Want to be a sales genius? Genius.com $10 million VC funding
UPDATE: Last November, Genius.com CEO David Thompson shared with me his excitement for the "on-demand, real-time, 1-to-1 marketing solutions for sales and marketing professionals" opportunity. Today, Thompson's excitement has been seconded by a $10 million Series B funding led by Menlo Park VC firm Mohr Davidow. The funding is to suport product development, marketing, and sales initiatives.
Genius.com co-founder & CEO David Thompson is on a sales mission: Help sales people sell, better.
A marketing veteran of WebEx Communications, Thompson knows what it takes to make a sale online and he is applying that knowledge for the benefit of all sales people with the “on demand, real time, 1-1 marketing” Genius platform.
Thompson co-founded Genius.com with Robert Seidl, CTO, in 2004 with the goal of developing and bringing to market a personal web analytics solution for individual sales reps and corporate sales teams.
I spoke with Thompson today about the latest addition to the Genius platform: Genius Interactive.
The Genius platform integrates elements of web analytics, marketing automation and CRM to present real-time Web behavior data as individual customers click through corporate Web sites in response to emails and other online media channels.
Genius differentiates itself from competing Web analytics solutions by enabling tracking of 1-to-1, named-prospect data at Web sites on a turnkey basis.
The Genius product pitch:
Typically, tracking systems such as traditional web analytics or marketing automation applications require significant coding, or "instrumentation", of a corporate web site in order to correlate web visitors with specific sources of the visit, such as an e-mail or a Google ad word. With Genius on-demand applications, end users are able to instantly access customer behavior data through the Genius Tracker, a real-time AJAX client that resembles an Instant Messaging Client, without any knowledge of Web site tracking codes or instrumentation.
The Genius sales pitch is also client-friendly:
Try SalesGenius free for 15 days! No obligation. No credit card required. Just sign up and start sending fully trackable e-mails instantly.
Monthly subscriptions start at $29 for the ability to e-mail up to 500 recipients per month.
The Genius Interactive Edition currently in beta enables presentation of personal greetings and chat invitations to Web site visitors via overlays to existing Web site content.
Genius.com promises to make every sales person a sales genius:
Know which prospects are interested enough to open your e-mails and visit your site,
Prioritize your call list based on prospect response,
Eliminate time wasted on cold leads,
Personalize your pitch based on what areas of your site the prospect visited,
Close more deals by focusing on the hottest prospects first and tailoring your pitch to their interests.
Genius is calling out to sales people everywhere to “Get smart about your customer.”