My Marketing Automation Experience

Just to see what the hype is all about in Marketing Automation, I decided to trial a solution with my sites. And, I’m here to report, that all of my cranky views remain even crankier.

This solution does a fabulous job following where site visitors go, telling me how long they are on each page, what company they are from, and who the potential buyers might be. And here is where it gets tricky. Apparently – and I didn’t know this before – if the visitor does not sign up on the Contact form, there is no way to know exactly who is the person visiting. Not to mention, it’s not even possible to know which office they are working out of, and the software brings me to the headquarters, regardless of where the visitor is located.

I’ve got all of these companies visiting me (how cool is THAT, so see the range of visitors from all industries and so many countries – even the Middle East, and even from Universities). And what to do with them??

HEY AUSTIN! ANYBODY THERE?

I took some of the name and started making some calls (if I can’t reach the people who are interested in my site, what good is it to know their companies? or am I missing something?). One of the very frequent visitors is the City of Austin. This person has visited 20 times in the past 3 months, and I can see all of the viewed pages. They either have an enormous interest in working with me, or are using my material to help them in some unknown way. It seemed like it would be a good place to start.

I called the receptionist – where else is there to start since I don’t have a name or email address – and I told her my problem. Since there was no sales/marketing group, we had no idea where to look for this mystery visitor. Finally she put me through to HR to see if possibly there was a purchasing agent or procurement officer who was looking around. Nope. He asked a few people, and then called me back. Couldn’t find anyone.

That took me 30 minutes. Don’t know how long it took the HR director. But I came out empty handed. And two people wasted time.

Then I tried one of the companies that had names attached. Apparently, the software only offered me names of the “C” level people – folks who are usually not on line reading blog posts or visiting ‘licensing’ pages. I called a few receptionists, and no one was able to find anyone. Of course I didn’t know which office was visiting (apparently the software defaults to home office).

So here is my question: do telemarketing/telesales teams get all these names and numbers and make calls like I did? How do they find folks? What do they say? If they hire telesales teams, where do these people start? What do they say? Or do companies attempt to get these same folks to do a webinar? But if they don’t have the email address, how do they do that?

Using Buying Facilitation™ I was able to get lots of support and meet some cool people. But I never found the site visitors. I’m going to try again with some of the smaller companies. But I’m flying blind here.

What is everyone else doing with this information?