The Secret to Stop Wasting 70% of Your Inbound Traffic: Reverse IP Lookup
A step-by-step guide for sales led B2B startup founders and growth teams
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.
This is the growth opportunity for sales-led B2B startups who are struggling to efficiently scale their inbound and outbound sales efforts. The opportunity lies in their learning how to take their Inbound Traffic Waste (a.k.a. unidentifiable website traffic that does not convert to a lead) and transforming it into a steady list of warm prospects for their outbound sales teams to chase. Surprisingly, most companies do not do this. In this article we’ll walk through why inbound traffic waste exists, the big revenue opportunity around it, and a step-by-step process for how to capture it using reverse IP lookup technology.
The Challenge Facing Sales Teams
Inbound and outbound sales efforts are hard to scale for different reasons.
Outbound sales: While outbound teams can reach a product’s entire target audience through cold outreach tactics, outbound sales motions plateau because of low sales-funnel conversion rates. This is because outbound typically focuses on cold prospects who have not expressed interest in the product. Worse, the average outbound prospect is likely outside their buying cycle when a rep reaches out resulting in abysmal connect and demo set rates. It really does take thick skin to be an outbound SDR!
Inbound sales is hard for the opposite reason: low prospect volume. While inbound prospects convert at 2x+ the rate of outbound prospects and can come from anywhere—paid ads, PR, organic/word of mouth, referral, etc.—they are still only a tiny fraction of your addressable audience. Inbound is limited to people who are actually visiting your site.
Trash vs. Treasure: Regardless of source, the common denominator for inbound is that they all have some level of interest in your product because they voluntarily came to your website. This is what makes them higher converting than outbound. The real tragedy, however, is that most inbound prospect traffic is wasted. In fact, less than 30% of inbound traffic converts to leads! That means the vast majority of ‘higher-than-outbound-intent’ visitors are simply not entering your sales pipeline. It’s like owning a clothing shop and having your staff not talk to <70% of the people who come into the store!
Simply put, Inbound Traffic Waste is all ICP (ideal customer profile) prospect traffic that is not captured as a workable lead. It’s a huge missed opportunity that >50% of CMOs, CROs, and CSOs do not sufficiently address1.
It doesn’t have to be this way, however. You can jiu jitsu the customer intent data from your inbound waste to your outbound sale’s prospect list for them to act on quickly. You do this through reverse IP lookup functionality, additional data cleaning processes, and the right revenue operations configurations. Your outbound sales team are hungry for higher intent prospects and will be chomping at the bit to work them.
Why Inbound Waste Occurs and How Companies Try to Minimize It
A demand generation team’s job is to generate top of funnel site traffic and convert it into marketing qualified leads (MQLs) at maximum volume and maximum efficiency. This allows the sales team to work MQLs through their pipeline and convert leads into paying customers (i.e. “Closed Wons”).
The website serves to educate prospect traffic enough to entice them to submit their contact info for a sales call or demo (or to use the product in product-led-growth). And do all this before they likely leave the site and never return.
Inbound traffic waste occurs when a company does not get a prospect’s contact information during the site visit and thus does not get the prospect into their sales pipeline. This is because visitors are anonymous site IDs until they fill out a lead form. Neither sales nor marketing can nurture inbounds prospects through the pipeline without their contact information.
Marketers try to decrease inbound waste by running conversion rate optimization (CRO) experiments on their websites such as A/B message testing, limited time offers promos, and site personalization. While these are valuable they are also expensive, require sophistication, and still leave a lot of inbound traffic waste.
At the end of the day, it is expensive to meaningfully scale inbound demand and even harder to capture most of it.
Compare this to outbound sales where they can reach most of the target audience by scraping or buying prospect lists but their cold outreach conversion rates are lower and require larger SDR teams than inbound.
How to Dramatically Reduce Inbound Traffic Waste With Reverse IP Lookup
The key to reducing inbound waste is tying anonymous site traffic to actual businesses—even if they don’t fill out a lead generation form. You can do this through a reverse IP lookup tools plus light automation that ties an anonymous prospect to a business in your existing outbound sales prospect database. This allows outbound reps to sequence prospects while the iron is hot and intent signals are fresh instead of just shooting in the dark and working a prospect whenever they get to them on the list.
For outbound, speed-to-interested-prospects is 10x more effective than calling them at a random time because:
There is higher relevancy
There is higher receptivity
They are more likely in their buying cycle
It can feel serendipitous (but be careful not be creepy)
All of this turns “inbound traffic waste” into outbound prospect treasure.
