Big Data Archives - LeadBoxer

What’s a Customer Data Platform (CDP)? 10 Best CDPs

Big Data, Marketing, Tools / Wart Fransen

When it comes to marketing, data is king. With in-depth data, marketers can personalize interactions with customers, market to them at the right times, create a more enjoyable experience, and overall, close more sales. However, capturing all of this data, organizing it in one place, and making use of that data has been a struggle. Because using traditional tools such as web analytics, CRMs, and marketing automation is very time consuming. Here a customer data platform software can help.

You typically have to spend a lot of time combining all of this data to get a complete picture of your customer. Even then, this process is limited and you can’t fully take advantage of this data to completely personalize your marketing campaigns.

This is where Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) come in.

In this article, we’ll discuss what CDPs are, the difference between them and traditional marketing tools, their benefits, and compare over a dozen CDP options.

Read on or use the links below to “jump” to the section you’d like to read:

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
CDPs vs. CRMs
CDP Benefits
Customer Data Platform Software

What is a Customer Data Platform?

The Customer Data Platform Institute defines a Customer Data Platform (CDP) as “a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”.

In essence, a CDP is a system that pulls together all the data you have on a customer in one place – customer data platform software. With it, you can create a unified view of that customer and see every action they’ve taken since first interacting with your company.

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Ideally, you’ll discover:-

When that person first visited your website
How many times they’ve visited a specific page on your website
When they opened one of your emails
When they clicked a link inside that email
How many times they opened your emails
Information on mobile app sessions, social media comments, purchase orders, and chat history

In short, CDPs can help you understand customer behavior by accurately assessing the customer journey.

Customer Data Platforms vs. CRM vs Marketing Automation: How Are They Different?

You may be thinking, “Don’t CRM or email marketing platforms such as Hubspot and MailChimp already do this?”. Not exactly.

The data that CRMs and email marketing platforms offer is limited. CRMs typically offer basic information and allow you to store customer information such as addresses, emails, etc. Some may even track interactions like email opens and live chat or email conversations.

The same goes for email marketing platforms such as MailChimp. These platforms will store a customer’s email and track email activity. On the other hand, they miss other key areas such as web activity, mobile app activity, and so on.

However, CDPs aim to combine all of this data into one place and try to capture a customer’s entire interaction with a company. A true CDP would have data on a customer’s chat history, email history, website visits, mobile app sessions, purchases, social media interactions. And anything else that would involve an interaction between them and your company.

Some CDPs also allow you to leverage that data to send emails, run marketing automation, optimize advertising, and more.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Customer Data Platform?

CDPs can expand your marketing capabilities with less manpower, saving you time and money. Specific benefits include:

1. Having a Single View of Your Customers

The most obvious reason to use a CDP is that you can get a “single view” of the customer, aka unified customer profile.

You can see their entire interaction with your company in one place, rather than trying to somehow manage and collect this data from multiple data sources and tools.

2. Being Able to Personalize Customer Interactions

Having access to both first-party data and third-party data in one place can allow you to personalize a customer’s entire experience with your company. Instead of going through each data point, you can use data segmentation target particular customer groups.

You can personalize names in emails, send out a coupon directly after a customer has visited a specific page on your website. Also, you can enter them into a B2B marketing automation process when they’ve had a chat with your company, or send them an email when they logged onto your app.

Hence segmentation like the above can help you personalize your marketing campaigns to each single customer. With CDPs, the possible personalized experiences you can craft for your customers are endless.

3. Being Able to Create Highly-Targeted Campaigns

With all of this information at your disposal, you can now create specific targeted campaigns, and in some cases, one-on-one experiences using your customer’s behavioral data.

Do you want to target customers who have visited your pricing page within the past month, have opened up and clicked in your last three emails, downloaded your mobile app and have been actively using it for the past two weeks, and have also contacted your company via email or your live chat widget?

