Professional Documents
Culture Documents
- 68% of Americans or about 137 Million people use the Internet today
- As many as 97% of Internet users research products and services that they intend to buy online1
- In 2005, auto dealers are drawing an average of nearly 230 online prospects per month. This was
defined as people who had winnowed their car choices on other Web sites before clicking through
to the dealers’ sites. In 2004, the same question was asked and the result was 116 online prospects
- a virtual doubling in one year2
Given the above data, companies have recognized the importance of prospecting online. As a result we
have seen a marked rise in online presence and in online marketing campaigns. To highlight this point
consider the following:
- In 2005, 94 percent of the some 22,000 auto dealers in the United States have Web sites; one-
quarter of these auto web sites have come online within the last three years.
- One just has to enter “sales leads” into Google to find hundreds upon hundreds of companies that
can provide leads2
This increased investment in online marketing has created a glut of leads. While leads are plentiful, busi-
nesses are now faced with two major problems in converting these leads to sales. These are:
- Quality of leads
- Timely and effective follow up of leads
1. “America's Online Pursuits: The changing picture of who's online and what they do.” - Pew Internet & American Life Project’s (http://www.pewinternet.org) report on Internet
demographics in the US.
2. National Automobile Dealers Association Survey, Nov, 2005 – Referenced in http://www.townnews.com/articles/2005/11/03/publishers/pub081.txt
- REALTOR.com survey data shows that for realtors who don't respond immediately, the conversion rate
is only about 2 percent whereas realtors who respond to an online lead immediately, find their chances of
converting into a sale increase tenfold from 2% to 20%.
- Forrester reports that only 165,000 out of 1.8 million online sales leads are closed by the auto industry
each month. They point out that this is a problem with lead processing technologies and follow up.
Forrester suggests better performance could increase online vehicle sales by 40%3
- According to a survey by the CMO Council and the BPM Forum, business executives placed the opportu-
nity costs of lead losses at between 10 and 20 percent of all sales.
This data clearly shows the importance of timely follow of sales leads. Businesses that recognize the
importance of timely follow up usually have implemented the processes and tools to enable it. Typically
the process involves, receiving leads and manually entering them into a lead tracking or sales force auto-
mation (SFA) system. These systems – depending on their sophistication, may automatically reply/market
to the leads, distribute/assign the leads to sales people, schedule appointments and reminders and track
overall follow up. One would think that tools like this should help solve all the lead follow up issues. How-
ever, the reality is that even the best processes supported with the best lead tracking tools will often fail
because of the human element behind them. The two key problems areas are :
- Lead Capture
- Adapting to new SFA Tools
Leads are typically “auto-routed” i.e. sent one by one as they are processed by the lead source, or are
batched together and delivered periodically. Leads are usually delivered by email in text, pdf or spread-
sheets, fax or through an online system. ELG automates the capture of leads by automatically recogniz-
ing leads in email or electronic documents and then converting them into the appropriate formats suitable
for the specific applications or databases that in use by the business today. ELG has an underlying work-
flow engine that allows it to automate the process of routing the captured lead data into the lead tracking
or SFA systems. ELG has adapters/drivers for all major SFA or personal lead tracking systems including
Excel spreadsheets.
Unlike other sales lead process automation technologies, eGrabber actually automates - and hence elimi-
nates, the costly/unreliable manual effort required to enter sales leads into a lead tracking system and
automates the flow and coordination of lead information between existing applications. It does not require
a new application/system to take advantage of the sales lead data being captured.