Patent Publication Number: US-2010131339-A1

Title: System and Method to Transform Website User Information into Sales Prospects, Sales Leads and Sales Intelligence

Description:
CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS 
     This application claims priority under 35 USC 119(e) of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 61/117,097, filed on Nov. 22, 2008 and entitled “Method to Transform Website Visitor Information into Sales Prospect, Sales Leads and Sales Intelligence”, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. 
    
    
     FIELD OF THE INVENTION 
     This invention relates to business intelligence, more specifically to sales lead generation, prospect intelligence, customer intelligence and competition intelligence. 
     BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 
     In business, finding prospects that will lead to new customers has been and continues to be the most critical and the most challenging stage in the sales process. Generally, the sales pipeline comprises of the following stages. 
     Build a List of Suspects. This is first stage of the sales pipeline. At this stage a suspect is only a name. In fact, it may only be the company name. Seller may not know the contact name of the buyer most likely to purchase their products and services. Or, if they have a name, it may be a reader of a publication, a listener to a radio station, or an attendee at a trade show, and seller doesn&#39;t know if this person is an interested buyer. Seller only suspects this “entity” is a target for their products or services. 
     Engage Suspect/Prospect. This stage usually happens during the Suspect to Prospect conversion phase. Engaging a suspect can involve their inquiry with the seller or seller contacting them, but does require the seller to have interacted with the suspect (either through marketing or sales efforts) to introduce the seller and its offering, and uncover their general need. 
     Qualify Lead. Having engaged the suspect and having determined that they fit the seller&#39;s overall target profile, the seller needs to qualify the lead further to make sure it is a “fit” with the seller and its offering. 
     Assess Opportunity. Once the lead is qualified using pre-defined criteria, the seller assesses the opportunity before spending the resources to develop a quote or proposal. The seller does research to understand the key factors driving the prospects&#39; buying criteria such as, what are the specifics of their need, what is the main decision-making factor, what is their budget, do they understand seller&#39;s value proposition, and are they looking at competitors? 
     Propose. At this stage the seller creates a detailed proposal to meet the decision maker&#39;s needs. At this stage it is advisable to include all the terms in the proposal to avoid slowing down the approval, and therefore the sales process. 
     Close The Deal. At this stage, the seller follows up to uncover and resolve any possible objections, negotiate terms, and close the deal. 
     SALE! This is final the stage of the sales pipeline. 
     The market currently has several lead generation solutions to broaden the sales pipeline and many marketing and sales automation systems to automate the different stages of the sales pipeline. However, since many of the leads are unqualified to begin with, a lot of time and money is wasted on sales and marketing efforts to unqualified leads. The existing solutions do not have a way to identify the suspect/prospect who is specifically looking for the seller&#39;s products and solutions. 
     Traditional lead generation is based on list building, email blast, cold calling, telemarketing, PR and advertising. Traditional prospect intelligence solutions are based on web text mining technology which mines web pages but not user activities and therefore they are unable to capture prospects when they are looking for the seller&#39;s products and solutions. Traditional ad networks and lead-exchange systems are ad based which require users to take some action (fill a form or click on ad). Prospects and suspects are becoming ad blind and ads dilute the brand of the content website. This results in lost opportunity to capture a majority of suspects/prospects. 
     Ad and form-fill based monetization produces negligible revenue for the content website which has low traffic but high quality users. Ads take up valuable visual space on the website, which could have been used to engage the user. 
     This invention solves all of the above problems. 
     SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION 
     In the present invention, lead generation involves the interaction of three parties: 
     User—this is a person visiting a website. A user is a prospect when he/she is interested in buying a product or service. A user having a specific need searches the internet &amp; visits websites. User&#39;s browsing patterns, mouse clicks and mouse movements can reveal his/her interest and his/her level of engagement. IP lookup and contact database lookup can reveal his/her location, company details and contact details. The information collected about a prospect is considered the “Lead” that a seller wants to collect. 
     Website—this is the host of the web page content. A web site produces content that a user is interested in viewing. Leads can be generated from a website, when the website uses the present invention by embedding tracking code in the web pages. 
     Seller—a seller is a person or entity that has a product it wants to sell, an item it wants to publicize, a newsletter for which it wants the user to sign up or offers a service it wants to sell. A seller may also simply be interested in obtaining user information for marketing or product development reasons. A seller may be a third party or may be the website host itself. There are numerous other scenarios for sellers but the ones listed are some of the typical scenarios. A seller buys the leads generated from the websites. 
     In general, the present invention is a method and system for collecting and storing information about each user; collecting and storing information about each user&#39;s domain context; creating and storing a user profile for each user and then transforming this information to a plurality of sales leads that are stored and delivered (in real-time or scheduled) to sellers. 
     In some embodiments, sales leads are analyzed to further transform and package a plurality of sales leads into a plurality of related sales lead information capsules that can be independently distributed to sellers. 
     In some embodiments, the present invention creates a hierarchy of keywords from users&#39; browsing patterns and then maps this keyword hierarchy to domain specific industry taxonomy. 
     In some embodiments, the invention offers features to distribute sales leads to sellers. There is a web interface for sellers to create accounts, then search and buy sales leads. Seller interface has account management and lead management and reporting features. There are features for leads delivery (to email, to phone, to CRM applications, to social media accounts etc.) There is also an admin interface to manage accounts for group of sellers. 
     In some embodiments, the invention offers advanced features for the sellers to access his/her account through an API. APIs can be used to programmatically login, search and buy leads. APIs can also be used for lead management, account management and downloading reports. These features allow integration of the present invention with third party applications. 
     In some embodiments, there is a web interface to create accounts for websites. This interface has account management and reporting features. There is a feature to set the price for the leads generated by a specific website. There is also a feature to manage multiple websites from one account. 
    
    
     
       BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS 
         FIG. 1  shows a flow chart modeling the overall method and system of the invention; 
         FIG. 2  describes the real-time web page to server communication that transmits user&#39;s browsing data to remote server; 
         FIG. 3  describes IP lookup process to get user&#39;s contact and company details; 
         FIG. 4  describes the process to generate user&#39;s domain context; and 
         FIG. 5  illustrates a typical networked computer system that is suitable for practicing the preferred embodiment of the present invention. 
     
    
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION 
     In the following detailed description, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the invention. However, it will be understood by those of ordinary skill in the art that the present invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known methods, procedures, components and circuits have not been described in detail so as not to obscure the present invention. 
     In one embodiment, the invention can use a tracking script, which can be client-based Javascript code in some embodiments. The Javascript monitors the user&#39;s browsing activity in the background and sends data to the server. The Javascript does not interfere with the user&#39;s browsing experience. 
     In some embodiments, when the web page loads inside the user&#39;s browser, the user&#39;s browser requests the tracking script from a server. The server can then transmit the tracking script to the user&#39;s browser. 
       FIG. 2  illustrates the process of loading the tracking script from the remote server and sending the user&#39;s browsing information to the remote server. 
     In some embodiments, the hosting web site, i.e., the web site being visited by the user, does not need to host the Javascript code. The hosting web site needs only to insert a brief section of HTML code. That section of HTML code will reference a JavaScript file that will initiate the system. The invention will then manage the entire life-cycle of the lead generation: data collection, getting the user&#39;s company and contact details, getting the user&#39;s domain context, creating leads and delivering leads to sellers. See  FIG. 1  for overall method. 
     In some embodiments, the method uses IP lookup to find user&#39;s company name, company website domain address, and geographical location of the user. 
     In some embodiments, the method uses company name and company website domain to get company details (website url, revenue, industry type, number of employees, details of company employees [title, department, location, email, phone etc.], decision makers, and organization chart etc.). 
     In some embodiments, the method the uses the user&#39;s company name, domain, browsing information and location to get the user&#39;s contact details, title and department. 
     If the user cannot be identified then the method suggests possible contacts from the user&#39;s company. Possible contacts are suggested based on the user&#39;s browsing information, location, and domain context. Seller can provide a list of keywords to filter from suggested contacts. Seller can also provide his/her own list of suggested contacts to be used in this scenario. 
     The invention can use a crawler to get the above details (0036, 0037, and 0038) from third party data sources, internal data sources and seller provided data sources. Standard data mining and machine learning techniques can be used to aggregate, transform, and categorize data (both structured and non-structured) from different sources. 
       FIG. 3  describes the method of getting company and contact details of the user. 
     In some embodiments, the method uses the user&#39;s company details, location, and browsing information to crawl different data sources (internal or external) for related information about user&#39;s browsing interest. Crawled data is aggregated, transformed, categorized, and stored as domain context of the user. Standard data mining and machine learning techniques can be used to transform and categorize the data (which can be both structured and non-structured). 
