Salespanel as a Whois Visiting Alternative

Published by Nilangan Ray on June 29, 2021

Are you looking for a Whois Visiting alternative? You are at the right place. In this article, we will discuss how you can get MUCH MORE value for your money and convert more customers while paying more or less the same prices.

What is Whois Visiting?

Whois Visiting is a software solution that identifies companies who visit your website and provides you a list of prospects who work from the company. So, the features are pretty much the same as any other company identification product in the market. Identify companies with reverse DNS tracking, provide a list of prospects based on the domain, and that’s it. Nothing fancy or extraordinary going around here. Whois also has separate prospecting and website personalization tools (discussed later).

Before discussing an alternative, let’s try to understand the technology as this will help you make your decision.

How does Whois Visiting work?

The technology behind Whois and most other products that identify companies visiting your website is fairly simple. Mid-market and Enterprise companies have a specific DNS pool where companies pool that computers from the network browse through. So, all employees visiting from a company’s IP pool can be identified and tagged accordingly. And, if you have B2B visitors on your website, a product can identify companies where your visitors work. Fairly simple.

Once a company is identified, the tool will then provide you a list of employees in the company and their contact information for your sales team to outreach. Now, the employee information you get will NOT be of the particular person who visited your website. Instead, it will be a general employee list, equivalent to what you will get if you enter the domain on any prospecting tool (like Hunter.io or Rocketreach).

The company identification rate would be around 10-25% (depending on your traffic), and the data will more or less be the same on all the tools that use this identification strategy. That is unless a product is crowdsourcing the data or using unethical methods. We have talked about it here.

Alternative to Whois Visiting

Now that we understand what Whois is, what it does exactly, and how it does what it does, let’s think of a few reasons why you want an alternative:

• You want to identify more companies.
• You have not purchased Whois yet and want to compare it with other products before you make a decision.
• You want more data
• You want more value for your money
• The data from Whois is not actionable for you. You want to do more than cold outreach. You want to create relationships instead of an intrusion.

If your reason is any of these except the first one, this article is going to help you. What about the first one? Like I mentioned earlier, all products that are using privacy and data regulation-friendly methods will have the same identification rate. A product having a better identification rate may be crowdsourcing the data or using the data from other customers to serve you. But, this data might be sourced using techniques like fingerprinting and third-party sourcing, which might break privacy laws like GDPR. E.g., You go to website A that uses the tool and sign up using your work email. The tool maps your IP with your domain, and when you go to Website B that also uses the tool, it will identify you even though you have not signed up and are not using a company IP.

There is an anecdotal experience that I share every time I talk about this. I visited a website (where I never signed up) from my home internet using Incognito mode, and I was shown a dynamic widget that identified me as an employee of Salespanel. If I were a privacy-focused lead, I would certainly not be impressed by this stunt.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about everything else and get you an alternative that serves your desires.

Salespanel as an alternative

Salespanel is a marketing enablement software that helps customers identify, track, qualify and nurture leads and create a seamless data synchronization process between Sales and Marketing. Salespanel enables you to optimize your customer engagement with data and connect your marketing to revenue while bringing critical data intelligence to Sales that help them close more deals.

Salespanel also identifies companies and provides you a list of prospects, but it is only one of our features. The similarities with Whois start and end here.

Pricing: Whois Visiting VS Salespanel

It is natural to expect higher prices since Salespanel has many features other than company identification out of the box. But, that is not the case. Whois Visiting and Salespanel have a very similar pricing structure, and both products charge unique visitors.

Salespanel’s basic plan lets you track 1000, 2000, and 5000 unique visitors for $49, $99, and $149 per month, respectively. On the other hand, Whois Visiting lets you track 1000, 2000, and 4000 unique visitors a month for $69, $99, and $139, respectively. Almost the same!

Salespanel’s growth plan costs $249/month for tracking 10,000 visitors per month, while Whois Visiting costs $239/month. But you get so much more! And, let’s talk about that.

Do more than company deanonymization

Salespanel is a complete visitor intelligence and marketing enablement software. Salespanel helps you capture leads from your web forms, live chat, and email marketing campaigns, segment and qualify them using various data attributes, run account-based marketing, create sales and marketing alignment, and the list goes on.

If your focus has solely been on visiting companies so far, using tools like Whois, you will realize what you were missing out on (crucial lead attribution) as soon as you start seeing the data on Salespanel.

Salespanel works with all your newsletter software, support chat, third-party web form software, and email clients. It will also enrich your CRM with a lead’s activity information. Salespanel tracks the complete customer journey of your visitors from the time they were anonymous and up until the purchase is complete. Salespanel can even track them for post-conversion nurturing.

Here are some of our top features:

• Multi-channel lead capture without integration
• Visitor intelligence (more on that later)
• Real-time tracking
• Segmentation
• Lead scoring
• Website triggers
• Marketing automation triggers
• Real-time alerts

Salespanel offers a complete tracking and enablement package that goes beyond lead generation.

Work on all visitors (even if they are never identified)

As I have mentioned before, the company identification rate is only 10-25%. What about the rest of your visitors?

Salespanel tracks all of your visitors. When a lead visits your website, it tracks what they did, where they found you from, which marketing campaigns they engaged with, and how much time they spent on each page. If you set up custom triggers, it can also track which website elements your visitors engaged with. If the visitor’s company is identified, that information is also added.

This set of information helps you create a customer profile for all users and qualify them in real-time. You can then serve highly personalized content, get qualified leads to priority sales, retarget them on social media platforms and also create lookalike audiences of your best visitors. The possibilities are truly endless.

When a visitor ends up signing up, Salespanel will turn the anonymous visitor profile into an identified ‘lead’ profile and provide you activity details of the lead both before and after sign up.

You can also fire up Reports on Salespanel and get complete B2B analytics in real-time.

Website personalization based on company lookup data is available on Whois starting for $999/month. Salespanel, on the other hand, lets you personalize the experience based on data and segments you create for not only companies but also signed-up leads and visitors. Website personalization is available on Salespanel’s $499/month scale plan.

Segment and qualify your leads

Salespanel helps you segment and qualify your leads based on all the available personal (for identified leads), firmographic, and behavioral data attributes. For lead qualification, Salespanel provides both predictive (automatic) and rule-based (manual) lead scoring solutions. These features are only found on higher-priced products.

Lead Scoring: Using this feature, you can set up your own custom workflow to gradually qualify your leads using several data points available on Salespanel.

Predictive Lead Scoring: Salespanel uses machine learning to analyze data from our lead qualification engine and adds a quality score to your leads without needing any input from your side. So, every lead gets a score.

Lead Temperature: Lead Temperature tracks the behavior of your lead and notifies your sales team when leads show high intent.

You can create thresholds and alert your sales team through push notifications, emails, or a communication platform like Slack to help them strike conversations when leads are hot.

Final thoughts

Salespanel provides you a lot more features at the same price point as Whois. If you want to compare the data, it is best to fire up Salespanel’s free trial and compare the data with what you get on Whois in the same period of time. Compare the two side by side, and you will have your answer. For us, the choice is obvious!