Driving a consultative approach to sales with web intelligence data

The importance of structured data for improving a business’s search rankings is increasingly important and Rome based start-up, Wordlift, is leading the charge. Wordlift has created a suite of tools and services which give small, medium and enterprise-level businesses the power to easily structure their content, allowing Google bots to easily understand the topic of a particular page.

Wordlift not only leads the way from with their powerful tools and services but their team, led by CEO Andrea Volpini, is actively educating the online community about the importance of correctly structured data. The team’s numerous webinars, online events and unique content draw audiences from around the world.
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“We are passionate about structured linked data and feel it is our job to educate businesses on the importance of their commercial success to create content that Google can understand. As a result, we participate in weekly webinars and create educational content on a regular basis.”

This thought leadership approach has allowed Wordlift to grow its network and, importantly, gather a number of leads of businesses that were interested in the topic.  The job of the Wordlift’s sales team was to convert these leads into customers, however;
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“We were gathering a number of leads from our webinars and content, but we’re struggling to turn these leads into customers. As much as we researched a leads business, we just weren’t finding the information that allowed us to really understand their needs”

Andrea and his commercial team felt that the one stumbling block in their sales process was having the knowledge they needed about a particular business to turn a sales pitch into a consultative sales process. The power of knowledge for them was vitally important in understanding their prospects’ needs without having to spend time on basic requirements gathering. They needed to find a simple way to gather data on the performance of a business as soon as the lead came into their sales funnel.

Wordlift engaged DataBravo to automatically enrich the domain URL provided by a lead with a number of data points detailing the performance of the lead’s website.  This allowed the Wordlift team to automate the initial prospect response with a personalized email that identified certain data about a website, therefore starting a knowledge-based sales process. This approach an increased our response rate by x2 and doubling our conversion.

“Using web intelligence data in our prospect follow-up emails doubled our both our response and conversion rate and really helped our sales team start a knowledge-based sales process.”

Gennaro Cuofono, Sales Director

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When we spoke with these prospects, the WordLift sales team were then able to use the data to identify issues and suggest solutions for the potential customer.

Being able to use web intelligence data to identify issues for a website and suggest a solution for a customer without needing an elongated requirements-gathering process had three immediate benefits:

• Potential customers felt reassured that the WordLift team understood their business, had done their research and were knowledgeable about structured data and how it could be applied specifically to the customer’s business.
• The WordLift team spent less time researching, qualifying and developing solutions for customers.
• WordLift’s sales conversion rate went up.

The WordLift team has additional ideas on how to make better use of web intelligence data across their business, but the immediate impact on their sales process and customer acquisition was clear to see.

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