Here’s 3 quick steps on how to turn Google Analytics into an effective sales prospecting tool. It’s a great way to generate a supply of free sales leads.

You’re probably sitting on a good number of prospects without knowing it and if you have Google Analytics running on your website you can quickly drill down and find these sales prospects in a few minutes. The good thing about this technique is that you DON’T need a ton of website traffic to make it work for you.

In the following example, I was able to generate a really good qualified prospect and it didn’t involve a nasty cold call .

A good prospect to us, is a website that can benefit from partnering with us by offering our online publishing tool to their audience (i.e. they make revenue by doing this).

Step 1: Find the sources that generate traffic

Start by unearthing the websites that are driving traffic to your website.

  • Login to Google Analytics (make sure the date range for your data is set to cover the previous 6 months – it doesn’t need to be exact but I found this works best for me).
  • Click on Traffic Sources > All Traffic (you’re going to see a list of websites. These are the sites that deliver visitors to your site. The second column to the right called “Visits” shows the volume of traffic for your specified date range.

google analytics free prospecting tool sources

  • Scroll down and review the list of sources in the Source/Medium column. Exclude all the big sites liked Google, Facebook etc and look for the smaller unknown names (the “long tail”).
  • I found one in our analytics called “CompanyX.com”. It didn’t drive a huge amount of traffic (66 visits) but that doesn’t matter.
  • Click on the link and it will take you to a new screen so you can view more detail stats for that source.

google analytics sales prospecting tool 2

  • The spike you see on Dec-19 is important because it indicates that something happened that day on CompanyX.com that started driving traffic to our site; probably a blog post mentioning”flashissue” along with a link to our site.

Step 2: Find the article and get a persons name.

  • Jump over to the referral site – CompanyX.com – and look for the article that is driving traffic (I just did a search for *Flashissue* and found the article).
  • My first impressions of this site were good:
    • It’s a legitimate site with great content
    • It’s a community for entrepreneurs and small business owners – it has 76,000 members
    • The site audience  is a great prospecting fit for us – we’re looking to get our publishing tool in the hands of small businesses and entrepreneurs and this site has a sizable audience they could make our tool available to.
  •  Now I want to find the actual article that is driving traffic so I can find out the name of the person who wrote it (this becomes my initial point of contact).

google analytics sales prospecting tool 3.1

  • As you can, we were included in a review of online marketing products. This is where the traffic to our website originated. When I review the article I can see our product and a link to our website (this is what Google Analytics picks up). 
  • I can see the author’s name Jane (not her real name). Now I want to send her an email. It occurred to me that if she reviewed our product, then she’d probably be a registered user of our. This turned out to be the case so it was straight forward to retrieve her email. Failing this, it would have been pretty easy to find her contact info by tracing the links back to her own website (she included this in her author’s bio).

Step 3: Setup a time to talk (now you have a prospect).

  • Now I have a name and contact, I have a “prospect” I can reach out to.
  • I emailed Jane asking to talk. My goal was to see if Jane felt that a partnership was a good fit for the website and if it was, then would she give me an intro to the person who I would need to talk to (here’s the email I sent)

 

sales prospecting email partnership

  • Given she had written a review of our product and liked it, she was very responsive and it wasn’t like a cold call.
  • I had a great chat with Jane (thx Jane if you’re reading) and it helped with the pre qualification work about a partnership fit.  Jane  was more than happy to introduce me to the correct person at CompanyX.com. She made the intro. via email (I offered to provide her some email text to use but she didn’t need it) and now I’m talking to a potential partner.

Let me know how you get on with using Google Analytics as sales prospecting tool. You might also want to check out a related post on the best way to manage prospects: Sales Tip a Faster More Efficient Way To Prospect.

 

 

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