During the course of watching my N.Y. Giants pummel the Patriots Sunday night, I took note that Salesgenie.com had two advertisements throughout the course of the game. It’s the second year in a row that Salesgenie has had a Super Bowl ad, and in addition to the advertisements being obvious and appalling to watch (which CEO Vinod Gupta has gladly accepted with pride in years past), for those of us in the industry I find the ads both a primetime reminder of what we do but also a horrific and misleading example of what CRM is all about.
This isn’t the first time I’ve come across Salesgenie.com ads, as I’ve seen and heard them both on television and radio. Lets get something straight: Salesgenie.com isn’t being confused as a CRM solution; it’s barely a nuts and bolts lead management solution. In reality it’s nothing more than a beefed up list provider, but judging by their advertising budget, Salesgenie is trying to go head-to-head with the likes of Salesforce.com.
Purchasing sales lists is nothing new and has been a part of selling for years, but I can’t help but to beg and ask the question: If you’re relying on Salesgenie.com to provide your sales department with qualified leads, what the hell is marketing doing? Providing businesses with the names and contact information of employees that have worked for other sales people hardly qualifies as a qualified lead. One of the purposes of CRM is to provide sales with well-cultivated, developed leads that lead to personalized introductions and relationships. Salesgenie.com is far from personalized. With the exception of small businesses and startups, what purpose is Salesgenie.com providing beyond any other list distributor?
If Salesgenie.com is your lead generation/qualification strategy, you might want to consider asking this guy for assistance.
Salesgenie is no where near trying to compare or compete with SFDC with their super bowl spending. Even though their campaigns are completely horrific, they actually have really good ROI for their marketing $$$’s. After last years superbowl campaign their daily site traffic tripled and they gained approx. 18,000 new customers from the ad spot.., they busted out a conservative estimate of a customer being valued at $1K for their lifetime.
18K New Customers x $1K ea = $18 Million in revenue – $3 Million ad cost = $15 Million ROI.
They are nothing more than a list/lead provider that is a subsidiary Info USA which is becoming the 10,000 lb gorilla in the direct marketing space that keeps gobbling up DM providers.., Direct Media is the latest to go down in the past few weeks. They provide an extremely minimal contact/addressbook type functionality and a few other bells and whistles.
Folks like Axciom are a better comparison for these guys