UK company Lead Forensics offers their eponymous platform for lead generation and web analytics.
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Owler
Score9.7 out of 10
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Owler is a sales intelligence app developed by the company of the same name San Mateo and acquired by Meltwater June 2021, providing competitive insights, company information, and other sales relevant information.
In my opinion, Lead Forensics is good for companies promoting a high-value ticket product on their website. If they are looking to maximize the results of their platform, LF is a good fit for their digital marketing strategy. If they are pushing a low-to-medium-ticket product, there is a higher risk that the platform will not be as relevant, because all the parts related to re-marketing and similar stuff can be done directly with Google tools, which are available to everyone.
This is a free service, so it should be compared to free and low cost alerting (e.g. Google Alerts) and PE/VC funding profile (e.g. Crunchbase) services. Owler is well suited for competitive intelligence professionals, named account reps, and marketing professionals tracking company news (web mined company mentions and press releases) and social media (blogs, Video, YouTube). The alerts are high precision and tag for three key events (M&A, Funding, Exec Changes). It is the alerting and social media tools which are the key strength of the service. The company claims two million profiles, but only has 60,000 with full address information. Content includes competitors, user polls, and funding / M&A data. Owler should be viewed as a free complement to other online company research tools, but it lacks the depth to replace subscription services. Missing content includes long business descriptions; financials and discrete sizing data; family tree linkage, and executive profiles (only the CEO is covered) While they offer list building functionality, it is quite thin and non-downloadable. As such, I would not recommend Owler for sales and marketing prospecting at this point. A unique feature is a set of company polls about the direction of the company and CEO performance. Unfortunately, the response rates are often too low to be statistically meaningful.
Lead Forensics helps us see which companies are visiting our site, even if they don’t fill out a form. This gives us a chance to reach out to businesses that are already showing interest but might not have contacted us yet.
Instead of cold-calling random prospects, we can see which pages a company has viewed and how often they return. This helps us tailor our conversations based on what they’re actually interested in.
The Lead Forensics support team has been great whenever we’ve had questions. They’re quick to respond and always ready to help, whether it’s troubleshooting an issue or offering advice on how to get the most out of the platform.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Better updates on companies' current names. Often if a company was a different company years ago it still says the old company name which is confusing.
Better identifying the correct location. Sometimes it seems like that the location coming up is the wrong location.
Giving a better understanding of how they got to the website would help too. Often is says "direct" but I would like to know if it was via a link from an email or what
The information provided is useful but at times the variation with other websites and tools is substantial which makes it difficult to rely solely on owler
Information only about bigger companies is available not for smaller and research on smaller ones are important as there are not many tools that do that
There are few companies that appear as defunct or do not exist but in the actual market there is a lot going on with them and being in market intelligence industry owler needs to capture that
It would be great if they provide revenue or growth of the in the past three years or so. As it would save our time and efforts to some extent
They need to maintain the database in aperiodic manner with precise information
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It is just a brilliant piece of software, and I discover more and more every time I meet with my account manager. The company missed a trick when it was first set up, as I believe they only used it to see who was looking at the site, but it can do so much more, and we would not be without it now. We have used it in relation to a cold-call campaign with Paragon to drive sales, but ultimately drilled down into who was coming to the site and whether they were our ideal customer.
I think it's well designed but always room for improvement. Maybe more customization in layout or information presented. Maybe even a layout that allows comparison and ranking of companies in a similar industry or vertical, or company size, and geography
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I have yet to see the platform down or running slowly, but there have been multiple instances recently (Q2 2015) when the user links to a news story and Owler gives an Oops message. Users simply click on the story a second time and the story is displayed. This is a nuisance bug. I also have a sense that the system is not processing alerts as quickly as before, but I haven't tracked this closely, so I could be wrong about it.
The news precision, which is the most important feature for me, is very accurate. They have editors review the news to ensure it is properly tagged by company and event type.
Top support from the Lead Forensics team. They take time to understand your business specifications, they make sure your needs are fulfilled, they show the new assets of the platform. The rythm for the business review is very flexible. You can access a live chat at any time. A lot of tutorials help you to deepen your skills in using the platform for your busines.
Focus on setting up companies that have limited news coverage first. Public companies are well covered and it is easy to track them. Furthermore, the surfeit of news around public companies can crowd out smaller companies with less news. It is smaller companies where you are most likely to see a benefit in their tracking of news, blogs, press releases, and videos.
I’ve used SalesIntel primarily for contact data, but I haven’t explored its web tracking features. What sets Lead Forensics apart is how quickly it delivers actionable insights from site visits. It helps me identify engaged accounts and prioritize follow-up without extra effort. For our needs, Lead Forensics offered a more immediate impact on sales productivity and customer engagement.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I believe Lead411 and Owler go hand in hand, rather than one over the other. I believe Lead411's contact generation is far stronger based on the cost, but Owler allows you to broaden your horizon for prospecting whereas Lead411 is more of a user-driven search rather than an platform-driven search.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We are still in the very early stages of using Lead Forensics for our agency, but I can see that it could already be very useful to us as we haven't had insights like this previously.
Our very first use case with Lead Forensics was with a brand-new client and I would say it went exceptionally well. We were running a large media campaign for them, and it was very insightful to see how those specific businesses were getting to the site and what page they were going to. Like mentioned previously, this helped their very small sales team to go after businesses they know were interested in them.
The personalisation of emails has definitely helped us to earn a higher reply rate, with the knock-on that this will be helping with future deals.
Keeps us very relevant in our conversations with contacts. They are often impressed by the research and knowledge we have on their company and how we have aligned ourselves to help. Again, small differences at the start of calls but this will be helping with the number of opportunities created.
Reduces SDR prospecting time. Quick and easy to get updates allowing them to process a great number of accounts on a daily basis.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