With Customer Data Management Platforms, you can do that

Customer Data Platform Software Options

To manage customer data, CDPs have become common . Different customer data platform software work best for different industries, and each offers unique data across platforms that set each apart from competitors. However here are the top-rated tools in the field:

LeadBoxer

LeadBoxer is a Lead & Customer data platform that focuses on the sales side of the CDP spectrum, by collecting information about your customers throughout their entire customer or buyer journey

We collect and give you information such as:

When a customer visited your website, what pages they visited, and how long they spent on that page
What emails a customer has opened from you when they opened it, and what links they clicked
Get notifications when leads or customers are ready-to-buy or show buyer intent

All of this information is then organized into an Accounts view and a Leads view. And here each of your customers or leads are given a score to gauge how engaged they are with your company:

The score is called ‘Leadscore’ which gives you an idea of which prospects are most worth your sales team’s time and effort.

Each of these customers or leads can be viewed on a micro level to collect real-time data and to see every bit of that person’s activity.

To learn how LeadBoxer can help you understand your customer experience across marketing camapign.

Schedule a product demo

Segment

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What sets it apart: Instead of manually integrating all of your tools, Segment has a single API that allows you to share data and integrate your entire marketing stack at once. There are also tools for validating and protecting all of your customer data.

Who it’s for: Segment serves a variety of customers, from enterprise-level companies like IBM and Petco to retail like Peloton and SaaS like Zendesk.

Pricing: Segment is free for tracking 1,000 visitors or less per month. The mid-range option for teams, which tracks 10,000 visitors per month, starts at $120 per month. For the enterprise-level option, contact Segment for a quote.

Blueshift

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What sets it apart: With the power of AI, Blueshift predicts how likely customers are to purchase, engage, churn, and more, all this based on the data collected. Customer scores and segments automatically update with each interaction, and the predictive affinities function ensures you’re targeting them with the most relevant content.

Who it’s for: Plenty of personal finance companies like ClearScore, LendingTree, and GOBankingRates use Blueshift, as well as B2C companies like Skillshare, Tuft & Needle, and Artifact Uprising.

Pricing: Blueshift doesn’t list their prices, but their solutions range from simple email automation to cross-channel marketing and AI for enterprises.

Exponea

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What sets it apart: In addition to tracking cross-channel data collection on individual customers, Exponea has experiment capabilities that allow you to tweak and test your website’s appearance so that you can always be improving customer experiences.

Who it’s for: B2C brands will get the most out of Exponea’s tools. Their top customers tend to be clothing and accessory brands like Topshop, Missguided, and FitFlop.

Pricing: Fill out a form to receive a custom pricing plan based on the needs of your company.

QuanticMind

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What sets it apart: QuanticMind unifies all your customer data to help you enhance your advertising and customer experiences. If you want to get more out of your advertising spend, QuanticMind customer data platform software can do it with automated bid optimization.

Who it’s for: QuanticMind is primarily geared toward large enterprises like WP Engine and Rosetta Stone, but it also serves leading B2B and SaaS brands like MOZ.

Pricing: QuanticMind doesn’t list pricing or product tiers on their website. Schedule a demo to learn which solution and pricing plan best fits your business.

CustomerLabs CDP

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What sets it apart: With CustomerLabs CDP, you can select specific elements on your website to instantly create trackable events to collect customer data. The friendly interface erases the need to write any code, making it possible to start tracking all the website events you want within minutes.

Who it’s for: CustomerLabs has customer relationship management solutions for e-commerce, B2B, and SaaS companies.

Pricing: Personal plans start at $0 per month but tracks only 2,500 customer events. Business plans start at $49 per month and track 0.5 million events per month.

Emarsys

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What sets it apart: The CDP is only one capability of Emarsys, a B2C marketing automation platform. With Emarsys, businesses can create personalized customer experiences at scale and show you where to focus on your next marketing steps.

Who it’s for: Emarsys is primarily a solution for B2C brands like Tupperware and Char-Broil.

