Turning Sales Into Science

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Leads.com, for example, converts a customer's online queries into e-mails that are sent directly to an advertiser's in box. Then there are pay-to-call services such as eStara and Ingenio, which convert online ads into phone calls by posting a toll-free number in a Web ad. Clients are charged a certain amount per call, and, unlike with typical phone calls, businesses can track the origins of each lead--and, as a result, the efficacy of the ad campaign. Prices vary, depending on the nature of the campaign, ranging from $2 to as much as $30 per call. But studies suggest that it's worth the expense: According to one survey, pay-to-call has been found to have lead conversion rates three to five times higher than traditional Web text ads.

Case In Point
In January 2006, Kevin Couser, the CEO of Couser Supply, a construction supplies company in Woodlawn, Maryland, got an e-mail on his BlackBerry from a hotel engineer at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C. The hotel, which was undergoing a renovation, was looking for someone to supply ceiling tiles. The engineer, it turned out, had found Couser Supply through an advertisement on the Web at Google's local pages--an ad placed for him by Leads.com. The Hyatt account ended up bringing in $23,000. And such results are hardly unusual.

Couser sets a fixed monthly online ad budget, picks keywords, and Leads.com does the rest, bidding on keyword auctions and plotting the most cost-effective balance of keywords and placements. Couser gets 40 to 50 sales requests a week, many delivered directly to his e-mail account. In fact, he now gets so much business online that he's pretty much stopped buying print ads. While he's spending a lot more for marketing--nearly $3,800 a month, or 20 percent more than in the past--he's getting a far greater return on his investment. The company's revenue has grown from $1.9 million in 2004 to more than $4 million in 2006. Says Couser, "When people go on the Internet locally they've already decided to buy. They are just looking for somewhere to buy it."

5. Focus on your best prospects

The Products
Eloqua, ExactTarget, VerticalResponse

How They Work
All sales leads are not created equal. The challenge is identifying the promising ones and giving them top priority. In the past, this involved syncing sales data with often pricey demographic information, a service that was well beyond the reach of most small businesses. But in a Sales 2.0 world, that's no longer the case. Software from companies like Eloqua and ExactTarget lets marketers sift through data contained in, say, an online sweepstakes entry, to more easily identify likely buyers. The software ranks your leads, based on a complex analysis of e-mail addresses, the tenor of a response, and other factors. That makes it easier to focus subsequent campaigns on better targets.

Case In Point Bella Pictures, a San Francisco-based wedding photography service that matches photographers with brides and grooms nationwide, was looking to beef up its customer database. So in conjunction with popular wedding sites the Knot and the Wedding Channel, the company launched a sweepstakes giving away photography services. Bella Pictures assumed interest would be heavy. But the company's sales staff found itself overwhelmed with nearly 5,000 entries a month. It was nearly impossible to keep up, let alone separate the strong leads from the weaker ones.

So Bella Pictures installed Eloqua Express, which is geared specifically to small companies. The software automatically filters each new entry through a rating system and ranks prospects on a scale of 1 to 100. In the 10 months since signing up with Eloqua, Bella Pictures has received about 40,000 sweepstakes entries. The software has enabled the company to screen out 35 percent instantly. "Typically, in marketing, people talk about sweepstakes and they say they give you lousy leads," says David Kreitzer, the company's director of inside sales. "We have found the opposite to be true--as long as you pick the right leads." At about $20,000 a year, Eloqua isn't cheap. But Kreitzer has no regrets. By focusing only on the strongest prospects, Bella Pictures has increased its number of face-to-face meetings some 75 percent. In addition to helping salespeople prioritize, the software led to valuable insights about the company's customers. Many respondents, for example, signed in from corporate e-mail accounts. Based on that information, the company is devising ways to target consumers in the workplace.

6. Warm up your cold calls

The Product
Before the Call

How It Works
So you've got your target list. Now it's time to start selling. Think a minute before you pick up the receiver. Do you know anything about the people you'll be calling? Do you know anything other than their phone numbers and job titles? The imperfect remedy for this vacuum of information has been a Google search. No longer. Services such as Before the Call automatically scour the Internet, data from providers like Hoover's and Factiva, and their own proprietary database for news articles. Before the Call can be integrated with CRM systems from Salesforce.com and Oracle OnDemand, making it easy to keep databases up-to-date and full of new and timely information. Before the Call charges about $75 to $125 per user per month.

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