LEAD GENERATION HAS long been the name of the game in business-to-business. The lengthy, complex decision cycles that precede most B-to-B purchases and the relatively high cost of many products have led marketers to believe they’re doing best by getting a name, phone number or e-mail address on the Web and then following up that lead offline.
They could be right. But, as with any other conversion, B-to-B marketers are showing a growing interest in tracking those leads all the way to the final sale. Knowing which of those Web visitors was ultimately responsible for a sale could allow better understanding of the true cost of lead generation, not to mention better optimization of marketing campaigns, from search-keyword bidding to customer segmentation and CRM.
But the problem with that end-to-end lead tracking has been the convoluted sales cycle. The executive who visits a B-to-B site and registers to download a white paper may not be the person who puts in the purchase order seven weeks
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