Hushly Helps Marketers Connect With Anonymous Web Site Visitors

When this blog last left Geoff Rego in 2010, he had just sold the assets of pioneering B2B marketing automation vendor Market2Lead to Oracle. Since then, he’s been gnawing at the bone of anonymous business leads, suspecting that there’s some way to gain value from people who are interested in a product but haven’t identified themselves to vendors. Rego has shown me a couple of approaches over the past few years, none of which quite worked out. But when we saw each other at Dreamforce last month, it seemed he had settled on a keeper.

The new product is Hushly, which addresses the reluctance of prospects to provide their email address even in return for valuable content. This is the gating dilemma: more people will read your content if it’s not gated, but you don’t capture their email address unless you gate. In its current form, Hushly waits until visitors have abandoned a content form and then pops up an offer for them to download anonymously via Hushly. Visitors determined to remain unknown can view the content online, while those willing give Hushly their email address can actually download and save it.  Making the offer after the form is abandoned ensures that Hushly only captures people who would not otherwise have connected with the company directly.

Once a Hushly member has downloaded vendor content, vendors can send emails to the member via Hushly.  This allows communication without the vendor actually receiving the member's email address.  Members can block messages from a vendor if they wish.

Hushly also lets members send questions to vendors and receive answers through the system, still without revealing their identity. They can even contact competitive vendors with the same protection. The system lets members send a list of questions to multiple vendors and tabulates the results, allowing more detailed anonymous research. 

Each member gets a Hushly library to store their downloaded documents and communications. Members can grant other people access to their library for collaboration. On the vendor side, Hushly creates anonymous lead records in the client’s Salesforce.com instance, so companies can track their interactions with anonymous prospects and keep the history once the prospect identifies herself. The system can integrate with other CRM vendors through batch file transfers.

All told, I think Hushly is a pretty clever idea. The concept takes a bit of explaining to potential members, which could be a barrier to success. There’s also a chance that people simply won’t believe Hushly’s promises to protect members’ privacy – not because of anything about Hushly but simply because they distrust of Web services in general.  Happily, both obstacles can be overcome through good marketing.  Rego reports that initial results show Hushly can confidently guarantee a 200% increase in distribution of gated content and 20% increase in identified leads. So it looks like enough potential users are receptive to make things interesting.

Hushly has been deployed in various forms by more than 200 companies since early 2014. Set-up is quite simple: users associate content with Hushly widget, which they embed in a landing page. Pricing is based on the number of form abandons, starting at $200 per month for 100 abandoners and falling on a per-abandoner basis as volumes increase.

Lots of Vendors Can Help You Find Leads on the Web

Few people would suggest you learn salesmanship from the play Glengarry Glen Ross,* but its central message rings true: good leads are the lifeblood of a sales organization.** That’s why scanning the Internet to find new  prospects is such an exciting opportunity. At least a dozen firms are now following that path.

These firms scan company Web sites, social media, news sites, directories, and other sources to identify companies, extract attributes like revenue, growth rates, and technologies used, and flag events that might indicate a sales opportunity, such as opening a new office, launching a new product, or hiring new management. Of course, there are plenty of important differences which impact which might make sense for you.  Some of the more important ones include:

• Specific data sources, scanning techniques, and analytical methods. Evaluating these in the abstract is interesting, but what works well for one purpose in one industry might work poorly for something else. So buyers really need to run their own tests to see what works for them.

• Types of predictive models available.  Some vendors only rank leads while others build multiple models for different purposes.

• Use of the client's internal data for model scoring, and whether this extends to sources beyond CRM.

• Whether the vendor sells prospect lists or only enhance names provided by the client.

• Whether the vendor provides lists of individuals as well as companies.  Since Web scanning is usually at the company level, the individual names usually come from other sources.

• Coverage outside the United States

• Information returned beyond names and lead scores, such as recommended treatments and social profiles.

• Whether the company maintains a permanent database on all businesses or only scans when clients request information about specified businesses or segments.  The permanent database costs more to maintain but stores history and trend information that is otherwise unavailable.

Here are brief profiles of the vendors I’ve identified in or near this space. There are probably others.  I’ve grouped them based on how much information I have available.  This correlates to some degree with market presence.

Vendors I’ve Reviewed

• Mintigo both returns new prospects and applies scores to prospect lists provided by the client. It is currently stressing uses of predictive modeling beyond traditional lead scoring and making it easier for clients to set up new models on their own. I last reviewed them in June 2013.

• Lattice Engines runs different types of models against names provided by the client. It provides recommendations for customer treatments in addition to scores. I wrote about them in April 2013.

• Infer runs multiple models against leads provided by the client. It originally returned only lead scores, although they are now adding multiple applications that create different scores for different purposes. I wrote about them in August 2013.

• Fliptop returns scores and some summary data on names provided by the client. It stresses quick model building. I reviewed them in June 2014.

• LeadSpace scans for data on demand, rather than maintaining its own master database.  It can find new prospects in specified segments and enhance names provided by the client.  It returns individual names as well as companies. I wrote about them in June 2013.

Vendors I’ve Spoken with But Not Reviewed

• Growth Intelligence is a relatively recent UK-based startup that provides lists of companies and associated contacts that are likely to become customers.  It draws from Web information, government lists, and similarity to the client’s current customer base.

• Kemvi is just emerging from stealth and plans to launch formally late this year or early 2015. It expects to focus on finding trigger events and advising salespeople about the best ways to approach each prospect.

• 6Sense finds new prospects using behavioral data gathered from a network of "several thousand" Web publishers rather scanning public sources like others in this list. So it doesn’t quite belong here, but it’s interesting nevertheless.

• Radius finds small business prospects that resemble current customers and deploys them to Salesforce.com, along with key profile information and lead scores.


Vendors I’ve Only Seen on the Web

• Avention (formerly OneSource, now part of D&B Hoovers) scans an eclectic collection of data sources to find prospect companies based on attributes and signals. It can rank companies with scoring but the scoring formulas are built manually.

• Gagein sends alerts on trigger events in media, social or public Web sites. It can track companies named by the client or build prospects lists for client-specified segments. It’s primarily a sales tool, with other features such as social selling and apparently without any predictive modeling.

• RealSociable is another sales-oriented product that tracks social media for trigger events related to target accounts. It appears to let users decide which events are important without using predictive models.  But it seems to have some clever technology to extract the trigger events from unstructured social streams. That (presumed) semantic filtering is the only reason to include it on this list -- otherwise, the limit to social sources and lack of predictive models would rule it out.

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*and the one person who admitted to it now makes his living as an arts critic.

** Also, coffee really is for closers.