Sales - It's all about knowing...

One of the best things you can do for your sales team is to set them up with real-time alerts when their prospects are on the website. It's quick and easy to do, and it begins delivering real value right away.

In Eloqua, under Management->User Management, pick a user, and select "Visitor Notifications" from their drop-down menu. Create a new notification for "Your Prospects on Website", and fill in the needed information. You can plug in their email address, specify timing (any time, only during business hours, etc), and choose content type.

Selecting the view of the visitor lets you pick exactly what fields you want to send to your sales team. Things like "Most Recent Search Query" and "Most Recent Marketing Campaign" give you good insights into what their interest areas are, while "Total Visits" and "Total Pages" gives you a sense of how deeply engaged they are.

Then, you set out when you want to send sales a notification. Usually, there are two parts to this; prospects who are "theirs", either by territory, or because their name is in the "Salesperson" field, and prospects who are interested.

The bar for interest can be moved up or down depending on the number of alerts you want to have sent out. Too few, and the sales team will not have a process to react to them, too many and they will ignore them. Talk with the team and fine tune this as you go forward.

Requiring at least a couple of visits, more than a few page views, or the existence of a most recent search query can make sure you only alert for interesting visitors.

What your sales team does with these alerts can vary. Immediately picking up the phone and calling is generally a bad idea, but the awareness they gain from seeing real-time indications of interest can be invaluable. Seeing old prospects come alive again, or interesting searches from active prospects provides valuable insight that helps them guide their sales process.

It's an easy thing to set up, and adds value for your sales team immediately. And who knows, they might even thank you for it....