Pricing: Emarsys doesn’t openly list its pricing on its website. Get in touch for a demo and pricing plans.

Optimove

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What sets it apart: Optimove’s self-optimizing campaigns use customer data to adjust triggered actions so that customers always receive the campaigns they’re most likely to engage with.

Who it’s for: In addition to retail, financial services, and apps, Optimove customer data platform software has solutions for the gaming industry to analyze player behavior.

Pricing: Optimove doesn’t list pricing or product tiers on the website. Request a demo to learn which features and pricing plan best fits your business.

Tealium AudienceStream CDP

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What sets it apart: Tealium AudienceStream CDP is one aspect of Tealium’s Universal Data Hub platform. It claims the biggest integration marketplace in the industry, offering you to setup a data warehouse to unify your marketing stack.

Who it’s for: Tealium counts large, diverse organizations like Providence St. Joseph Health and the Utah Jazz basketball team among their customers.

Pricing: Telium’s product tiers and prices aren’t listed on the website. To learn which features and pricing plans fit your business, schedule a demo.

Pimcore

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What sets it apart: Pimcore CDP is open-source software that aggregates best customer data and customer insights to create real-time personalized experiences at any scale.

Who it’s for: Pimcore CDP serves a diverse and largely European customer view, from freight and port logistics company Rhenus Logistics to online marketplace Modile.

Pricing: Get in touch with a sales rep for a custom pricing plan.

Boxever

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What sets it apart: Boxever is CDP that collects data on web visits, mobile activity, email activity, calls, ads, and more. It combines all of this type of data into one place and allows you to personalize your marketing and deliver predictive offers.

Who it’s for: Boxever’s largest customers tend to be airlines like Jetstar, Emirates, and Ryanair.

Pricing: Pricing is crafted on a per business basis.

Evergage

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What sets it apart: Evergage allows you to personalize the content on your website, app, and emails on a one-to-one basis in real-time.

Who it’s for: Large companies like Intuit and Walmart use Evergage, as well as software companies like Autodesk and B2B solution providers like Citrix.

Pricing: Pricing is offered on a per business basis, so you’ll need to contact a salesperson for a quote.

AgilOne

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What sets it apart: AgilOne is CDP specifically for B2C companies. The platform offers a “360 profile” where you can view customer interaction. The platform automatically cleanses, standardizes, and enriches customer profiles to help you deliver consistent experiences.

Who it’s for: B2C companies Lululemon Athletica and Tumi are among AgilOne’s customers.

Pricing: Pricing is offered on a per business basis and you will need to contact the company for a quote.

Customer Data Platforms are the Next Level of Marketing Automation

Having a customer’s data all in one place rather than hopping in between a suite of separate tools saves marketers and salespeople time and money.

Also with a unified view of customers, you can create personalized marketing campaigns that maximize your spend, increase conversions, and create delighted customers for life.

The best customer data platform from the list is definitely LeadBoxer and Segment. You can choose your CDP depending upon you current tech stack and business goals.

Looking for more qualified leads?

We offerLead Identification and Lead intelligence through website & email tracking

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What’s a Customer Data Platform (CDP)? 10 Best CDPs Read More »

Comparison: The 10 Best Sales Intelligence Tools

Big Data, Data-Driven analysis, Lead Generation, Sales, Tools / Anna

It’s no secret that to make sales, you need to know your individual prospects inside and out, from the size of their company to their most recent source of funding. However, gathering this data is time-consuming. Most sales reps are extremely busy communicating with their leads and working to close deals.

Meanwhile, sales intelligence tools automatically find and interpret this data so your reps don’t have to. With the right sales intelligence tools, your reps can focus more on delivering a better sales experience to prospective customers and less on data entry.

This guide offers an introduction to sales intelligence and a comparison of some of the most popular tools available. That is to say, with the right suite of tools, your team will be able to close more deals faster and with less data entry.

