Imagine how many people end up on your company’s website looking for more information about your B2B product and never call you. These visitors are incredibly useful leads for your sales team, but you just don’t know them. Meet Azalead, a French startup that tells you which company recently visited your website and sends you alerts in real time.
“In my previous software company, the marketing department was always looking into getting more leads,” co-founder and CEO Nick Heys told me in a phone interview. “We used to get a two percent conversion rate. Yet, we spent between €30,000 and €40,000 a month in ads to get a two percent conversion rate — for 98 percent of my traffic, I was missing out on who it was.”
According to Heys, the way companies look at B2B buying has really shifted in the last few years. Before, you called a sales person right away and he would answer all your questions. Now, the last person you call is the sales person. And you already took your decision.
Many potential customers don’t realize that your product might be the right tool for their needs. Azalead is all about giving more information to your sales team to create more frequent warm calls and emails.
So how does it work? The website integration is very reminiscent of analytics services like Google Analytics. You just have to insert a small JavaScript line. The company also provides WordPress and Drupal plugins if you don’t want to dive into your code.
After that, the service figures out who owns a particular IP address and scraps relevant information around the web. Your sales team will get the company’s size, revenue and telephone number in the Android and iOS apps. Azalead also integrates with Salesforce to pull all the contact history and make sure that the best person deals with this company.
Now, this is where Azalead needs to improve. The company can’t identify every IP address that visits your website. You will get a name for only 20 percent of your visitors. “Our objective is to get up to 30 percent,” Heys said.
So far, 130 companies are using Azalead. The first customers pay $60 (€50) per sales person per month, representing around $7,500 per year on average (€6,000). The team of 13 is self-funded so far, and plans on doubling in the next 12 months. Heys previously funded Emailvision — he also happens to be an Englishman who chose to create his startups in France.
And of course, Azalead eats its own dog food. To find new clients, the company relies heavily on its product. Azalead is a lead generator, and it makes sales people for a SaaS product like Azalead more useful. They don’t have to wait for the phone to ring and can start conversations with potential clients right away. “We’re trying to put the power back in the sales guy’s hands,” Heys said.