       FIG. 4  describes the method of creating domain context of the user. 
       FIG. 5  illustrates one embodiment of a networked computer system capable of practicing embodiments of the invention. User&#39;s host computer  501  may be any computing device, preferably including a processor (controller, CPU), a memory and a display, and being capable of connecting to an electronic computer network, such as a LAN or the Internet, and preferably able to run a web browser application  502 . In the course of browsing web pages on the Internet, user&#39;s host computer  501  may connect via the network to web server  503 , which serves content web pages to user&#39;s host computer  501  and is configured to work with the present invention. The content web page sent to a user that is running host computer  501  contains references, e.g., by HTML code, to data collection server  504 , which transmits tracking script to web browsers, such as that running on host computer  501 , and receives browsing information sent there from. 
     Data sent from host computer  501  is passed from data collection server  504  to back-end application server  505 . Application server  505  handles the bulk of the data processing in the system of the invention, and contains lead generation engine  506 , crawler  507 , lead matching engine  508 , and lead delivery engine  509 . Lead matching engine  508  matches a lead to a seller. Lead matching is done with a variety of data factors. 
     As is understood by one skilled in the computer arts, multiple host computers  501 , multiple web servers  503 , multiple data collection servers  504 , multiple application servers  505 , multiple data stores  510 , and multiple seller host computers  511  may be used in the present invention, as is the case with all network based technology. Furthermore, the functionality of web server  503 , data collection server  504 , application server  505 , and data store  510  may be combined into fewer units for efficiency or business reasons. The embodiment of  FIG. 5  is a base case of the preferred embodiment, depicting all major components in the singular. However, elements of  FIG. 5  may be duplicated or removed without departing from the scope of the present invention. 
     Similarly, each server or unit described herein may advantageously include a memory and a processor (e.g., controller, CPU) that may execute instructions stored in the memory to perform the functions with respect to embodiments of the method, as described herein. Embodiments of such devices within the invention may also include a computer readable medium, such as for example a memory, a disk drive or a USB flash memory, including instructions that, when executed by a processor or controller, carry out methods disclosed herein. 
     As persons of ordinary skill are aware, servers contain both hardware and software. The particular power and other requirements and thus the preferable hardware for a given application are determined by the amount of data that needs to be processed, and the ability to store, process and transmit the data. 
     When a plurality of servers are used in combination they may communicate with one another via a network switch, while two or more web servers work in tandem utilizing a network Load-Balancer to direct incoming traffic equally between them. For example, one may use four web servers, two application servers, and two database servers operably coupled to one another. The software of the present invention is a combination of computer executable code that runs on the aforementioned servers and is stored on a computer program device that is part of the hardware. There also may be computer executable code running in the form of client-side JavaScript code that is embedded in the web sites web page and executes in each users web browser. This client-side code communicates with the server-side code sending data to data collection system. 
     The present invention has been described with certain degree of particularity. Those versed in the art will readily appreciate that various modifications and alterations may be carried out without departing from the scope of the following claims.