have a great chat. He sounds really keen!

But…damn…he’s not ready to buy. No budget available. Just looking. Loves the tech but not ready to progress. If you’re in sales, you know the story. I follow up with some details on an email knowing that 9 times out of 10, these ones go nowhere.

Sure enough, it goes cold.

I wait a while and put in a follow-up call. No response.

Email? No response.

Nothing. What happened? He was so keen!

Six weeks later I’ve pretty much given up.

When PING! Dave comes back to the site.

How do I know? CANDDi tells me. The nightly summary email shows me all the previous days identified visitors, and sure enough, there’s Dave. He hasn’t done much - just looked at pricing - but that’s enough to tell me he’s back on the trail.

I put in a call the next day and guess what? NOW it’s the right time. He has budget and his need is even more acute. He’s ready to roll. We get his trial live the same day.

And sure enough, Dave is now a customer.

Here’s what one of our other customers said about a similar experience.

“When you’re dealing with large corporates - and that describes most of our customers - patience is very much a virtue. Decisions take a long time and involve a lot of people. But once things start moving, they can move really fast.

We’d been tracking one deal for over a year and it looked to have gone cold until we identified multiple contacts from the prospect returning to our website. The sales team jumped on the case and sure enough the project had just been greenlit. We stole a march on our competitors who were also bidding because CANDDi told us when to call. Our sales team tell me that head start was key to closing the deal.”