Jesse Ouellette, founder of LeadMagic, explains how to turn anonymous website visitors into real conversations, and why most companies are wasting the data the moment they get it.
Here’s something that surprised me. Website visitor identification is finally mainstream. The tools are everywhere, the data is flowing, and companies of every size can now see who’s on their site. And yet a lot of them are blowing it in the first five minutes.
Jesse Ouellette, founder of LeadMagic, came back on Deconstructing Data to talk about exactly that. Jesse started as a BDR, worked his way up through field sales and frontline management, got fired, came back swinging with a lead gen agency, and then built LeadMagic, an API-first data platform for go-to-market teams. He describes his current mindset as “let’s build it, let’s ship it.” (His Wi-Fi had other ideas during our episode, but the insights still came through loud and clear.)
How does website visitor identification actually work?
Jesse has been doing this longer than most. Ten to fifteen years ago, as a sales rep, he’d pull his company’s WordPress logs, match IP addresses to companies, and pick his accounts based on who was actually visiting the website while everyone else was picking accounts from a list.
Today it’s a lot more sophisticated. There’s company-level identification (think Clearbit-style account matching), and now person-level identification that’s widely available through a growing number of vendors. At BDEX, we use a combination of cookie and non-cookie identifiers, which means we can still do a strong job of identifying visitors even when someone has cookies turned off. Then it’s about enrichment: attaching the right data so you know whether this person actually fits your ICP.
One thing I shared on the show: a lot of our clients aren’t B2B at all. We have our pixel on around 200 brands, including furniture retailers and airlines, and many of them use the data for direct mail. Not a postcard that says “we saw you on our site.” Something relevant, like the product they were browsing, now in blue.
What should you do with website visitor data once you have it?
This is where Jesse got really opinionated, and I agree with almost all of it.
The mistake he sees constantly is companies handing their visitor identification leads straight to their most junior salespeople.
“They sort of get it to their low-level people first. I think that’s a big problem because now you’re just like… you’re kind of a creep. You’re like, you were on our website, right?”
— Jesse Ouellette, Founder, LeadMagic
His counterintuitive advice? When an executive from a target account shows up, protect that account.
“Don’t give it to your SDRs. Actually, don’t give it to your cold email people… Just don’t give them the data and take that account and block it off.”
— Jesse Ouellette, Founder, LeadMagic
Instead, Jesse runs LinkedIn brand ads at that company, especially organic-feeling posts from the founder. And he shared a tactic he says he rarely talks about: go into Sales Navigator, find an older, low-engagement post from one of that company’s executives, and leave a genuinely thoughtful comment. No bots. Just real engagement where a buyer will actually notice it.
I do something similar. I’ll see someone on our site and just connect with them on LinkedIn without saying a word. More often than not, they message me first. “Oh, I was just on your website.” That’s the conversation you want.
“I think we took the wrong path with getting the most junior people to reach out to the most senior people.”
— Jesse Ouellette, Founder, LeadMagic
The reason this matters so much is scarcity. Most companies only get a handful of these senior-level visits. As Jesse put it, prospects “don’t give you a second chance.”
How do you bridge the gap between B2B and B2C data?
This was the topic I was most excited to dig into, because it’s a real pain point. Jesse Lee Zach, our co-host, put it perfectly from the B2B marketer’s side. You identify a company by IP and all you get is the office address. What if you actually want to send that person something?
That’s the gap. Sometimes you know the person’s work identity but need their personal email or home address. Other times you only have a personal email (matched from a cookie) and you need to connect it back to their work email and LinkedIn profile. Moving between those two worlds is hard, and it’s one of the core problems visitor identification companies, BDEX included, are working to solve.
Jesse pointed out that the market is crowded now, with RB2B, the 6sense drama, and hundreds of new players all claiming different accuracy levels. Many share the same back-end providers. My advice, and something I see our clients doing, is to run more than one provider in a waterfall. Different match rates, different accuracy, better combined coverage.
Jesse’s highest-value signal is multiple people from the same account:
“If you can find two to three people at a company that are all part of a group, that’s where you can really change the world with your sales organization.”
— Jesse Ouellette, Founder, LeadMagic
And he thinks this is a moment for the little guys:
“If you can get your privacy right and you can get your legal right… the smaller companies actually have a massive opportunity right now.”
— Jesse Ouellette, Founder, LeadMagic
Why does cheap cloud storage change the game for marketers?
Jesse spent years in the big data world, helping Fortune 500 companies on Hortonworks before the shift to Snowflake and Databricks. His take is that the cost of storing data has fallen so far that there’s no excuse not to keep everything.
“You can store an unreasonable amount of data for nothing. So the companies that figure this out are going to be the ones that lead the pack.”
— Jesse Ouellette, Founder, LeadMagic
I see the flip side of this with one of our clients. Because of FTC requirements, they have to keep about three years of data, and their storage bill runs around $200,000 a month. Sounds huge. But the volume they’re storing would have been physically impossible just a few years ago.
Jesse also believes the marketers who win from here will be the more technical ones who actually understand data. Looking ahead, I think ad targeting becomes fully AI-driven, with platforms deciding in real time who sees what. Jesse’s worry is trust. With AI-generated testimonials and “vibe hacking” on the rise, he believes brand and ethics will matter more than ever, because a brand caught using AI the wrong way may not get another chance.
What’s in LeadMagic’s tech stack?
Jesse always brings the goods here. His current favorites:
- Cursor, paired with Claude Code (he installs every Cursor update the moment it drops)
- DuckDB, an analytical database he runs locally alongside an LLM to chew through CSVs that are 200 to 300 gigabytes. He called it “total freedom of your data.”
- OpenRouter, whose models page he refreshes a few times a day looking for an edge
- shadcn/ui for building great UI components fast
- Claude Sonnet’s million-token context window
- Tinybird for streaming analytics
- Cloudflare, where LeadMagic is moving everything (we moved a lot of our pixel infrastructure there too)
He also mentioned LeadMagic built its own free logo tool after Clearbit started retiring its logo service.
The bigger picture
Visitor identification isn’t a secret anymore. The data is available to almost anyone. What separates the winners now is judgment: knowing which signals matter, who should act on them, and how to start a conversation without making someone feel watched. That’s a human skill, and it’s the part most companies skip.
Jesse’s advice boils down to this: treat your best visitor data like it’s precious, because it is. Put your most experienced people on it, lead with value, and let the prospect come to you. The companies that get that right, especially the smaller, faster ones, are going to eat a lot of lunch.
Want to connect with Jesse? Check out LeadMagic and follow Jesse on LinkedIn.
Want to identify more of your website visitors, accurately? BDEX delivers the most accurate identity resolution in the industry, bridging B2B and B2C data. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert.”
Watch the full episode: From Clicks to Connections: Data Matching and Scalable Infrastructure on YouTube
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
