SalesGenius Launches: Track Sales Leads
Michael Arrington
16 comments »
Genius, Inc. launched their first product tonight: SalesGenius. It’s targeted to sales and marketing teams and allows these professionals to track the activities of sales leads on their corporate websites. CEO David Thompson, a former WebEx executive, gave me a walkthrough last week.
A lot of analytics packages already offer the ability to track user behaviors on websites. The difference with SalesGenius is that it requires absolutely no IT integration on the company side, and ties actions to specific leads. The method that they use to do this is actually quite clever.
If you are a sales professional, you use the SalesGenius Outlook plugin or web based email product to send an email to a lead. Any URLs back to your corporate website are automatically converted to Genius URLs, which are served through a proxy and allow Genius to track their clicks and subsequent actions on the site. The sales professional can then contact leads with the additional information that Genius provided to them.
This isn’t a consumer facing application, but a lot of sales people read this site and I think this may be very relevant to them. The basic product is $49/month per user and includes a 30 day free trial.
There are aspects of the service that trigger questions of privacy. For more, see Dan Farber, who says it’s “Not exactly a stroke of genius, but useful” and Rafe Needleman, who calls aspects of the service “disturbing”.
But is this service evil?
yeah, yeah.
As someone involved in marketing, this will be a really useful tool to help us track whether the messages we are sending out are actually useful, and generate interest.
One of the comments above says “but is this service evil”. I have to say that if you are doing legit marketing it actually helps you stop annoying people with email they don’t want. If you don’t know that people aren’t interested in what you are saying, you probably will carry on annoying them. This is a basic principle of marketing as it allows you to target the correct message at the correct people, making your marketing more effective.
I’ve only progressed as far as creating a free trial account and stepping through the quick start guide [hmm... i guess the folks at salesgenius know exactly which pages, and for how long!] but so far SalesGenius is underwhelming me. Whelming at best.
Most importantly, it’s only telling salespeople about the results of outgoing email marketing, not overall site visitor actions.
Most companies doing email marketing have already subscribed to another product (e.g. campaigner, quivamail, constant contact.) Migrating from their current product to SalesGenius is going to be a pain as, far as i can see, SG ony imports a CSV of customer contact details - no prior reporting history. So all your marketing reports will be in two chunks - pre- and post-SG switchover. Ick.
I think Rafe way overstates how much insight SG gives the salesperson into the prospect’s behaviour. I wish every click in a user’s path translated into intended action that had a purpose, but any usability tester will tell you that a X% of clicks are “oops, i clicked on the wrong link,” “does this ‘more info’ link tell me about international orders or not?” “I don’t want one of these, but let me see what colours it comes in,” and “hey, that’s a pretty button, I wonder what it does?” from the user.
SG’s reporting gives you a lot of detail on the clicktrail of each email recipient, but it doesn’t appear to offer reporting roll-ups along the lines of “show me which click paths were the most popular off this email” or “where did most recipients go after they landed on this page?” - you can only follow the actions of individual users, which may not be as insightful as you’d wish.
Privacy concerns? OK, your entire click trail might be visible, but guess what: it could as easily be tracked via cookie dropped on you when you visit a landing page - this does not require SalesGenius to do.
In fact, if I was a marketer, I’d prefer to track user behaviour via cookie rather than proxied URL. That way I can aggregate behaviour from all visitors to my site, not just those who’ve received an email from my salesfolks.
Finally, if I’ve invested in a website, I’m doing email marketing to push customers to it, and the website’s not generating sales without follow-up from a salesteam, I have a website problem!
If most people aren’t aware that mostcompanies with an online presense track web activty, they’re in for a big shock. Just ask WebSideStory.
This product looks like great demoware and that’s about that.
Why? Because it’s trying to pitch as marketing product (web analytics with email) as a sales product (without any relationship handling).
I actually like the idea from a marketing angle, but don’t kid yourself. This isn’t a sales product.
How long will it be before the average business user, or even consumer for that matter catches onto this method of tracking. Even now my mom - NOT a techie in the least - knows that if she sees a link in an email to just type it into the browser to avoid getting directed to some other tracking/phishing URL (after I berated her for clicking on phishing URLs that looked like they were coming from her bank).
How long before people will learn to take a url http://www.domain.rsvp1.com and just kill out the rsvp1? Not long I don’t think - which would pretty much nullify the usefullness of this product altogether. You think WebSideStory and the like have issues with cookie deletion effecting accuracy of reporting data? Once the public realizes what’s going on with URL/proxy tracking the validity of tools that track this way will plummet - IMHO.
Does it integrate with SalesForce? Might fly better as an AppExchange application that could track leads through the entire sales lifecycle.
Alan nails it:
“Most companies doing email marketing have already subscribed to another product (e.g. campaigner, quivamail, constant contact.) Migrating from their current product to SalesGenius is going to be a pain as, far as i can see, SG ony imports a CSV of customer contact details - no prior reporting history. So all your marketing reports will be in two chunks - pre- and post-SG switchover. Ick.”
It’s a nice add-on product, but not nearly enough integration with other tools I’m using.
It’s important to note that SalesGenius is focused on the individual sales rep and his or her e-mail communication with prospects.
SalesGenius brings the rep additional insight into the actions a prospect takes, and the proxy-based technology is ideal for sales reps because they are not technical and cannot implement Javascript on their web site. Here’s an example of how SalesGenius provides a win-win:
Just Friday, Genius received a note from one of their customers, a sales person, who saw that a prospect visited their site each month and spent over 10 minutes there every month after receiving a newsletter. The sales person contacted the prospect who said he was glad to be called as he reads the newsletter every month, visits the site, but can’t figure out exactly how the product would be useful for his company. The sales rep walked him through potential uses and a sale was made. Our customer said, “I would have never called this company and they would have never called me… but Genius gave me the information I needed to make the call.”
Products in development by Genius address some of the other issues mentioned in this thread (anonymous and return visitors, more “marketing” type of communications, etc.) and will be announced later.
How is this web 2.0?
Who tried it?
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