BtoB Magazine released its inaugural Lead Generation Guide this week. Whether you’re looking to improve lead generation response rates from e-mail, direct mail campaigns, and websites, or read about what other businesses are trying, the guide contains articles that are worth reading.

One article that particularly stood out was “Focus on facilitating demand, not generating it.” The article details that because the Internet has changed the way people make purchasing decisions, marketers need to think differently about how to turn visitors into sales or leads.

How do marketers need to think differently? The article explains it thus:

Previously, when sellers wanted to generate demand they started inundating their target audiences with messages….Today, buyers prefer to be educated, not sold. And most would rather pursue this “education” anonymously until they’ve reached a purchasing decision.

You need to make sure your Web site is more like a consultative sales call, where it’s easy for buyers to find what they need and propel themselves through the decision process. Most important, you need to build a relationship through your interactions, both direct and indirect, so they come to feel that yours is the type of organization with which they would like to do business.

All of this can be done by applying the science of Web analytics (both behavioral and attitudinal) along with the art of business intelligence to help you see which parts of your Web site move buyers in the direction you want them to go (so you can enhance those areas) and which are barriers to that goal (so you can knock them down). [Emphasis added.]

In other words you need a website that is informative, easy to navigate, and funnels people to your desired course of action. Though that may seem basic, it’s a good reminder for marketers to look at your website for the perspective of potential customers and see what you can do to improve their experience.

Last week, Microsoft added a cashback section to its Live Search web search engine. Their goal is to have more people use their search engine by offering them money back on purchases they make online throught this portal.

Two thoughts.

First, it’s interesting to learn how they incentivized retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Sears, Home Depot, J&R Electronics, and Office Depot to use their service. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

To get merchants to use the Live Search cashback service, Microsoft is using an alternative payment model called Cost Per Acquisition, in which the advertisers pay only when the ad results in a consumer purchase. Microsoft isn’t the only company to try that, but it differs from the standard model, which is based on the number of clicks on an ad.

Cost Per Acquisition (or CPA – also called Cost Per Action or Pay Per Action) has long been touted by direct response advertisers as the ultimate way to buy advertising since you don’t pay unless the visitor becomes a customer. Though CPA can be a good solution for some businesses, most advertising companies don’t have complete confidence in their client’s ability to close the sale and therefore don’t offer a CPA option.

It will be interesting to see how successful retailers find Microsoft’s CPA model and whether their success will pressure other search engines and other online purveyors of advertisements to offer similar advertising models to their clients. (Google’s Pay Per Action campaign is still in beta and is no longer taking new clients. You can read more about their Pay Per Action ad program here.)

Second, Microsoft’s new offering was touted as its latest attempt to grab market share from search engine leader Google. This is seems to be an odd way to go about it since all they are really offering is a product search engine. Live Search cashback seems to be more of rival to Google’s Product Search, not their web search engine. It may be helpful if you’re looking to buy a DVD player but not if you’re writing a report on George Washington.

For those who are old enough to remember, early search engines were somewhat of a crapshoot in terms of getting the quality search results. Google became the dominant search engine not by offering financial incentives for those who use its search engine, but by providing better search results than its competitors.

If Microsoft was really looking to cut into Google’s share of the search engine pie, a better way to do it would be to have their search engine produce better results and then convince web browsers that their search engine is better, and then enable a CPA strategy – in that order.   

When it comes to its search engine dominance, it appears Google has little to worry about from Microsoft’s latest offering.