Understanding the New World Order

This blog is geared towards enlightenment of the New World Order and the implicatiopns if each and everyone of us allow it to happen.

Sunday, June 19, 2005

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?

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