Pairing Web Analytics With CRM, Email Tools Presents New BtoB Platform Options

As interest and competition within the Web analytics continues to heat up, we recently chatted with Brett Habermann, VP of Sales at LeadLander, to get his insights into the company’s plans for the future. With new integrations with Salesforce.com’s AppExchange as well as different Email Management systems, Habermann pointed out that BtoB organizations with limited budgets can now customize their own marketing suites.

DemandGen Report: LeadLander was a pioneer in the area of real-time Web analytics for sales folks, having been around now for more than four years. The space has gotten a bit more crowded of late, though. How do you continue to differentiate your offerings and provide a competitive advantage when you are your solutions to a new account?

Brett Habermann: We constantly listen to customer feedback to help drive our product road map and are continually rolling out new features to align with these demands. While there are new players coming into the market, we have a market-tested product that has matured over the past several years. We also have a proven sales & support system that separates us from companies that are focused on still trying to enter the market place.

DGR: How have you seen awareness and the interest level in real-time Web analytics change over the past year or two? Are you seeing any significant shifts in your client or prospect base?

Habermann: Our client base continues to grow across several sectors. While the days of grabbing all the low hanging fruit may be passing, there are still significant opportunities out there. With a varied prospect base, we can still use a broad stroke to go after companies in a multitude of different markets. Even as the analytical space matures, there is also new growth across the Web 2.0 universe.

DGR: Since you have had the advantage of working in this space for several years now and you have a large installed base of clients, what kind of feedback and request are you getting from your customer base. What other features and functionality are they looking for?

Habermann: Integration has always been a key issue for clients. Whether they are using a product like Salesforce.com already or just planning to roll it out, they still want to know that you can integrate with them. We just rolled out a new Lead Scoring feature recently which had become a frequent request. Because the product would be beneficial across our entire client base, it was any easy decision to develop & roll it out. Customization of reports & alerts is always in demand as clients like to know they can use an off the shelf set of data, but also that they can do their own data mining as needed.

DGR: Integration is becoming more critical for solutions like LeadLander as you expand more into Sales Activity Reports and Lead Qualification. You recently launched LeadLander for Salesforce as an add-on to the core LeadLander service. Are you planning further integration with other CRM solutions or potentially even some of the marketing automation suites?

Habermann: We have made some recent updates to our Salesforce.com integration, including a free component which allows the user to push company, contact, & lead data from LeadLander directly to their Salesforce.com application. We also continue to aggressively sell our AppExchange integration. Along with this, we've found a lot of clients use 3rd party email/marketing automation suites which LeadLander can also integrate with. The nice thing with a product like LeadLander is that you can integrate with a CRM system as well as a Email Campaign Management systems to have equal/better features to a full blown marketing automation suite -- but you can do it for a fraction of the costs.

DGR: LeadLander came out of the gate with a defined, niche product but do you see the company expanding its offerings? Potentially moving more into the marketing automation or lead management space?

Habermann: The product is ever changing with new features and functionality rolling out all the time. I wouldn't go so far to say that we'll move into the marketing automation space as a big component of what makes LeadLander so successful is it's simplicity to use and it's clean design for sales people. Sales people will never be the end users of marketing automation products.  However, with enhanced integrations, LeadLander certainly appeals to a variety of end user from sales, to marketing, to executives.