A corporate communications executive for a Fortune 500 company that earns a living from selling systems integration and technology support services told me his site doesn't do much in the way of e-commerce aside from some consumable supplies sales.

Most of his contracts are with large companies and are in the multiple millions of dollars: There are things like continuing or upgrading a warranty, stuff like that. And, if you consider customer support e-commerce, we have that but it's not actually paying for stuff over the Web. Our goals are pretty simple. Our main goal is to generate leads.

We have ways that prospects can contact various people. People tend to like to contact someone in their own vicinity, so we have contact names and numbers and email addresses for people around the world. It's all consultative types of selling. No one comes to us and sees the site and says "Oh, I want one of those" or "I need a complete billing solution. I think I'll buy one."

I don't think we've ever had a sale that was really less than a 6- to 10-week process. So our intent is purely to generate leads, so we try to motivate calls to action whenever possible, get information from people as they traverse the site, invite them to seminars and online presentations, and yada, yada, yada.

I ask if they're tracking their promotions-to-leads ratios and if they measure the quality of their leads. He replies:

Generally, the leads end up in our call centers where they are further qualified. We have a plan in place to do more of that on the Web. So by asking more and more in-depth questions, we'll get them to self-qualify. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to do on the Web.

It's a big project to get people to think through the process so that they can self-qualify, because we cater to so many diverse industries and types of clients that one size certainly doesn't fit all. One size rarely fits two. What we watch is people drilling down the click paths to where we can tell that they are serious. And we relate that back to the method of promotion. You know, when we ran a radio ad, it had no effect, but when we run ads in Computerworld, it works for us. We put up special pages for individual promotional activities so it's easy to track, whether it's a trade show handout or an ad in a magazine. We recently had a recruiting effort going on where we stuck the URL on the side of a van and drove it around the parking lots of competitors that are having struggles and laying people off. It was a perfect opportunity and real cheap way to get a lot of good leads.

I'm curious about the calculations. I want to know if there's a dollar figure attached to acquiring a lead, and then passing it along to the sales team.

"We can rarely trace a single lead to a single sale. We can track an increase in people visiting our Web site based on a certain type of ad or a promotion, but we are not very good as yet at tracking that lead through the entire process to a sale. A lead costs about a dollar if a pure sale comes through the Web, about $25 through a call center, and it's about $500 to $750 depending on the country for a live sales call. But it's always going to wind up as a live sales call anyway; it's just how many of them, how qualified are they, and how many prospects can one hit with live people?"

A large test and measurement technology company I spoke with calls it demand creation. Their Internet director spells out the sequence "demand creation creates leads which creates opportunities which creates a funnel opportunity which creates a quote which creates an order.

"So," he continues, "we're setting that whole process up to have traceablity. We finally figured out how to get from funnel opportunity to a quote, because that was from our sales force system across to order processing. We finally figured out how to make it so it is an advantage to the sales guy to do it the way we want, which then makes the association. We decreased the amount of [data entry] keying he had to do and set up an administrative support process that says feed your quote request to these people; they'll create a quote. When you feed the quote request you have to feed your funnel number, and we gave them a little tool on their laptop that says you have a funnel number with an order, enter it here, and we will automatically download it [the] next cycle you sync, and therefore your opportunity has exactly what the quote has."

I asked him to back up the leads and walk me through that area. He replied: When we buy a list we do a projection of how many responses we should get. So we are classic in that sense. We know that we should yield 10 percent. Are we getting back a thousand or are we getting back a hundred? Are we getting a hundred hits? When programs fail they do the analysis to understand why we were under. When we get something over, we try to understand why we got a better hit response. What was clear in the messaging or in the targeting? So, we're getting pretty disciplined about that.

We're in the final stages of a program called retention marketing, but it's really the full spectrum of it. If I touch [contact] you, where do I touch you? Where's the value? What's the value? How many times do I have to touch you? What kind of methods? We're trying to get that so we can proceduralize it.

I asked him if they were correlating leads with the calls that the salespeople make. Not yet. That's the next step. We're doing it within the buckets in the chain, but we're not doing it across boundaries in the chain. That's the next step we're doing. That's why we have to get the traceability through the chain, because we want to know where we fall out and where the failure rate is, what the abandonment rate is and what cost is the failure. Sometimes those are restarts that can happen fairly quickly because the [advertising message] is wrong,

It's starting to sound familiar. There's a real gap between the online and offline worlds. How do you close the loop? How do you bring all those together technically? I could tell he was making a wish list in his head as he thought through the process. "Well, that's why I start with a lead process. I can tie a lead to an offer to a campaign. I've got a tie to the marketing process; that's where we start and make the allocations on what we plan to spend. We tie that back into marketing programs. So a lead then converts into a site visit, it then goes into an opportunity. I then know the relationship from tactic to lead to opportunity. Then if it goes to a funnel entry, I know that the salesperson scored the opportunity. If he doesn't, I know there's something wrong with it. I force every lead to be scored by the salesperson. So I can take all the hits and all the misses and I can take those back upstream against the tactics."

Then reality sunk in.

"I haven't spent a lot of time with the marketing guys to figure out how are they doing that yet. The capability is getting there so you can almost see the total picture." I've only come across one company that directly sells large orders which has really integrated the browsing, shopping, information-gathering side of their systems with the sales side. It's a business-to-business technology firm that has understood how to get the most out of the Web from the beginning: National Semiconductor.