LEAD GENERATION HAS long been the name of the game in business-to-business. The lengthy, complex decision cycles that precede most B-to-B purchases and the relatively high cost of many products have led marketers to believe they're doing best by getting a name, phone number or e-mail address on the Web and then following up that lead offline.
They could be right. But, as with any other conversion, B-to-B marketers are showing a growing interest in tracking those leads all the way to the final sale. Knowing which of those Web visitors was ultimately responsible for a sale could allow better understanding of the true cost of lead generation, not to mention better optimization of marketing campaigns, from search-keyword bidding to customer segmentation and CRM.
But the problem with that end-to-end lead tracking has been the convoluted sales cycle. The executive who visits a B-to-B site and registers to download a white paper may not be the person who puts in the purchase order seven weeks — or seven months — later. Or the lead may come online but the order will be placed over the phone or through a sales call. And even if the transaction does happen online and via the same lead, he or she might be downloading at home but ordering from work. How do you link all these stages into a unified marketing-to-lead-to-sale conversion chain?
If you're online software vendor Alpha Software, you design your own proprietary tracking system. You populate it with all your lead-generation contacts and follow-up actions. You also work in data from your search engine marketing firm to show which search ads and channels brought in the leads that converted best.
Alpha's flagship product is Alpha Five database software, sold online, by phone and through several vendor resellers. On its Web site, Alpha offers a trial-version download of the system with a minimal sign-up — the basis for its online lead-generation program.
Working with SmartSearch Marketing, its search marketing firm in Boulder, CO, Alpha was able to track cost per click for its SEM efforts and then calculate cost per lead generated. But the company realized neither of these measures brought it all the way to knowing cost per sale.
“That made us nervous,” says Alpha co-founder and chairman Richard Rabins. “Without that knowledge, you can easily be deluded into choosing a keyword that costs 20 cents over a $10 one. And at the end of the day, the more expensive term may convert at a better cost per sale.” Alpha wanted to stop taking it on faith that a decent cost per click or cost per lead translated into a favorable conversion metric.
A good real-world example of Alpha's dilemma was the advertising it had done on the keyword “Excel,” Rabins says. This term was considered an obvious win since Alpha's product can be used to build database files that work like Microsoft Excel, but with more flexibility.
“We had a theory that if we delivered ads when users searched on ‘Excel,’ we could attract some of those prospects,” he says. “And in fact, we did. The problem is, none of those clicks or leads turned into sales. It was a commonsense assumption, but it was wrong.”
That troubled Alpha, a company old enough to have begun direct marketing in the pre-Internet days. At least when you rented a mailing list you had a clear picture of how well those prospects could be expected to convert. But marketing online without visibility to the end of the sales cycle was like driving blindfolded, Rabins says.
Alpha started solving the lead-tracking problem by scattering globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) all over its Web pages, which enabled unique visits from keywords to be trailed. The company was then able to tell how many times people opened the trial software they downloaded from the site. And, of course, Alpha has sales records in its database.
To match those clicking and on-site behaviors to final sales, Alpha's application (known internally as “RoboLeads”) builds a holistic picture of a customer's interactions with the site by taking data from different sources. Alpha starts by looking at initial search marketing referrals, using data from SmartSearch, then reviews the download sign-up information and on-site cookie-tracked actions.
The broad sales view that RoboLeads offers gets around that common B-to-B problem of leads pointing to one individual and sales coming from another. By bridging online activity with transaction data, Alpha can infer that the sale to “Mary@abccompany.com” likely came about because “John@abccompany.com” was acquired as a lead. That guess is all the more educated if Alpha can see that John visited the Web site 10 times, viewed 75 pages and activated the trial software 25 times immediately prior to Mary's purchase.
RoboLeads also has a future as a sales tool since it can set up queries that segment prospects. “We can query the database to find all the visitors who have downloaded the trial software in the last 60 days without buying yet, but who show signs of being serious,” Rabins says. “We can define ‘serious’ any way we like: people who've returned to the Web site 10 times, or who've viewed 40 or 50 pages. These guys are clearly in serious evaluation mode and should be called or e-mailed.”
Linking lead generation to actual sales is a concern voiced by many marketers, notes SmartSearch president and founder Patricia Hursh. “Web analytics companies like Omniture and WebSideStory are working on this linkage, but the products just aren't there yet. A lot of companies are developing homegrown solutions for their own marketing campaigns. And of course Alpha has an advantage, because database software is its main business.”
And RoboLeads, or some later version of it, may become part of that external business offering. SmartSearch is planning to show the lead-tracking application to some of its other B-to-B clients.
“Based on their reactions, this could be another software service that we offer,” Rabins says. “In building a program to solve our own marketing worries, it seems we may have come up with something that solves one of the hot issues in B-to-B marketing.”
