Some of the best leads come from inquiries filled out on a business’ site. Not surprisingly, businesses spend lots of money making sure their pages rank so that they can take advantage of these organic inquiries. That’s great, but have you ever looked at how most companies manage these leads? Creating the forms to capture them are simply enough, but for the average business, it is surprisingly difficult to make that data trackable and actionable. Enter ContactUs.com, which I have become a fan of for many reasons, not the least of which is this is one business idea that I might have considered doing in the future were I no longer running LeadsCon. (Better not quit the day job so soon after all.)
Founded by Howard Yeh and Brad Seiler, both names should sound very familiar to those who have spent time in the LeadsCon ecosystem. Howard was previously the co-founder of BrokersWeb, which he grew to become one of the largest vertical click media networks in just two short years, catching the eye of many companies, one being Vantage Media who purchased BrokersWeb in September 2011. Brad Seiler is the founder of Boberdoo, among the longest running lead management and distribution software providers.
ContactUs.com, as the name might imply, is focused on taking the typical “Contact Us” link and experience and turning it into an end-to-end lead-gen, lead-management, and marketing automation platform. Sounds complex, but it’s all turn-key, offering enterprise level features with consumer internet ease. ContactUs.com is geared towards smaller businesses who haven’t historically had access to the software, processes, and knowledge of those familiar with more advanced online customer acquisition and lead management.
Says Howard, “I met Brad when I was running our online marketing campaigns for BrokersWeb. After leaving Vantage Media post-merger, Brad and I started talking about the larger opportunity for lead-gen. Aggregators play an important role, but for my next business I was excited about the market opportunity to build tools for end-users of leads. Even businesses that have online marketing budgets aren’t doing the basics that we in the performance marketing industry know as gospel. Things like funnel optimization, lead nurturing, real-time delivery, timed call-backs, lead disposition, call-tracking, source attribution and mobile-optimized experiences. From the front-end, those websites aren’t converting enough visitors into leads, and their primitive lead systems and processes aren’t converting enough leads into sales. We thought, ‘What if we could package something together that does all of that, and what if we found a great entry point – like the Contact Us form experience?’ We knew we could define and build a great product and a profitable business model. In ContactUs.com, we’re packaging together what we know is used by advanced online marketers, stripping out what isn’t absolutely necessary, and packaging it together into an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-configure system.”ContactUs.com will be soft-launching in early March with their initial free version, and will be releasing paid modules and new, advanced features post-launch. Visit www.contactus.com for more details. You can email Howard directly: howard (at) contactus.com. Also, Brad will be at LeadsCon, so make sure to catch up with him about ContactUs March 19 – 20, 2013.
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