Have you wondered about generating B2B leads from your website? You can use Google Analytics and a great B2B lead filter for the purpose.
B2B marketing is far more complicated and recondite than B2C, due to the diversity in the B2B market.
For instance, there are B2B product companies and services companies.
Some small companies provide fixed-priced services, while some larger organizations make deals worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. So the deal sizes across the board in the B2B market is quite diverse.
Some B2B companies target small- and medium-sized businesses, while others target much larger organizations.
Similarly, there is difference in the target market as well: An ERP vendor may target horizontal markets while others, such as a telecom-focused OSS/BSS provider, may target a vertical.
All companies need leads to stay afloat and sell their services.
Earlier, I touched upon how Google Analytics is useful for B2B organizations. Today, I want to talk about how you can generate B2B leads from your websites: Specifically by using a SaaS product known as Leadberry, a Google Marketing Platform technology partner.
About Leadberry
Leadberry is a wannabe startup SaaS product operating as an independent wing within a Hungarian full-service digital agency called Brandlift, which was established in 2010. Brandlift has offices in Budapest and Los Angeles.
They have done app development, social ad campaigns, web development, and user experience designs mostly in the B2B space.
Leadberry allows you to identify the companies among your website visitors by analyzing your Google Analytics reports and helps you turn them into leads.
1. Setting Up Leadberry
Leadberry needs read access to your Google Analytics account to work. After you sign up, it will request the connection.
The product will only read, and not modify, the data across various Properties and Views you have.
As shown in the following Image 1h.4, select the Properties or Views you want Leadberry to access by checking them.
Once done, it may take up to 10 minutes to process the B2B lead data and generate the reports. A typical Leadberry lead report looks like the Image 1h.5. You can select the date range at the top and see the B2B leads on your website during that period.
So, that’s it. Once the appropriate Google Analytics account is connected, there is nothing more you need to do to get Leadberry to work.
2. How Leadberry Identifies a B2B Lead
How does Leadberry identify a lead?
We might be playing fast and loose with the word “lead” here though, because all Leadberry collects and reports are the networks from which the visits originated. It employs filters to weed out the internet service providers (ISPs) among these networks.
Google Analytics provides the Network report under Audience->Technology section. This report is a list of the networks, or ISP, from which visits originated.
For the visits from normal people, like you and me, the report only shows the ISP name.
But for medium to large organizations, it will show the name of the company itself as they generally have their own network names.
Most of the top results shown here are ISPs. When you look at Leadberry’s report for the same period, you can find the filtered company list which corresponds to the visits from specific businesses.
Identifying whether the leads are valid for your business would require lead qualification by your sales and marketing teams.
3. What’s in a Lead
Besides the names of the companies from where visits originated, Leadberry also shows a lead score as a colored bar to signify the validity of a lead.
You can get more validated leads depending on the level of sensitivity you set for the filtering algorithm. This can be set in your “Settings” page under “Filters.” Educational institutions are by default filtered out because you can’t be sure whether a visitor is an actual person from the institution or some student using the institution’s open Wi-Fi network.
Once you click a lead, the system gives some useful information about it:
- Location
- Website
- Lead contact details (email addresses, phone numbers, and designations)
- Pages visited
- Organization description
- Organization address
- Social URLs (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn)
- LinkedIn-based contacts
- Crunchbase URL
You should know that the contact information given here is almost never the information of the actual person from the company who has visited your site. So, it’s not a hot lead.
All that you get from this is that someone from that organization was interested in your content and has visited it.
Also, don’t assume that you will get contact details for all the leads. If Leadberry doesn’t have in-depth information, it doesn’t give anything.
Especially when you have no filtering enabled, there may be so many ISPs in the list. That’s why you should set your filter sensitivity to at least moderate level, which works great in providing accurate leads with high lead scores.
4. Working With Your CRM
As shown in the above Image 1h.9 above, you can see the option to add a lead to your CRM.
As of now, however, Leadberry provides integrations to only the following digital products:
- Pipedrive
- Insightly
- Zoho CRM
- Salesflare
- Zapier
- Slack
Besides Zapier and Slack, others are CRMs. What if you are using some other CRM such as Salesforce or Hubspot CRM? That was one of my questions to the VP – Marketing of Leadberry, Balazs Dora.
Zapier is your answer!
It allows you to seamlessly connect CRMs that are not available in Leadberry’s system now.
Still, it’s a workaround solution and a native integration is always preferred.
Here is how I connected Hubspot to Leadberry using Zapier.
Firstly, get the Zapier API key by clicking the option.