Keep reading or skip ahead to these sections:

What are Sales Intelligence Tools?
The Importance of Sales Intelligence
The 10 Best Sales Intelligence Tools
Accelerate Your Sales Process with Sales Intelligence Tools

What are Sales Intelligence Tools?

Sales intelligence involves gathering and analyzing information about prospective customers. As a result, sales reps can keep their pipelines filled with high-quality leads that are likely to close.

While a sales rep could do this manually by collecting data from social media, news outlets, lead capture pages, and company websites, in reality, the process is too time-consuming for this approach to be feasible.

That’s where sales intelligence tools come in. These tools automate the collection and interpretation of data, helping reps to:

Find potential new customers
Populate prospect records with details such as contact info, company size, and revenue
Track online behavior, including email clicks, website interactions, and search habits around the web
Qualify and rank leads according to their likelihood to buy
Update lead records so their data is always accurate
Gather relevant info from public sources like social media or news outlets

The Importance of Sales Intelligence

The main selling point for sales intelligence is its ability to streamline your workflow, therefore saving your team time and energy.

Moreover, without sales intelligence, reps can end up wasting time:

Searching for leads and accurate contact info
Pursuing leads with no real interest in buying
Passing up on prospects that actually want to hear from them

In short, with sales intelligence and sales AI, not only do reps know who they should contact, in addition, they’re already familiar with that company’s unique financial situation, any recent staffing changes, and other details that influence their pain points. As a result, reps can then refine their pitch to be sure they’re addressing each prospect’s most pressing needs.

The 10 Best Sales Intelligence Tools

1. LeadBoxer

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LeadBoxer helps you identify, track, and prioritize leads with ease.

Pros:

Identifies anonymous website visitors
Finds and fleshes out prospect profiles with contact info, company size, and other important details
Tracks website and email marketing behavior
Assigns contacts a lead score and helps prioritize prospects

Cons:

Doesn’t include intent data
Doesn’t gather insights from news outlets regarding recent company changes

Price: LeadBoxer’s basic plan starts at $195 per month.

2. ZoomInfo

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ZoomInfo keeps your lead database up-to-date with the most relevant and actionable details.

Pros:

Includes intent signals, so you know exactly which accounts are actively researching problems for which you provide solutions
Enriches contacts within your CRM, as a result, information like company size, funding, and technology use is always accurate

Cons:

Doesn’t score or help prioritize leads

Pricing: Contact ZoomInfo to find the right plan at the right price for your needs.

3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

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LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you find new leads and offers a ton of insight, for example, who they are and what makes them tick.

Pros:

Advanced search and lead recommendation options make it easier than ever to find prospects that fit your ideal customer profile
Integrates with your CRM so the leads you find are automatically saved as new contacts
Sends you alerts about job changes and other big shifts happening at target accounts

Cons:

Offers no insight into a lead’s behavior on your company’s website or around the web
Doesn’t help score or prioritize prospects

Pricing: LinkedIn Sales Navigator starts at $65 per month for a basic plan.

4. EverString

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EverString uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence to monitor companies and give you the most comprehensive view of their current situation.

Pros:

Firmographics, news, intent data, and more certainly give you a 360-degree view of prospects
Tracks 20,000 intent signals per company, therefore giving you insight into who needs your product most
Automatically verifies contacts so you’re reaching out to the right person every time

Cons:

Requires significant training before you can use it efficiently
The cost can be prohibitive for smaller businesses

Pricing: EverString starts at $820 per month, so it is on the pricier side.

5. HubSpot Sales

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HubSpot Sales is a CRM and lightweight sales intelligence tool all in one. As a result, making this a comprehensive solution for businesses on a tight budget.

Pros:

Tracks who visits your website in real-time so you can find new, qualified leads without actively searching
Prioritizes leads and scores them, showing reps who to reach out to first

Cons:

Doesn’t search for news or other insights that may impact your lead’s willingness to buy
Doesn’t automatically update or verify contact information

Pricing: HubSpot has a free version of its popular CRM, but Sales Hub starts at $50 per month.

