Genius.com Adds Instant E-Mail Marketing to the Mix

On-demand business-to-business marketing vendor Genius.com has developed a new collaborative e-mail marketing module that focuses on lead qualification and prioritization.

MarketingGenius brings together the sales and marketing departments. To a certain extent, it adds a service element, as the prospective lead receives personalized attention from the marketing department during the lead-qualification process, explained Parker Trewin, a spokesperson for the company.

"This product gives marketing the ability to send e-mails on behalf of anyone in the sales department," he told CRM Buyer. The visibility between the two groups means that sales and marketing are able to track exactly when a lead qualifier has turned a prospective lead into a sales opportunity.

A permission-based system, it allows marketing to send and track personalized e-mails to any sales contacts. Its Instant Promos feature lets users craft Web campaigns on the fly. Marketers can use this feature to compose and post personalized content on the company Web site with no tagging. They can deliver custom offers instantly to certain customers, or encourage visitors to chat live with sales reps who are immediately available.

The application offers scalability with respect to the number of e-mails sent out per campaign, as well as some lightweight automation and enhanced reporting tools.

MarketingGenius will be available as part of the Genius Pro product line on June 30.

Deeper Inroads

The application represents a deeper step into the marketing arena for Genius.com, which launched with the intent of making a mark in Sales 2.0 technology -- a category that incorporates Web 2.0 technology into the sales cycle with the goal of increasing the salesperson's effectiveness.

"Before, Genius.com was focused on frontline sales," Trewin said. "Marketing could use it, but we didn't have advanced e-mail capability that allowed marketing to quickly and easily create an e-mail campaign and have those results instantly delivered to sales."

Going forward, he said, the company will be focusing on both sales and marketing features. Adding more functionality around service is a possibility as well, albeit a distant one. "We are looking at the roadmap and see all kinds of opportunities and possibilities," noted Trewin.

The 10 Percent Gap

Genius seized on better lead qualification and prioritization following a survey it conducted with CSO Insights of more than 2,000 sales and marketing executives. The results indicate that the traditional industry disconnect between sales and marketing translates to a loss of 10 percent of potential business.

By solving this problem, the survey results suggest, a company could close up to 10 percent more business and support the 40 percent of sales reps who typically do not meet their quotas.

Genius is not the first vendor to attempt to integrate the sales and marketing functions, Barry Trailer, managing partner with CSO Insights, told CRM Buyer. However, vendors have failed in many previous attempts to fully bridge the gap.

"People say sales and marketing in the same breath," noted Trailer, "but in fact, these are two siloed functions stand next to each other, bumping shoulders but never really meeting." For instance, half of all leads are self-generated by the sales rep, suggest data gathered for the survey.

Until users start reporting back on their experiences with MarketingGenius, said Trailer, the jury will be out on the application's efficacy.

"It address a clear need that is obvious," he said. Other pluses in its favor include a straightforward user interface and a balance between sharing too much information between sales and marketing and, on the other end of the spectrum, not enough.