Now head over to your Zapier interface and look for Leadberry among the apps to connect to.
Now, I connected HubSpot CRM as an integration under Leadberry.
Now, while creating your first Zap, Zapier may ask you to input your Leadberry API key to establish a connection.
Once it’s connected, the Leadberry account should be visible in your Zap window. You can test and make sure it’s working fine.
Next, go over to the HubSpot CRM setup and select the appropriate action when a new lead originates from Leadberry. Ideally, you can select the option “Create or Update Contact.”
In the next step, connect your HubSpot CRM account.
Now comes the key part—setting up automatic data transfer from Leadberry to HubSpot CRM. In your Setup Preview page, you will find all the fields available on the CRM. You need to click the “+” button to select the variables from Leadberry to match to each CRM field, as shown in the Image 1h.h below.
Once you have selected and matched the appropriate variables to the fields in the CRM, send a test update and see if it works out. Oftentimes, if the data is not matched properly, it might throw an error, such as the company ID mismatch in my case.
But if you have everything matched appropriately, you should see the data updated in the CRM.
After finishing the setup, you may have to turn on the Zap for it to automate the process.
Even after the Zap was turned on and matched, I was getting occasional errors from Zapier about the data matching. If you are a paying Leadberry customer, you should be able to get support on such issues.
The Pros and Cons
Now, about the big question. Leadberry is a product that costs upwards of $29 a month. The detailed pricing data is given below.
You need to understand the pros and cons of the product before making a decision. While conducting my testing, I checked various aspects of the product to identify whether it is worth it for you.
I also got in touch with the VP of Marketing of Leadberry, Mr. Balazs Dora, who gracefully answered several of my queries.
From my testing, data accuracy and the lead contact information are the key disadvantages I found for the product. The pro of course is its excellent filter that lets you pinpoint B2B leads with high accuracy.
The Data Accuracy
The accuracy of the data was one of the key concerns I had while testing. I found several inconsistencies.
For instance, Leadberry lists Bill Gates as the Chairman of Microsoft, a post he left in 2014.
Another contact that I found for Electronic Arts in Leadberry had left the company in 2014. This was not a one-off case. I found several such contacts who were no longer with the respective company.
Leadberry collects data from open sources, such as LinkedIn, the company website, or Crunchbase. I asked how frequently the data is updated to Mr. Balazs Dora. He informed that every two to three months the data is re-indexed. But some of the data are evidently not updated for years. So, I drilled him further about that.
According to him:
“Every two-three months we reindex the data, but still, there can remain some discrepancies here and there, as you pointed out as well. Unfortunately, we cannot be 100% sure regarding the contact data, as we do not own the database (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, etc.) Our periodic index activities are dependent on the data quality available in the databases, and there will be always smaller gaps.”
But what I have found is that LinkedIn profile of a contact was updated but the corresponding data shown on Leadberry wasn’t, in the case of Accenture, Electronic Arts (even after 4 years), and several other cases.
So, the data accuracy is a key concern I have with the product.
The B2B Lead Contact Is Not the Actual Person Who Visited Your Site
As mentioned, the contact detail given is a generic contact for a company. It’s not the actual person who visited the website. In my case, somebody from Microsoft network visited the website, and the contact given was Bill Gates.
So, the lead is usually a cold one and you have to do a lot of work to identify the actual person who visited your site.
Mostly, how you can use the product is in initiating a discussion with your existing B2B lead contact about the visit to the specific pages on the site. Or you can see which specific web pages are visited and see if that data can be used in qualifying or converting your B2B leads.
The Filtering
The filtering system Leadberry has in place is excellent. That’s a plus of the product. When I turn off the filter, I get to see all kinds of results, including several ISPs. However, it’s still better than the corresponding network report I get on Google Analytics.
When I put the filter to the moderate level, the system works brilliantly. It shows only the names of the companies whose networks were used to visit your site. This is a fine way to start your campaigns.
For qualification of the lead also, Leadberry reports can be quite helpful. For instance, if you are actively pursuing a company, it’s very nice to know that someone from that organization visited your site and checked out a particular piece of content. It’s a great way to start conversations.
Especially for companies which get thousands of visits to their websites, using the Google Analytics network report may be quite difficult. That’s where Leadberry comes into picture.
Recommendation
Leadberry is a great product if your requirement is in identifying B2B leads from your website. But it has gaps that may need to be fixed.
If you are a small business with not much traffic to your website, you may not find Leadberry worth your investment. Your digital marketers can do most of the filtering themselves.
But for medium and large businesses with a lot of traffic and want a good filter on their network reports, Leadberry is pretty much worth it.