6. Clearbit

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Much like ZoomInfo, Clearbit for sales is a contact database that updates your records with a range of insights.

Pros:

Includes a database of 200 million contacts at 20 million companies. So finding leads within your parameters is a breeze
Automatically enriches records with up-to-date contact and company information
Scores and routes leads to reps, who can strike while the iron is hot

Cons:

Doesn’t track website or search behavior
Some customers complain that Clearbit’s databases don’t update often enough

Pricing: Clearbit starts at $99 per month.

7. Adapt

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Adapt is one of the more lightweight and inexpensive tools on this list. However, it also offers limited features.

Pros:

The lead builder tool lets you build a list of new prospects in seconds using Adapt’s contact database
Chrome extension finds emails for leads on LinkedIn

Cons:

Doesn’t offer insights based on news or intent signals
Doesn’t score or prioritize leads

Pricing: There’s a free version, or you can choose a basic plan that allows more views and downloads. The basic plan is $39 per month.

8. InsideView

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InsideView integrates with your CRM to provide accurate information about target accounts and employees.

Pros:

Includes data like finances, recent news, and competitors, therefore giving you the clearest picture of who your lead is and what their pain points are
The “corporate family tree” feature shows you all the key players involved in a decision-making process. As a result, allowing you to build all the necessary connections to make a sale

Cons:

Doesn’t score or prioritize leads
CRM integrations can sometimes be buggy or clunky

Pricing: InsideView’s Sales Acceleration tool starts at $99 per user per month.

9. Lusha

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Lusha makes it easy to enrich and verify contact profiles. In other words, you can make faster and better connections with leads.

Pros:

Can be used as a Chrome extension to verify leads during your browse in LinkedIn
Automatically updates leads in Salesforce
Comes with a feature that scores and routes leads. As a result, reps always connect with the right prospects

Cons:

Customers complain that the phone numbers for leads are often incorrect.

Pricing: Lusha offers a free version of the tool. A basic plan starts at $23 per user per month.

10. UpLead

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UpLead is similar to Adapt or ZoomInfo. For instance, you can find verified contact info for leads, therefore enriching the records in your CRM.

Pros:

Their database of 46 million contacts in 200+ countries makes it easy to get in touch with key players at target accounts
You can search for contacts and companies using over 50 different criteria. For example, location, management level, and revenue
Verifies email addresses in real-time, so you’re always getting the most accurate information right when you need it

Cons:

Revenue levels are broad. However, you can filter for revenue in a range of $1m-$10m, but not $1m-$5m
Smaller database size than its competitors

Pricing: UpLead offers a free version or a basic plan that starts at $99 per month.

Accelerate Your Sales Process With Sales Intelligence Tools

To build a strong relationship with your prospects, most importantly you need the most up-to-date information about their company and its needs. Sales intelligence tools and customer data software automate the collection and interpretation of this data, letting sales reps focus on moments of actual connection.

However, not all sales intelligence tools are created equal. Some excel at finding accurate contact information, while others stand out in their ability to gather intent data and relevant news from media outlets.

None of this data is helpful if you don’t know which leads are most worth focusing your efforts on. In the end, sales intelligence tools with lead scoring or prioritization features and demand generation marketing strategies are perhaps best able to accelerate your pipeline and close more deals.

LeadBoxer does exactly that. With website visitor identification, record enrichment, online behavior tracking, and lead scoring, LeadBoxer can find and prioritize prospects on autopilot, putting sales reps closer than ever to the actual sale. Get started with a free trial today.

Comparison: The 10 Best Sales Intelligence Tools Read More »

What is Lead Intelligence & Why Should You Care?

Big Data, Data-Driven analysis, Lead Generation, Marketing, Tools / Wart Fransen

Imagine knowing your leads’ level of engagement with your brand, the likelihood that they’ll buy your product, and even the best strategies for communicating with them. With that kind of information, you could increase the effectiveness of your prospecting and win more deals. Lead intelligence is what makes it possible.

But what is lead intelligence, and how do you start using it in your business? This guide covers the basics, including the most useful types of lead intelligence and the best tools available today. Once you learn how to leverage lead intelligence, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to make sales without it.

What is Lead Intelligence?
Types of Lead Intelligence
Lead Intelligence Software

What is Lead Intelligence?

Lead intelligence is a form of data that significantly elevates your understanding of your prospects. So you can better address their pain points, communicate effectively with them, and win their business. When it comes to B2B sales, lead intelligence is invaluable.

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Given how effective lead intelligence is for prospecting, chances are that if your competitor isn’t already taking advantage of this sales strategy, they will be soon. All the more reason why you should start incorporating this form of data into your company’s sales process today.

There are several different types of lead intelligence. Which ones you should focus on depends on the needs of your business.

Types of Lead Intelligence

Knowing your lead’s name, email address, and phone number is just the beginning of lead intelligence. The following data points tell you just how interested prospects are in your product, what their pain points are, and how you can better connect with them.

Site visitors

Who’s visiting your website that isn’t already on your radar? Some lead intelligence software can unveil a visitor’s name, contact information, and company before they ever fill out a form.

Given that only 2% of website visitors fill out a form, being able to tap into that other 98% is a game-changer.

Contact information

If you know your lead’s name and company but don’t know how to reach them, there are tools available that can dig up and verify their email address or phone number for you.

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A Chrome extension such as this one from Lusha or a contact database like ZoomInfo both make it simple to find up-to-date info for all of your prospects.

Company details

If a company has recently received a big investment or has launched a new project, you should know about it. This information can give you insight into whether or not now is the right time to reach out with your offer. Updates about new hires or job changes also let you know if you’re contacting the right person.

Demographics

Study your company’s ideal customer profile, then make sure your lead intelligence software is gathering any details you need about a prospect’s age, job role, and geographic location. Knowing that a prospect has the essential characteristics of your ideal customer ensures that you spend time reaching out to the best leads.

Social media profiles

There are more ways than ever to connect with prospects. Knowing their LinkedIn profile, Twitter handle, or other social media profiles gives you more opportunities to engage with prospects outside their inbox and earn their trust. It also helps you come up with talking points based on the content they’ve recently posted.

Pages visited

Knowing the number of pages a prospect visited on your site can help you gauge their level of interest in your product. Lead intelligence can take it one step further and show you exactly which pages they’ve visited. And how long they spent on that page, shedding light on what problems they need help solving.

Emails opened

Ideally, you also want lead intelligence software that can integrate with your email marketing platform. To show you which emails a prospect opened, how long they spent reading the email, and if they clicked through on any links.

Site revisits

Does a prospect often return to your site? This can signal a greater level of interest in your product. Some lead intelligence software will alert you at the moment of a site revisit. So that you can reach out while your at the top of a prospect’s mind.

Personality characteristics

Knowing if a prospect prefers to communicate by email or phone is sometimes the difference between making or losing a sale. Some lead intelligence software can also clue you into their negotiation style, mannerisms, and questions that are most likely to prompt a desirable response.

Lead Score

Now that you have all this lead intelligence, how do you make sense of it quickly enough to take action? A lead score takes all the data you’ve gathered on a prospect and turns it into a number. This number indicates the likelihood that they’ll buy. There are formulas out there for calculating this yourself, but it can be a tedious process. Luckily, some lead intelligence software will make this calculation for you.

The Best Lead Intelligence Software

There are several different types of lead intelligence tools available that can find and help you interpret the best data on your prospects.

LeadBoxer

LeadBoxer is a solid all-in-one lead intelligence option that integrates with your CRM and marketing tools of choice. Not only does it help you identify and track website visitors and email behavior, but it also assigns them a leadscore based on their engagement with your brand across multiple channels and mediums. With LeadBoxer, not only do you know what kind of content prospects are most interested in, but you immediately know which prospects are most worth pursuing.

