We recently had a discussion with a vendor who, in the process of extolling his web analytics product, said his company’s technology went beyond clicks and conversions. That ended up being troublesome for two reasons:

First, we’d be happy with reliable information on clicks and conversions, thank you. We’re not convinced we’re getting it from some of our existing resources. So we weren’t about to let a sales guy get away with changing the subject because he didn’t want to address our concerns.

And second, he offered a solution that was even worse. His company’s megabucks solution, engagement mapping, would track the activity of individual site visitors and try to give appropriate “credit” to other media, like online ads that a visitor may have seen, instead of just the last click.

That’s trying way too hard. It’s building a technology solution to a marketing question. And it’s incredibly techno-centric: creating a complex system to count other online influences, while ignoring the multitude of non-Internet media – like e-mail, print ads, trade shows, direct mail, or sales calls – that may also have contributed to that conversion.

In all fairness, I don’t mean to single this guy out for ridicule; we’d heard the same thing from his competitors.

The problem is that the real solution does not involve a new technology. It requires a new hyperintegration model for understanding how marketing connects to the sales process in a 2.0 world. That model has at least three main parts:

• a branding side that takes prospects through the AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action) process, getting the preliminaries out of the way.
• a response side that tracks how clicks turn into conversions. This portion finds the transactional buyer and gives him a quick and easy way to get what he wants (increasing sales and lowering cost of sale).
• a cultivation side that takes interested prospects and cultivates them, maintaining top of mind awareness while their current vendor stumbles, their design cycle matures, or their new budget is approved. In light of the pressures on sales, this approach is a real opportunity for marketing to help companies and build a working relationship with sales.

If there are any vendors out there who can offer that solution out of the box, give us a call.