SalesGenius: Their Response

After I posted about SalesGenius, I received a long email response from Lisa Dilg at PeskettPR, who handles (I believe) the PR for the product. She wanted to make some corrections, so here it is — I have not edited it, I’ve only done her the favor of keeping her cell phone and email address off of the web:

Robbin,

Thanks for the write up about SalesGenius. Great review of the product – and with screen shots too.

We really hope though that you will allow us to correct a few misconceptions that you have about the product however. I would really appreciate your time in reading some information from us on these issues.

1) SalesGenius is not a phishing product, and CANNOT be used to phish. Users CANNOT track visitors outside of their own domain – as you saw, you can only track prospects on their own site. (The definition of phishing is the fraudulent presentation of a web site – this is not) It is entirely legitimate for business users to track visitors on their own web site.

2) Yes, SalesGenius does proxy the LINKs and text of our user’s corporate web site. This method makes it VERY EASY for a Sales rep to interact with and understand his customers, and his own web site. Unlike any other Web analytics tool, SalesGenius requires NO TECHNICAL knowledge, a key design point when serving a Sales audience.

3) We have over 120 customers using our product, and we have not received a single complaint from any visitor. Tracking visitors in this way is entirely commonplace and expected on both web sites, and physical storefronts like Department stores, etc. The goal is to provide better service. Visitors are opted-in, and can easily opt-out. It’s all standard practice.

4) SalesGenius helps customers too: by helping Sales Reps focus just on their most interested prospects, SalesGenius fosters positive interaction between Sales Reps and prospects who actually need help with a solution. Just Friday we heard about a $6K deal from one of our users who said “The customer and I never would have found each other without SalesGenius.”

SalesGenius delivers the power of web analytics to a wide, non-technical audience. Our goal is to deliver personal web analytics data directly to the people who need/want to help customers most: the Sales Rep. Web Analytics should not be bottled up in an ivory tower in Marketing, with reports delivered once a month, and ignored. It should be personal.

Thanks for taking the time to learn and write about our product, and we hope your audience will appreciate the spirit within which we are trying to democratize the web analytics marketplace.

–Lisa

Lisa Dilg
PerkettPR for Genius Inc.

She makes a great point about analytics being bottled up with marketing. But that Point #1 bothers me. If the sales rep added at the bottom of the letter, “By the way, you will really be going through someone’s proxy server so that I can see your every move,” would the individual click?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics