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Interview of LeadGenesys President, Jeff Kostermans


Earlier this week I had the opportunity to catch up with the President of LeadGenesys (lead/demand generation solution), Jeff Kostermans. During our chat I was able to get Jeff’s insight on their latest product Pipeline Builder. Check out our chat below:

[Manoj]: Tell us a about your Pipeline Builder product and how B2B organizations can leverage it?

[Jeff Kostermans]: It’s essentially advanced Caller ID for the website, so it reveals who is checking out your website – before they fill out a form. You can instantly correlate anonymous website visitors to the contacts in your CRM or the prospect database that can be managed within Pipeline Builder. You can also add new contacts with lookups into list partners that include Jigsaw, Hoovers, ZoomInfo and soon LinkedIn. With the integrated email engine and the Outlook Plug-in, both marketing and sales can also send tracked emails that cookie the recipient, to reveal even more information when valuable prospects visit the website. Sales teams apply their own criteria to trigger instant sales alerts on truly interested prospects. This enables them to exponentially improve their connection rates, and very efficiently put more opportunities in the funnel. Plus marketing departments can now recoup their lost investment on anonymous PPC campaigns, correlate website visitors to the pipeline, and record a more complete view of hand-raising activity that can synch with the CRM or trigger instant alerts.

[Manoj]: How does Pipeline Builder fit into an organization’s sales process?

[Jeff Kostermans]: With complex B2B sales, the company with the most responsive and efficient sales team wins the deal 9 out 10 times…not the one with the best or least expensive product. Since B2B sales cycles can be quite long, the objective is to accelerate sales cycles of truly interested prospects and enable the sales team to be laser focused on the best prospects. Leveraging the Pipeline Builder, sales teams can define and adjust their criteria for receiving hand raising alerts. Prospects conducting early stage research on your website can be contacted and qualified much more efficiently. Prospects considering the competition will most likely visit your website as part of their due diligence, and if the alert criteria is met, the appropriate sales team member can get an instant alert and intercept the buyer. After all, in sales, timing is key.

[Manoj]: How accurate are the prospect details from databases such as Jigsaw, Hoover, LinkedIn and ZoomInfo?

[Jeff Kostermans]: While we do bundle in discounted subscriptions to these sources, in our experience, you’ll generally want to select contacts that have been validated within the last six months. LeadGenesys has unique arrangements with these sources enabling you to be credited on any disputed contact info.

[Manoj]: What types of software/services does Pipeline Builder integrate with?

[Jeff Kostermans]: LeadGenesys can integrate with all the major CRM providers as well as Microsoft Outlook. Although the sales team gets complete information within each instant alert, the benefit to integration is that all the hand raising activity recorded in Pipeline Builder gets appended to the contact record in your CRM. Bi-directional synching also enables you keep the Pipeline Builder up to date with your CRM data.

[Manoj]: Please describe the implementation process and when you can start seeing leads?

It’s as simple as pasting a line of code into your website pages. You instantly see who is checking out your website as soon as the code it there. The free, no obligation trial begins with a set of “starter rules” for triggering instant sales alerts that are based on best practices – but those can easily be tailored on the fly to your own triggering criteria.


[Manoj]: What separates Pipeline Builder from its competitors?

[Jeff Kostermans]:

  1. Unlike other solutions, Pipeline Builder triggers INSTANT sales alerts. A delayed alert or report of visitors means the sales team still has to cold call vs warm call. Plus it’s a hassle to manage those reports for the whole team.
  2. Pipeline Builder does not just record anonymous visitors. It also correlates visitors your prospect base – and enables both marketing and sales teams to send tracked emails that build a more complete picture of true prospect interest.
  3. The solution is able to custom grade prospects, which can factor into your rules for triggered alerts.
  4. The solution is a subset of the LeadGenesys Platform and Lite Platform, so B2B firms seeking to do more than blend website tracking and emailing can seamlessly grow into those solutions that include automated lead nurturing, intelligent landing pages, and other marketing automation features. Why have a separate disjointed tool to track visitors when you can do so much more with single application ?

[Manoj]: What is the cost of Pipeline Builder?

[Jeff Kostermans]: Depending on the number of users, the cost will range between just $3 and $4 per user per day.

Informed Decisions and Proactive Measure through Economic Literacy

By : Sweta Sharma, Chief Operating Officer, InRev http://www.in-rev.com

Gone are the days when public data used to be confined to the walls of government buildings and there usage was limited to budget formation or high level government activities. We are no longer content with our money lying in the bank in a safe fixed deposit. The need for more has brought stock markets to our doorsteps. This has not just created more jobs for analysts but forced each of us to be analysts. And why shouldn’t we be when we have all facts and figures on our coffee table?

Why should we be dependent on CNN or BBC to tell us what the GDP of our country is? Why should we know from someone else that the unemployment rate has been growing over years? We don’t need to experience a dot-com bubble burst or a Subprime crisis to realize that the economy is volatile and one must keep a close watch.

It’s the age of informed decisions and proactive measures. The problem then is to make sense of the available public data. Most of the time, it’s difficult to figure out where you can find the information for what you are looking for. If that’s not painful enough, most of the available data is not presented in a user friendly format. Being an analyst, it was easier for me to pull the data from these sites and get meaning out of them. It was a time consuming process but I was paid for this. This need to have information presented in a way people could understand gave birth to the concept ‘F-Cube’.


What started as a source of data on labor statistics, today hosts a series of data on numerous parameters ranging from green energy to Crime. The new data sources are just the initial steps towards the end vision. The home page now has current as well as most talked about topics on economics from Twitter.

