SalesGenius Launches: Track Sales Leads

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”.