Let’s face it- we live in a world that is becoming more and more technology based. Customers are turning to the World Wide Web when they need a new product or service, and companies are relying on websites, blogs and online articles to boost sales. Inside sales people need to know where traffic is coming from in order to efficiently gather leads and prospects. There are three important ways that potential customers are brought to a website: direct traffic, organic traffic and social media traffic.

1. Direct Traffic

Direct traffic involves people accessing your website through a bookmark or by “directly” typing the web name into the URL. This sort of traffic does not depend on your SEO ratings or the popularity of your blog. It is important to understand how direct traffic works because it tells you that people view your company as credible, and they came directly to your page or blog to look for information and updates.

Direct traffic is great for lead generation because you know that the people purposefully came to your site, and they are interested in your product or service.

2. Organic Traffic

Any traffic that comes to your website or blog because of words typed into a search engine, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo, is known as organic traffic. It relies mostly on keywords and search engine optimization which help your website appear earlier in any search. The more content you have built surrounding your company (this can include multiple website pages, blogs, whitepapers and articles), the more likely you are to increase your sites popularity.

Organic traffic tells inside sales people that there are people out there that are in need of their product or service, and if prospected properly, they could become long-time customers.

3. Social Media Traffic

This is the traffic that comes from people reading your blogs, clicking on twitter links or visiting from sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Typically, these people can constitute both customers and competitors. Include an RSS feed button onto your blog to keep people coming back and measure the amount of time people spend re-tweeting your information and participating on your Facebook page.

If you monitor social media traffic properly, inside sales people can generate leads from the active participants because it shows that they are genuinely intrigued by the information that you are posting.

      If companies want to see their sales progress, they need to help their inside sales reps fully understand how to create leads from the tools that are out there.