Over the past year I have listened to many vendor webinars talking about their cloud computing solution story. After the call I always get an e-mail or phone call trying to see my needs. This follow-up is very good as the purpose of these webinars is to obtain leads and the follow up process is to qualify these leads.

Until yesterday, none of these calls were of any value to me. Some vendors called and promised to connect me to their product folks to give me more information but nobody ever contacted me. I replied to some vendors e-mails but they do not follow up. Other vendors call using some call center employee who cannot answer a simple question about what the product can do.

Earlier this week I listened to an interesting webinar from Aplicor andGartner. Lisa DeVinney from Aplicor looked me up on LinkedIn before calling, understood my background and we had a great conversation about their CRM product. It got my attention that not only is is a SaaS solution but it also has a  good implementation story in the automotive industry that I used to

cover in my previous job.  As the automotive industry recovers, OEMs can surely use a domain-focused solution to help them take advantage of customers coming to replace their age-old vehicles with new cars that they have been putting off buying for a while now.

Overall, I think that although webinars can bring in a lot of leads, turning them into actual customers or getting an interested party to become knowledgeable on your product takes a little more than a call center rep calling with a packaged script. Doing a little analysis (maybe automated) to direct calls to the appropriate representative will help. No call is better than a bad call to improve conversion rates.
Now I got to update my cloud ecosystem presentation and add Aplicor to it!