HubSpot Sales

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CRM heavyweight HubSpot offers sales tools that anyone can start using for free. The paid version of the platform comes equipped with features that identify prospective companies and their level of engagement. It can also track page views, pages visited, and the number of visitors from each company. However, HubSpot Sales doesn’t identify individual or anonymous visitors to the degree that LeadBoxer does.

VisitorTrack

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In addition to identifying and tracking anonymous website visitors, VisitorTrack offers intent data about a business. Intent data indicates that a prospect has been actively researching topics relevant to your business at other locations around the web. For instance, if you sell a marketing automation solution and a visitor to your site has been researching similar tools or topics on other websites, VisitorTrack will let you know.

Albacross

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Like HubSpot Sales, Albacross identifies companies that are visiting your website and shows you how engaged they are. It also goes into stats like the company’s revenue, the number of employees, exactly which pages they visited, and how long they spent on the site.

Albacross doesn’t identify individual visitors, but it does offer a list of GDPR compliant email addresses for decision-makers at the companies visiting your site. With this tool, you can have a better idea of whether or not the person you’re contacting has the authority to make a purchase.

LeadSift Buzz

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Buzz from LeadSift tracks what’s going on at a prospective company, such as if they found new sources of funding or launched a new product, eliminating the need to do that research yourself. In addition to curating all this news for you, Buzz offers guidance about what to do with that information, taking the guesswork out of conversation starters or talking points.

Crystal

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Crystal sets itself apart from other tools in this list by focusing on intelligence about a lead’s personality. This is especially useful for when you’re ready to contact a lead, deliver a proposal, or negotiate a contract. Few other tools can offer the same level of insight about a lead’s personality that Crystal can, but it doesn’t track their level of engagement with your brand or tell you how likely they are to buy.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

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LinkedIn Sales Navigator leverages a platform that both you and your prospects are already using. Sales Navigator comes with advanced search functions that make it easier than ever to find leads that match your ideal customer profile and can even recommend leads that you wouldn’t have thought of.

Lusha

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Lusha is one of the highest-ranked lead intelligence tools on G2. Its Chrome extension provides B2B contact enrichment based on profiles from places like LinkedIn or Twitter, making it easy to build up your list of prospects while you browse.

Use Lead Intelligence to Find and Engage With Qualified Prospects

If you’ve ever felt like you’re engaging with too many prospects and have not enough to show for your efforts, it’s time to integrate lead intelligence into your sales process. With lead intelligence, you’ll know exactly which prospects you should focus your attention on, plus which talking points you should use with them and how to engage with them in a way that earns their trust.

When it comes to choosing a lead intelligence tool, you can’t go wrong with an option that gathers data about anonymous visitors from a variety of sites and platforms, then interprets it into an actionable lead score. That way, you’ll spend more time on prospects who intend to buy and win more deals.

What is Lead Intelligence & Why Should You Care? Read More »

Data-driven Lead Qualification

Big Data, Lead Generation, Notifications / Cralan Deutsch

Why LeadBoxer Is The Best Choice For Automating Lead Generation

Q: As briefly as possible, what has LeadBoxer done that is so valuable for business websites?
A: Developed a way of applying Search Engine technology to qualify leads.

We started with visitor website tracking a number of years ago, and have evolved into a system which uses big data technology to identify interesting leads. Currently we’re working towards full automation of the process of lead identification.

Calling it AI or artificial intelligence would be wishful thinking, but we’ve definitely made enormous strides in the process of automating lead qualification and audience segmentation.

How have we done this? Basically, moving on from MYSQL to NOSQL using Elastic and Cassandra, we’ve built a system that can filter, in real-time, through website traffic, and create notifications based on a lead score. Click here to read how (technically) LeadBoxer’s lead score formula converts clicks into prospects via an algorithm.

