I used to be a satisified Genius.com customer and liked the product so much, I actually was one of their customer spokespersons, and now have come to work here. The power of Genius is the importance the product puts on time, and how quickly it gets qualified leads into the hands of the right sales rep. Time really matters because the faster you can capture a lead while it is hot and deliver it to a ready sales person, it dramatically increases your chances to make a sale.

This alignment of marketing and sales is critical because both of these organizations need to work together and not just be silos. As John Neeson, the CEO at Sirius Solutions states, marketing needs to enable a sales result from all the prospect conversations they are generating. In fact, the entire organization needs to be selling and should to be aligned around revenue results, not just the number of inquiries that are generated.

Our main differentiators for our customers are that we provide deep sales domain expertise, the product’s ease of use, the incredible time-to-value because you can get the product up and running in just a day, as well as our Salesforce.com integration.

What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?

We think that social networking and media are the next big trend in SaaS. Marketing is under pressure to track and manage all types of social media. Because these conversations are affecting every company’s brand and you need be able to tie these conversations back to a potential sales events. We are currently working on a new product that will allow us to generate real leads from social media such as Twitter by tracing URL’s in real time. There are a lot of conversations being had outside of marketing’s view and Genius.com will soon be able to better manage this Tweet-to-Deal process.

What is your outlook for 2009?