What Reverse IP Lookup Is and How It Works
Reverse IP lookup is a way to use an unidentified user’s IP address to find the domain name and business associated with it. Every visitor to your site has an IP address attached to it
B2B companies can use this data to identify which business visited their website and map that data to a prospect in their outbound prospect database. At that point, your outbound team can bump the warm prospect to the top of their queue and sequence them while they are relevant. Speed-to-prospect without being creepy is key.
Why This Gets Missed Today
90% of B2B sales led teams already have the tech to do this (e.g. Clearbit, ZoomInfo, etc.). Shockingly <40% of them implement this strategy*.
Here are common reasons why:
It’s messy - while its easy to implement basic tracking & lookup functionality its harder to clean and prep the data for all the stakeholders that need to use it.
It takes expertise and effort - setting up and maintaining data flows to your sales CRM requires time, resourcing, and systemization. This often falls within marketing or revenue operations.
It takes some education and training - sales, marketing, and execs.
There are also legitimate scenarios where its not worth doing. For example:
Poor match rates - there are some verticals where there won’t be a good match between your ICP visit and reverse IP lookup. Fortunately, this is easy to determine with a tool linked below.
The juice is not worth the squeeze or you have other priorities - In some cases your inbound traffic volume isn’t large enough yet for this to be worth it. This is also easy to determine with some simple sizing analyses
How To Build This - A Step by Step
First, evaluate if this is right for you. Key criteria:
You have great outbound list coverage of your target audience. Specifically, measure what percent of ICP traffic that is identified actually exists in your prospect database. If the number is low you may need to focus on list building first
Your ICP have the right characteristics to be identified via reverse lookup IP - Industries that have a lower likelihood are ones where there is high VPN or work from home employees. Also industries where prospects are more likely to have dedicated IP addresses are better than those with dynamic IP addresses.
Second qualify the opportunity:
The quick and dirty version is to add this ClearBit script and run a quick report to get a match rate. A report would look something like the below
Expect this number to have a lot of noise; not every IP will come through as the shiny target enterprise by name. This is because some IPs may appear unreadable or unknown until you take the next step and do some hunting, correlate with other IPs, and play the role of detective.
With this work you can often get to the true source and act on that account. Typically you can improve match rate by ~30-70% with manual data cleaning and other tactics.
Paul Sebastien: For example, a $200M customer experience platform increased IP match rate from <30% to 80%+ with custom data cleansing. The biggest gains for this company's sales led GTM came from the outbound sales team reprioritizing inbound waste prospects before their intent signal went cold. This increased net outbound conversion by more than 30% over a single quarter – a whopping increase that could be directly attributed to reverse IP lookup coupled with manual data cleansing.
Third, do a scrappy A/B test and then productionalize it if it works
This can be easy or hard depending on how nimble your sales systems are, but essentially you want to:
Create a list of reverse IP identified prospects and sequence them with different “speed-to-prospect-outreach” timings
Analyze the data and compare the conversion uplift at different “speed-to-prospects-outreach” thresholds.
Use the results to extrapolate what the incremental revenue, cost, and ROI of rolling this out across your entire sales workflow would be. This is an important step because integrating this across large teams means reconfiguring systems, reporting, and training.
Fourth: double down further
If this works at scale, you should start thinking about how to optimize this further. Some optimization areas:
Data Ops - Increase the match rate and accuracy
Marketing Ops - Build into your scoring system so you know when it is better to nurture as a lead rather than sending to sales as an MQL
Sales Ops - Speed to prospect, what are the thresholds and systems you need for sales team to consistently call at the optimal time (not too fast that it is creepy but not so slow that you miss best conversion window)
Everyone else - additional customization of scripts, materials, and timing by traffic source: Look at organic, paid, referral, independently
These are just a few of the levers you can build on if the strategy is successful for you.
Final thoughts and next steps
In the age of efficient growth, reducing inbound traffic waste is a big opportunity that you should explore. Use a step-by-step approach to quantify the opportunity, test, and build.
If you are interested in pursuing this opportunity as quickly as possible, reach out to us as we’ve worked with companies to install this system. It's a great way to get to impact quickly whether or not you have the expertise in-house.
Thanks to Paul Sebastien for expert collaboration on this article.
Informal poll from 25 B2B SaaS executives and advisors