Go Slap Your Salespeople Around

We typically receive two types of complaints from potential software buyers who submit their needs to Capterra:

1) In the intro email, vendors do not address the specific needs that the prospect has entered in the form. For example, here is an excerpt from a complaint we received recently..."So far I have received 7 responses to my posting. Only two of them gave any indication that they had looked at my specific requirements and could meet them. The form letters from the other vendors don't actually help me to know if they meet my needs or not."

2) The prospect states that they would like to be contacted by email, but the vendors decides to just go ahead and call without any email. Again, here is an excerpt from a recent complaint..."In filling out an RFI with Capterra I asked that vendors with products matching my requirements contact me by email only. It was therefore rather uncomfortable to receive a phone call from one of the companies responding to the request. Even worse was the fact that this company's product wasn't even what I was looking for!"

How difficult is it to pay attention to the potential customer's needs starting from the very first contact that you ever make from them?

So go slap your salespeople around...or stop letting them cost you sales by no longer giving them leads so early in the process!

Cookies

We get asked fairly often by vendors that are new to tracking online campaigns how to create cookies so I thought it was worth a post...

First, what are they and why use them? A cookie is simply a small text file created by your website and placed on your web visitor's hard drive. Although there are other ways of doing it, cookies are the fairly standard way of tracking web visitors from click to lead. If you place a tag, which is a string of characters such as ?source=capterra, at the end of your ad link, then a cookie allows you to identify a web visitor with their incoming tag as they navigate throughout your website or later return to your website. Then when they complete an online form, the cookie will allow you to report the referring site along with the information submitted via the form.

Tracking in this way is more accurate than relying on your web logs due to the fact that logs are unable to identify the referring link for a good chunk of your web visitors - often 10-20% of them - due to variety of technical limitations.

Regarding how to implement cookies, I generally don't go down this path for the simple reason that it depends on the platform/language of your website. But here are a couple websites that provide some technical details: The Code Project and W3Schools.

I hope these help!

Sell Your Unqalified Leads!

Here's a random idea...why not partner with other software companies that have products similar to yours yet different enough that they may place value in the leads that you would normally discard?

Expanding on this, your marketing efforts hopefully result in tons of leads. However, as you well know, only a fraction of these leads qualify as a good fit for your offering. Maybe the customer is too big or small. Maybe they are from a region you do not cover. Or maybe they are looking for certain features that your product does not include.

Instead of turning that lead away entirely, why not refer them to another software company that you have developed partnership with to either trade leads or literally pay each other for them? After all, it was your marketing dollars that generated the lead. Why not get compensated for it?

More Ways to Convert Visitors Into Leads

Galen De Young just wrote a piece that provides a decent list of resources you can offer on your website to convert your visitors into actual leads.

Some are the standard offers such as demos, white papers and trials, but others are a bit more cutting edge such as podcasts and webcasts. I couldn't imagine a much more valuable task for a marketing department than to create some of these tools and begin testing them as lead converters over the corporate website.

Plus they make life easier for the salespeople when performing regular follow-ups with leads. Instead of simply contacting the leads with the standard "just checking in to see how things are going", salespeople can actually provide a new content piece that may help guide the lead closer to becoming a sale.