The various data sources added to F-Cube include Economic Analysis, Green Energy, Demography, Federal and Crime. Apart from the new data sources, a Knowledge Repository is also added to F-Cube. This would provide information on various topics ranging from general economy to the current trends.

We are currently working on other available data and would make it available in the future releases. F-Cube is not just an attempt to let you make informed decisions but also help you take proactive measures. For this we would soon be coming up with the forecasting of the various parameters. F-Cube is started with US data but would be going global as per the data availability of different nations.

Note : FCube http://www.f-cube.us/ is the Free Economic Reporting Portal from InRev.

Follow Sports Teams with Yahoo

According to the Yahoo Search blog, Yahoo has added some additional functionality to the search results page when searching for professional or collegiate sports teams:

Starting today, when you search for your favorite major league or college sports team on Yahoo! Search, a new shortcut appears with the real time score, the last game’s score, and the date and time of the next game. You’ll also find quick links to the team’s page, as well as news, scores, schedules, stats, and photos.

PS – We used the example of Denver Nuggets above because Boston is out and we’re not huge fans of LA or Cleveland.

Top 5 Things Marketers Can Do Now – Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik lead a discussion sharing the “Top 5 Things Marketers Can Do Now”. Listeners learned how to implement Avinash’s tips for using data-driven insights to guide their marketing message and media strategies immediately. They also walked away knowing how to improve marketing efficiency, drive insights into consumer behavior, and generate greater returns on their marketing investments.

How Canada Feels about Social Networks

Delvinia recently released a study in which they try to determine the behavior and attitudes of Canadians towards Social Networks. Here is a summary of Delvinia’s findings:

Highlights about Canada’s view towards Social Networking include:

  • 83% of female Canadians aged 18-30 feel digital technology allows for easier social connections, compared to their male counterparts at 76%.
  • Only 6% of NGen and 4% of Gen X report visiting recent media darling, Twitter, in the last month. The same as other, less talked about social networks including Hi5, DIGG and Tagged.
  • There is a significant difference between how frequently Canadians visit social network sites vs. post content. YouTube experiences the greatest difference between views and posts – for example, while 83% of NGen visited YouTube only 6% posted content. While 59% of Boomers visited the site, only 4% posted content.

When sharing information online, here’s how Canadians felt:

  • No surprise, NGen feel the safest about sharing any type of personal information online but are more comfortable sharing credit card (79%) rather than address and phone number (50%).
  • The majority of NGen and Gen X feel safe about sharing and using credit card information; Boomers & Canadians 65+ are significantly less confident (only 46% of Boomers, 39% of 65+ feel safe).
  • Only the majority of NGen are comfortable sharing demographic information (53%) – the majority of all other generations are neutral or not comfortable sharing information like their age, gender and marital status.
  • Most Canadians would prefer NOT to share their addresses or phone numbers online. NGen is most comfortable (yet only 29% feel safe), while Boomers are least comfortable (only 22% feel safe).

You can download the full report on Online Communities and Information Sharing at the Delvinia Insight website.

Results are based on 11,559 regionally and demographically representative* AskingCanadians™ representative panelists surveyed, 50/50 gender split, broken down
as follows:

  • 1,112 18-30 year olds (NGen)
  • 3,432 31-44 year olds (Gen X)
  • 6,222 45-65 year olds (Boomers)
  • 793 65+

Are You Attending eComXpo? Free Virtual Conference

Affiliate marketing industry’s top global experts share their insights on how online marketing strategies need to shift in 2009 at eComXpo on July 8-9. They will discuss the latest online tools that both merchants and retailers need to consider to drive ROI and remain competitive in the current landscape.

A key session at the event is a presentation by Chris Anderson, Editor-In-Chief of Wired, talking about developing money models in a cashless economy.

“The internet has enabled lots of businesses and business models to go digital. And one of the economic advantages of digital is that the marginal costs of anufacturing and distribution are zero, or close to it. This means that you can now experiment with giving away one thing to sell something else. It’s no surprise that virtually all businesses on the internet are based on ‘free’ in one way or another,” said Anderson.

Joining the ranks is Rohit Bhargava, Author of Personality Not Included, who shares his innovative strategy on how merchants can use Twitter to generate sales within 30 days. Talking about his presentation, he says, “There’s a growing trend of online retailers using Twitter to promote direct sales and therefore it is important to use it right.” He also added that the increasing role of individuals and personality in driving higher sales and customer loyalty mean that marketers need to change the way that certain pages and processes work in online retail to increase customer loyalty.

eComXpo features a combination of presentations and panel discussions on a variety of topics including social media, marketing accountability, m-Commerce, content optimization, affiliate management and incentivizing, search marketing, new customer acquisition, channel attribution, RSS marketing and black hat vs. white hat.

Debra Haym, Executive Director of eComXpo at New York based conference organizer, Worldwide Business Research, said, “The research for this conference with high caliber marketing executives indicates an intense interest in seeking out the opportunity to discuss many pressing and urgent issues of the day. We have worked hard to create a speaker line up to provide the best catalyst for fresh thinking and energized debate. We expect eComXpo to provide an exceptional platform and that, going forward, it will be viewed as having been a significant and influential gathering.”

eComXpo is 100% virtual and free. For additional information on eComXpo, please visit: http://www.ecomexpo.com/

This Weeks Must Reads in Internet Marketing

A short week up here in Canada is over (we just had Victoria day holiday on Monday). The Denver Nuggets and Orlando Magic have both won a game on the road – so things are looking very good. Aside from the NBA, there have been tonnes of great news stories from around the web:

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