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Headquarters:
eMaximation, Inc.
58 South Park Square; Suite N
Marietta, GA 30060
Phone: 800-900-8321
Fax: 678-348-7234
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The following excerpt is from The Wall Street Journal interview with eMaximation's CEO. Portions of the interview appeared in a WSJ article dated February 11, 2002.
So how did you get into this business? Where did it all start?
When I realized that what frustrated the average sales person is that they were blind dialing into a base of largely unqualified 'suspects'. The essence of their career had turned from a professional sales person to a blind dialing telemarketer and they refused to do that. Nevertheless, the Internet was still a very effective source of leads, and companies had to respond.
I assume that one response was to hire additional sales staff to accommodate this lead flow?
Yes. And they only sell one of 100 Internet leads if they are lucky. With traditional media one out of one hundred was not accepted. Companies could not achieve what they were able to achieve with traditional media. It will be less efficient, even with blind dialers. To get back to the traditional conversion ratios experienced through print media you need to deploy a system like ours. And, they are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in salaries that could be largely reduced by the eMax system and done much more effectively.
We spoke recently with a company that claims to generate over 25,000 monthly leads from the Internet. But out of those 25,000, he sold only 300. How is that possible? Are Internet leads of a poorer quality?
In part…. as with all media, the vast majority of Internet leads will never be qualified buyers. But, the bigger issue is the manner in which Internet leads flow through the sales funnel. I would ask that company of the 25,000 inquiries how many of these leads spent four or more hours with your salespeople on the phone? What percentage? And, you are gonna hear this dramatically low percentage by comparison to the percentage of the traditional media leads that came in. Which is literally 100%, because they were inbound calls to the company. It's impossible for sales people to get on the phone with all 25,000 to qualify and sell them. Effectively, it's that connection that is the biggest difference between the traditional media lead that was in-bound that you got to talk to and sell from the very first step in the relationship. You cannot possibly sell a franchise or any other consultative product through the Internet because you cannot talk to the individual to get them motivated and to moving through your sales process.
Okay, so no matter how motivated I am as a buyer, it might just stop right there?
Yes, it just stops. Its amazing when we survey industries by posing as an mystery shopper and we find out how little follow-up is done with Internet leads - this is primarily the result of the degree of difficulty to contact and qualify and the lack of netted sales. Many companies live by the general assumption that Internet leads are not going to bear fruit.
And your system attempts to change this?
Yes, with Sales Campaign Automation. Our system automates the follow-up process to communicate with the Internet leads through 'TV-like' commercials that are delivered right to their PC. All the while the system is monitoring behaviors and collecting data to qualify the prospect, pushing them farther down the sales funnel. And this is done in a completely automated way…starting with lead origination on a portal site, corporate site, or anywhere else on the web our clients collect lead data. We have proprietary technology that parses lead data from the most common advertising sites. Our engine takes the data and populates it automatically into the eMax system as well as the client's contact management or SFA system, all in less than one second. All automated. Human resource is applied only when the system has indicated that a lead has reached a level of qualification that makes the initial sales call justifiable. We talk about 60% qualified as a good benchmark for this.
What are you hearing about success rates from your clients?
We primarily focus on our client's current performance on the Internet and then we write a proposal as to how we are going to improve that. The majority of our proposals call for a raise in benchmark performances by 50 to 100%. We attempt to achieve a return on the investment for our clients within 4-8 months.
And ROI would depend a little bit on what their franchise fee is?
Yes, however, the system contributes to reducing the cost to qualify and sell any consultative product at any price point.
So what's next for the company?
At this point, we have about 600 customers that are aggressively spending money on Internet advertising and marketing. We are also the response engine of choice for one of every ten franchising companies. We have recently moved into three new spaces as beta growth markets…Mortgages, Automotive, and Insurance. We believe the system has the same value proposition in those industries, and know we can achieve similar results for companies there.
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