What does this actually mean?
It means that now, as of December 2017, we provide the framework to organize Marketing and Sales data on the following traffic values:

FILTERS:

Company
Country / Region
State / Province
City
Industry
Company Size
Utm Tags (PPC-traffic, Adwords, LinkedIn, Facebook campaigns)
URL
Exit Link
Referrer
Lead Tags (competitor, customer, partner, prospect)
Identity Fields (Email, First Name, Last Name)
Visits
Page Views

Letting smart algorithms do the heavy lifting

In conclusion, in order to succeed, a software product needs to add value. The value we are adding is machine learning. You tell our machine what a valuable lead looks like, and we use algorithms to find these leads for you. Our goal is to automate the process, so that letting LeadBoxer loose on a website will provide a list of all activity, prioritized by lead score. To increase the efficiency of the system, and reduce the burden of logging in to (another) software product, we push email Notifications to your team’s mailboxes.

Data-driven Lead Qualification Read More »

When Big Data goes Wrong

Big Data / Wart Fransen

Because Web Analytics is part of our core solution we have spent a lot of time pondering over and perfecting our use of Big Data. LeadBoxer has been in the industry for more than 15 years (both directly and indirectly) and we can say with fair certainty that we have learnt several things during our cumulative “service”. But we will be lying to ourselves if we don’t admit that sometimes Big Data can fail you. With that in mind, we wanted to write this piece on how to make sure that your company is using it the right way and it doesn’t lose touch with the individuals that make-up the data sets. In the spirit of honesty, I have to give credit to Martin Lindstrom’s book “Small Data”, because it is what gave me the inspiration for this article. In it, he makes a point that nowadays the corporate world has become blinded by Big Data and this happens because it is incredibly hard to describe emotions using data.

Data does not reflect emotions.

Martin starts his book with the famous example of LEGO. In 2002-2003 the company was going bankrupt so they used Big Data to determine that Millennials have short attention spans and get easily bored. This led LEGO to make their small, iconic bricks into huge, simplistic building blocks. This change only accelerated their decline so out of desperation, the company decided to go into consumers’ homes to try and reconnect with their once loyal customers. I am not going to reveal much from the book, but in a few words, after meeting with an 11-year-old German boy, they discovered that for children, playing and showing mastery in something was more valuable than receiving instant gratification. This made LEGO pivot again and after their successful movie in 2014 they surpassed Mattel to become the world’s largest toy maker. Now, of course there is much more to the story that is hidden in the background, but the bottom line is that patterns and trends can sometimes be misleading.

Correlation is not causation.

Big Data is all about finding correlation and patterns in human behaviour, but that is not always the whole truth. Take as an example Google; back in 2008 they believed they could use Big Data to predict flu outbreaks and launched a program called Google Flu Trends (GFT). The algorithm analysed search queries with the word “flu” to follow patterns but it did not take into account unrelated searches. And then in 2013 it failed dramatically by missing the flu season peak of 140 percent. This is not necessarily a failure of Big Data as much as it is a failure of people using it. Call it hubris or simple error of judgement. But the fact of the matter is that correlation is not always causation and sometimes Big Data is simply just too big and not all relevant.

Not all data is useful.

The problem with Big Data is that you are looking at the data you have collected and not necessarily the data that you need. Sometimes the numbers you have are not interesting or insightful. Or even worse, they are just a vanity metric. Like thinking that a lot of Twitter followers translates into actual real-life influence or that a lot of website traffic leads to high conversion. You only need to take a look at the Big Data Industry Report for 2016 by Prompt Cloud to see that the biggest issue for companies is how to get value out of the data they have collected.

What is the take-home?

Data has become so rooted in our work that we sometimes use it almost exclusively. But the examples that I mentioned and all of the others that didn’t make the cut to be included in the article, show that it takes something more than data. Organisations need to keep in mind that data does not reflect emotions. Correlation does not always equate causation. And just because you have a lot of information it does not mean that it is useful or actionable.

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