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Book the right meetings faster with one-click scheduling
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Engage website visitors with automated Journeys and live chat
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Qualify, route, and schedule prospects directly from your web form
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Route records in Salesforce based on a Trigger
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Route and schedule prospects from bizdev to sales to implementation
What You Need—And What You Don’t—For a Successful Inbound Program
Anyone who’s seen the Martech 5,000 list knows the marketing technology (martech) landscape is crowded and complex.
Don’t believe me? Just look at this graphic:
Source: chiefmartec.com
So how do you know which technologies you need to be successful?
Let’s start with what martech actually is.
Martech refers to the technologies marketers use to accomplish specific goals. This includes goals and KPIs at all buyer life cycle stages.
Buyer life cycles vary from organization to organization, but they typically include the following stages: awareness, education, decision, conversion, retention, and advocacy.
Your Inbound Conversion tech stack refers specifically to the tech that powers the funnel at the point of conversion.
Now, there are a lot of conversion points throughout the buyer journey, so which conversion are we talking about?
For our purposes, we’re referring to demo requests and “contact us” form submissions: the conversion of an anonymous visitor to an engaged, identified prospect.
To understand how we’ve curated this list, you need to understand our ethos, the set of underlying beliefs that inform how we think about marketing.
The traditional way of B2B marketing involved capturing email addresses and then slowly nurturing those leads toward conversion.
This is outdated for a couple of reasons. First, the act of capturing email addresses and following up, hoping that they are interested enough to "nurture,” isn't always effective or congruent with how people buy or how they want to engage.
Second, your website is no longer the only place buyers can educate themselves on your solutions now that information is readily available across more platforms. By the time someone lands on your site, they’ve likely already made a decision to at least evaluate your solution.
So what does this mean for B2B marketers? Enter the straight-to-meeting imperative. This is the idea that most buyers educate themselves in the dark funnel, and therefore you need to optimize your website for conversion to not miss out on existing demand for your solution.
This seems like a no-brainer, but today, the average vendor response time for a demo request is 42 hours. Forty-two hours! And 60% of demo requests never convert into meetings — much less revenue.
Full stop. Can you imagine if your favorite online shopping website made you wait 42 hours to confirm your order after you hit the checkout button?
We believe that B2B experiences can and should be as easy as the best B2C experiences.
This list includes technologies we believe are mission-critical to optimizing for inbound conversions on your website. If you’re ready to join the straight-to-meeting imperative, read on.
Landing page builders allow you to create effective and professional-looking landing pages without any web dev expertise.
While most marketing automation platforms provide functionality around landing pages and lead capture forms, specialized tools provide more template variety and flexibility. We’ll explore a few of those.
Unbounce is a conversion intelligence platform that combines market expertise with AI to provide smart landing pages and forms that convert.
Where they shine: Template variety, responsive builders, advanced reporting capabilities, machine learning
Who they serve: E-commerce companies and SaaS companies with a strong reliance on inbound
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2
Leadpages is a landing page builder that specializes in landing pages, alert bars, and pop-up forms.
Where they shine: Ease of use, integrations, budget-friendly
Who they serve: Small teams with straightforward marketing funnels
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2
Instapage is a landing page tool that promises to deliver massive ROI from your ad spend.
Where they shine: Usability, template variety, collaboration capabilities
Who they serve: E-commerce and SaaS companies, big and small. They are something of an everyman
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2
ABM is the strategic alignment of your sales and marketing teams to work the same accounts. So, it’s not a technology, but rather, a strategy.
When we say “ABM platforms,” we merely mean technologies that help you execute an ABM strategy.
Metadata is a B2B platform that helps demand marketers get closer to revenue. It offers solutions around audience targeting, campaign automation & experimentation, and lead enrichment.
Where they shine: Dedicated support, audience building capabilities, funnel visibility
Who they serve: B2B marketing teams with revenue and pipeline goals, mainly in the SMB and mid-market segments
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2
6sense is an ABM platform that allows you to identify good-fit accounts, orchestrate cross-channel campaigns, identify intent signals, and measure campaign performance.
Where they shine: Onboarding program, sales team buy-in, intent signals
Who they serve: B2B companies with well-established ABM programs
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2
MadKudu offers a data science studio that allows marketers to score leads, understand intent, and arm their sales teams with more actionable insights.
