By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA—Today, 80 percent of major purchases start with Internet research, but marketers can snag more buyers if they pay attention to what visitors actually do on their sites. So says FirstWave CEO, Richard Brock, who compares success in business to good golf. “You can’t stare at the ball and expect to win. You’ve got to look where you’re going and hit it down the fairway with conviction,” he says.
Founded in 1985, Atlanta-based FirstWave sells marketing automation tools to help companies generate leads and turn them into sales. It has 100 active customers for its various products selling it as software as a service. SaaS, says Brock, means smaller initial transactions, but provide recurring revenue. “We have a nice balance-sheet,” he says.
The secret to turning leads into buys is that “You have to engage the customer,” says Brock. “You have to give them something of interest at different touch points or they’re gone.”
At one time the big company with the largest booth at an industry trade event vacuumed up all the business, but that has changed, notes Brock, who says small companies that nurture their leads can compete effectively for a share.
But the Internet also broke the traditional sales cycle, Brock adds. “Today you have to work on an efficient margin. You can’t get away with being sloppy.”
Customers today don’t want a sales person calling on them at the office. They want to be sold online. “The Internet is fundamentally game-changing in the way people buy products,” says Brock. “Email can go around the world in six seconds at the speed of light. A global economy at the speed of light is not the old economy.”
One common mistake companies make, he says, is asking questions based on their needs rather than the customer’s. They ask if they have budgeted a decision to buy, if the person is the decision maker, or if they plan to buy in 60 days.
“We think people are different than we are and don’t look in the mirror,” Brock says. “You haven’t earned the right to ask those questions and you’ll bore the potential buyer or spook them. They move on. You have to be easy to engage with. They didn’t come to answer questions. Buyers are ever more in control of the sales cycle.”
He suggests that sales reps ask, “How do I buy? How do I want to be treated? The buyer makes the rules.”
With proper lead nuturing, Brock says, “You can pick a ripe tomato from the vine every day.”
How is that done? By focusing on what the customer needs, Brock explains.
One way to do that is to assign points to actions potential customers take online. Those would include monitoring how much time a person spends on each page, what exactly they look at, and other factors. “You study their behavior,” says Brock.
For example, he says, when he went online to research a motorcycle purchase, his behavior should have led the company to engage him—although it did not. “I started to compare one motorcycle to another. They had good comparisons. But they should have seen that this person is really looking with a pop down saying, I see you’re looking at colors. Let me send you our factory color chart.” Then they could ask for an address.
“What we do is track behavior. It’s really very simple. You look at a total relationship.
Different point totals lead to different actions. In a 100-300 point range, the company might send the lead a newsletter based on products they showed interest in, while 500 to 750 might lead to a telemarketing call.
“Over that, you send them directly to a sales rep, to his phone or Blackberry and say this person is online right now. This is how you convert buyer interest.”
On the Web: www.firstwave.net
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