I used to shop via catalog all the time. So many great pictures and neat and tidy descriptions for all the items I wanted to add to my personal inventory. I would read them over and over, especially the ones that had articles as well as products. Then came the Internet.

The Internet brought a plethora of changes to they way people shop, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, PayPal, the list is endless. And these changes not only affect the B2C market but are changing they B2B market as well. More and more people are bringing their personal shopping habits to the workplace and with tools like search engines and social media there are almost endless roads leading to any business door.

How then are business to interact with customers finding them outside of the traditional outbound marketing mix? Some may say, ‘Oh we have analytics on our website and we see where our customers are coming from.’ Is that enough? Knowing how many people are coming to your site is helpful, and even how many of them are new visitors is more helpful still, but is this really as helpful as it could be? What if you not only knew who came to your site by name, but what they looked at, what they downloaded, and then based on this behavior had a method for qualifying these leads in such a way that when Sales calls them up they are ready to buy.

The benefits of this our enormous. You would be saving your Sales team time by only contacting leads that are primed, and you would have less leakage from your sales funnel because you have more pull than push.