Where they shine: Ease of implementation, integrations, predictive modeling
Who they serve: Companies with a large volume of inbound leads who need help prioritizing outreach
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2
There are a lot of definitions of website optimization out there, but Optimizely puts it quite aptly:
“Website optimization is the process of using controlled experimentation to improve a website's ability to drive business goals.”
Website optimization tools help with things like user experience, page speed, content, and goal completions (e.g. demo requests, trial sign-ups).
Optimizely is an A/B testing tool that allows you to make data-driven decisions around specific website optimizations.
Where they shine: Usability, multivariate testing, data visualizations
Who they serve: E-commerce and SaaS companies with sophisticated analytics tech stacks
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2
FullStory is a website visitor tracking tool that surfaces quantitative and qualitative insights into user experience.
Where they shine: Easy segmentation, out-of-the-box analytics, end-user privacy
Who they serve: SaaS and e-commerce companies with sophisticated analytics tech stacks
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2
Booking and routing tools allow you to automate meetings and route inbound leads efficiently.
Chili Piper is an inbound conversion platform that automates the inbound process from end to end. The Distro product allows you to route and assign leads automatically. Concierge allows prospects to book a demo directly from your web form.
Where we shine: Ease of use, speed to lead, advanced routing capabilities
Who we serve: B2B SaaS companies with a high volume of inbound leads
What people are saying about us:
Source: G2
LeanData is a lead distribution software that offers solutions for lead-to-account (L2A) matching, lead distribution, and lead engagement. For our purposes, we’ll focus specifically on their lead distribution capabilities.
Where they shine: Salesforce integration, opportunity matching, audit logs
Who they serve: B2B SaaS companies with complex lead routing scenarios
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2 Crowd
RingLead, which was recently acquired by ZoomInfo, is a revenue operations tool that helps with tasks like deduping, segmentation, data enrichment, and lead distribution.
Where they shine: Data normalization, de-duping, custom field mapping
Who they serve: SaaS companies with complex CRMs and dedicated operations resources
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2 Crowd
Chatbots are a powerful tool for helping buyers and sellers connect. While forms remain the primary channel for sales-ready hand-raisers, chatbots help buyers navigate your website and answer any questions they may have. They can also be effective qualifying tools for your sales team.
Drift is a revenue acceleration platform that offers solutions for chat, visitor intelligence, and personalization.
Where they shine: Custom chatbots, audience insights
Who they serve: B2B teams with established budgets and a dedicated ABM marketer
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2 Crowd
Intercom is a customer communication tool that allows you to use chatbots throughout the customer journey.
Where they shine: In-app chat, customer support use case
Who they serve: Primarily customer support and customer success teams
What people are saying about them:
Source: G2 Crowd
Stay tuned! Chili Chat is coming soon. 😃
Webinars are a top demand generation strategy for 95% of marketers, so it's safe to say that choosing your webinar platform is pretty important for driving inbound leads.
When we refer to "webinar platform", we refer to the platform you use for hosting webinars. Our favorite webinar platforms include features that improve audience engagement, like polls, live reactions, questions, and chat.
Sequel.io is a webinar platform that lets you run webinars and live events directly on your website. The benefit of hosting directly on your website vs. on a third-party platform is a significant increase in traffic, boost in website conversions, and a more seamless and transparent customer journey.
Where they shine: Hosting webinars directly on your website, turning webinars into SEO-optimized blog posts
Who they serve: B2B marketers at organizations like HP, Carta, and Mutiny
What people are saying about them on G2:
Welcome makes it easy to create and host webinars, engage your audience, and repurpose your webinar content into video clips after it's all said and done.
Where they shine: Repurposing webinar content, breakout rooms, beautiful webinars
Who they serve: B2B marketers at organizations like Adobe, 1Password, and Square
What people are saying about them on G2:
Converting inbound leads is your go-to-market team’s most important job. Your investments in creating and capturing demand will be moot if you can’t successfully convert that demand.
With median B2B landing page conversion rates hovering around 2% (WordStream), we have a long way to go in optimizing inbound conversions.
The message is clear: invest in your inbound conversion tech stack. It’s the easiest ROI you’ll ever have to prove.
Ready to see how Chili Piper can help double your inbound conversion rate? Get a demo.
Madeleine Work is Product Marketing Manager at Chili Piper. She loves bringing people together, learning new things, and making hilarious jokes. When she's not typing away at her laptop, you'll probably find her running, hiking, or hanging out with her baby. Follow Madeleine for laughs and product marketing tips on LinkedIn.
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