Sales representatives typicallyprospect for and obtain leads from a wide variety of sources. Today,in many industry segments such as Insurance, Loans, Real Estate andAutomobile sales, agents and representatives routinely rely quiteheavily on leads obtained online. This has to do with the fact thatmore and more Americans are going online. Consider the followingfacts:

- 68% of Americans or about 137 Millionpeople use the Internet today

- As many as 97% of Internet usersresearch products and services that they intend to buy online

- In 2005, auto dealers are drawing anaverage of nearly 230 online prospects per month. This was defined as people who had winnowedtheir car choices on other Web sites before clicking through to thedealers? sites. In 2004, the same question was asked and the resultwas 116 online prospects a virtual doubling in one year.

Given the above data, companies haverecognized the importance of prospecting online. As a result we have seen a marked rise in onlinepresence and in online marketing campaigns. To highlight this point consider the following:

- In 2005, 94 percent of the some22,000 auto dealers in the United States have Web sites; one quarter of these auto web sites have comeonline within the last three years.

- One just has to enter ?sales leads?into Google to find hundreds upon hundreds of companies that can provide leads

Source: NationalAutomobile Dealers Association Survey, Nov, 2005 ? Referenced inhttp://www.townnews.com/articles/2005/11/03/publishers/pub081.txt

This increased investment in onlinemarketing has created a glut of leads. While leads are plentiful,businesses are now faced with two major problems in converting theseleads to sales. These are:

- Quality of leads

- Timely and effective follow up ofleads

The quality of leads depends on suchfactors as the attractiveness of the offer, the construction andtargeting of the marketing campaign and effective coordinationbetween marketing and sales. These issues are somewhat easilyaddressed once the issue with lead quality is identified by thecompany.

On the other hand problems with timelyand effective follow up are a little more difficult to fix as theunderlying causes are most likely process related. Often there is noprocess or when a process exists, it is not being followedeffectively.

The Yankee Group estimates that up to80 percent of sales leads are either lost, go stale, or are simply never followed up on. This is despitethe fact that there is plenty of data that clearly shows that timely follow up to an online lead does helpimprove sales. Consider the following :

- REALTOR.com survey data shows thatfor realtors who don't respond immediately, the conversion rate isonly about 2 percent whereas realtors who respond to an online leadimmediately, find their chances of converting into a sale increasetenfold from 2% to 20%.

- Forrester reports that only 165,000out of 1.8 million online sales leads are closed by the auto industry each month. They point out that this isa problem with lead processing technologies and follow up.Forrester suggests better performancecould increase online vehicle sales by 40%.

- According to a survey by the CMOCouncil and the BPM Forum, business executives placed the opportunitycosts of lead losses at between 10 and 20 percent of all sales.

This data clearly shows the importanceof timely follow of sales leads. Businesses that recognize the importance of timely follow up usuallyhave implemented the processes and tools to enable it. Typically theprocess involves, receiving leads and manually entering them into alead tracking or sales force automation (SFA) system. These systems ?depending on their sophistication, may automatically reply/market tothe leads, distribute/assign the leads to sales people, scheduleappointments and reminders and track overall follow up. One wouldthink that tools like this should help solve all the lead follow upissues. However, the reality is that even the best processessupported with the best lead tracking tools will often fail becauseof the human element behind them. The two key problems areas are :

- Lead Capture

- Adapting to new SFA Tools

Even though Lead Tracking and SalesForce Automation tools can help automate most elements involved inthe lead follow up process, they rely on a manual process to getleads into the system. Typically most leads are delivered by email,fax or on web pages. A human has to physically transcribe the leaddata into the lead tracking or SFA tool. If lead volumes increase,then manual data entry can become problematic and the rest of thefine-tuned, automated system breaks down as well.

There is no dearth of sales leadtracking and SFA systems in the market today. With the adoption orimplementation of each, there tends to be a learning curve forpeople. Also, people tend to have private data in spreadsheets or inpersonal applications that they feel comfortable using formanipulating or storing the data. Given these realities, businessesalways end up with situations where the fancy tools end up being marginalized.

eGrabber's eMail-Lead Grabber (ELG)is designed to address the two specific problems we detailed above. ELG helps :

- Automate the capture of sales leads

- Enable and automate the sales leadsfollow up process using all the existing applications

Leads are typically ?auto-routed'i.e. sent one by one as they are processed by the lead source, or are batched together and deliveredperiodically. Leads are usually delivered by email in text, pdf orspreadsheets, fax or through an online system. ELG automates thecapture of leads by automatically recognizing leads in email orelectronic documents and then converting them into the appropriateformats suitable for the specific applications or databases that inuse by the business today. ELG has an underlying workflow engine thatallows it to automate the process of routing the captured lead datainto the lead tracking or SFA systems. ELG has adapters/drivers forall major SFA or personal lead tracking systems including Excelspreadsheets. Unlike other sales lead process automationtechnologies, eGrabber actually automates - and hence eliminates, thecostly/unreliable manual effort required to enter sales leads into alead tracking system and automates the flow and coordination of leadinformation between existing applications. It does not require a newapplication/system to take advantage of the sales lead data beingcaptured.

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