B-to-B Marketer Follows the Money

September 27, 2006 1:46 PM
By Brian Quinton

Lead generation has been the name of the game in B-to-B online marketing for some time now. The long, complex decision cycles that precede most B-to-B purchases and the relatively high cost of the products have led most marketers to believe that they’re doing best by getting a name and phone number or e-mail address on the Web, then following that lead up offline.

Maybe so. But like any other conversion, B-to-B marketers are showing a growing interest in being able to track those leads all the way to a terminal sale. Knowing which of those Web visitors was ultimately responsible for a sale of products or services could allow better understanding of the true cost of lead generation, and 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 down the road. Or the lead may come online but the order is 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 tie all these stages together into a unified marketing-to-lead-to-sale conversion chain?

If you’re online software vendor Alpha Software, you go into the back and 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 marketing firm to show which search ads and channels brought you the leads that converted best.

And when you’re sure you have the new application working well for your own purposes, you consider maybe—just maybe—licensing it out for other B-to-B vendors to use.

Alpha’s flagship product is the Alpha Five database software, which is sold online, through call centers and through several vendor resellers. Online, Alpha offers a trial version download of the software with a minimal sign-up—the basis for its online lead generation program.

Working with its search engine marketing firm, Boulder CO-based SmartSearch Marketing, Alpha was able to track cost per click for its SEM efforts and then to calculate cost per lead generated. But the company realized that neither of these measures brought them all the way to knowing their 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 when 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 good cost per click or per lead translated into a favorable conversion metric.

A good real-world example of Alpha’s dilemma was the advertising they had traditionally 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 common-sense assumption, but it was wrong.”

That troubled Alpha, a company with a long enough history to have done lots of direct marketing in the pre-Internet days. At least when you rented a mailing list, you had a clear picture of how well you could expect those prospects to convert. But marketing online without visibility to the end of the sales cycle was like driving down the road blindfolded, Rabins says.

Alpha started solving the lead-tracking problem by scattering globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) all over its Web pages, to enable tracking unique visits from keywords. The company also can tell how many times someone has opened the trial software they’ve downloaded from the site. And of course, they have sales records in their 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. The company can look from initial search marketing referrals, using data courtesy of SmartSearch, through the download signup information and the cookie-tracked on-site actions.

The broad sales view that RoboLeads offers gets around that common B-to-B problem of leads pointing to one individual and purchases coming through another. By bridging online activity with sales data, Alpha is able to infer that the sale to “Mary@company.com” probably came about because “John@company.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, thanks to the ability to set up queries that can 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.”

Rabins discussed the Alpha lead-tracking platform in a presentation earlier this month at the Direct Marketing Association’s B-to-B Interactive conference in Scottsdale AZ, speaking alongside SmartSearch president and founder Patricia Hursh

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 generally.”

Posted on September 27, 2006 05:35 PM

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