Customer Registration Platforms

I left the Web boom for the custom software development frontier and sold a bunch of projects with an MIT start up in Cambridge, MA that was bought by a NYSE listed graphic arts firm. With moderate success I moved forward to a dot com software Warranty company. With no success there I moved into Speech Recognition Sales. One of the things I figured out early on was that in order to make money in Speech Rec. I needed to sell a lot of phone calls. (We are a Speech Rec. application developer).

It dawned on me clearly in the parking lot one day to leverage my Warranty background (consumer electronics companies, appliance manufacturers and computer companies) to create a “product/warranty registration application” that would automate that process using a telephone. A telephone had a few things going for it that a web site and a paper registration card did not: The phone had the following preferences:

1) you could use a phone to fill out a registration card
2) you could multitask while phoning in your registration
3) the customer data capture process was a lot faster
4) the process was equally accurate (especially with reverse look ups on name and address databases
5) the biggest benefit by far was response rate—hands down

I went from one Speech Rec. start up to another in California and had not problem finding or selling the value proposition to Speech Rec. techies. Where I did have a problem was selling the concept to the industry. While I had success with companies like Hewlett Packard, Holmes Product Group, Proctor and Gamble I had a hell of a time rolling this product out past the expected pilot stage. I was not able to create enough momentum in the market to create a category killer.

In hind sight I know why I did not have massive success. Companies that are large multinational companies move very slowly and they typically do not do a lot of direct marketing to their consumers. For example Sony: here was a company that manufactured or OEM’s DVD players, they also had an entertainment division. I pushed and pushed for their ATTENTION to get them to see the value of registering a DVD customer with a telephone then uplifting them into an Action Adventure Movie of their choice. Their entertainment division was their razor blades division of the company.

This blog has a premise that can fulfill the following:

Who is doing successful lead generation today?
How to measure the success of lead generation: i.e. % of leads closed?
What is the typical cost of a lead using the 1,000 lead quantity as a starting benchmark?
Where are the new technologies?
Distinguishing on the different types of leads:
Web lead (banner ad, splash page, paid search etc…)
Direct mail lead
Newspaper lead (display and classified)
How fast can the leads be delivered from origination?
Is your lead company a lead origination company or a lead reseller?
How many times has the lead been sold before?
What are the new lead generation platforms? i.e. On product leads? For example I put stickers with 800’s on humidifiers and asked consumers to “call for important product information.” This is a very soon to be hot area that direct marketing companies have yet to exploit. So with this said I am interested to learn how you or your company are actually making a difference in the lead generation business?