It’s obvious that sales leads are important to most businesses. But did you know that even high-profile government agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, depend on sales leads?
You might wonder, “Why in the world does NASA need leads? The agency doesn’t even sell anything! Does it plan on selling used space shuttles or something?”
Actually, NASA depends heavily on leads to find U.S. businesses that are willing to become research and development partners of the agency.
“Our goal is to create partnerships with companies to further develop technologies that are of joint interest – not just to industry, but also to NASA,” says Michael Weingarten, director of marketing for NASA’s commercial technology program.
“Ideally, we can identify areas that NASA has a strong expertise in and that we’re really pushing to meet our mission needs. Our goal is to find companies that are pursuing similar lines of research.
“By partnering with companies, the idea is that you can push the technologies further and faster by working together.”
Weingarten says both partners benefit from such a relationship. NASA receives help in the research and development of the new technologies that it develops, and the partnering business is usually granted commercial rights to use the new technology in its products, services or processes.
“Essentially, we work to commercialize technologies that NASA is developing for NASA missions,” Weingarten says.
“NASA puts several billion dollars a year into ‘R&D’ for its missions. Our job is to bring the fruits of that research and development back to U.S. companies, so they can benefit from it.”
Through such partnerships, a whole host of new products has been developed. Here are two examples of commercial products that originated from NASA research:
n A new line of “camera-on-a-chip” image sensors was developed from technology that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory invented.
The tiny image sensors are a key component of video conferencing and Web cameras. NASA’s partner in the project, Photobit, obtained the licensing rights to the technology and commercially developed the image sensors.
n A new line of blood-separation products was created that allows researchers and others to more easily extract plasma and serum from whole blood supplies.
The new technology relies on special filters to separate blood as opposed to the previously used method of using heavy, bulky spinning centrifuge machines.
The new blood-separation products, which NASA invented while studying the effects of zero gravity on astronaut’s blood supplies, were commercially developed by DBCD Inc.
Weingarten’s marketing department is responsible for finding U.S. companies that want to become partners with NASA to commercially develop products.
“The way we market ourselves is, we use a whole range of media to get the word out that NASA is a partner that you can work with, and that NASA is an organization you can look to.”
Even though NASA’s marketing efforts were successful at developing partnerships in the past, they were often fragmented, with each of NASA’s ten research centers working on their own partnerships.
However, Weingarten decided that the process could be more efficient and that there was room for improvement.
“Going back a few years, we really had no system in place for tracking and servicing the leads that we were developing out of our different efforts,” Weingarten says.
“We really didn’t have a system in place for offering good, strong customer service to people who were responding to the message that we were putting out there.”
That’s when NASA decided to hire Mac McIntosh to help jump start the agency’s lead process.
In 1998, McIntosh began working closely with a marketing team comprised of Weingarten, employees from each of NASA’s ten research centers and the National Technology Transfer Center.
The NTTC works closely with NASA to generate and service its leads, from the time prospects first inquire, to the time when partnering companies get “handed-off” to work directly with any of NASA’s ten research centers.
The marketing team’s first step was to make sure it had a responsive, efficient sales-lead system in place. The team was planning to promote NASA partnerships through an expansive national campaign.
However, before doing that, the group had to put a system in place to effectively handle the sales leads that were generated from the campaign.
“Let’s say we’re wildly successful, and the phone starts ringing and the website is getting all these hits and people are e-mailing requesting more information,” Jerry Miller, vice president of marketing at the NTTC says. “We better not drop the ball right there.
“When an interested party inquired, we needed to have a system in place that would help us qualify the opportunity very quickly and get them to a [NASA research] center. There’s the stereotype obviously of government being very slow and bureaucratic. What we wanted to do was overcome that.”
McIntosh and the group did exactly that. They developed a detailed lead-management system that rivals that of any Fortune 500 company. “Mac helped us develop a flow process for handling leads, all the way from when they first contact us, to when we qualify them, to when we pass them to a NASA center once they are qualified,” Weingarten says.
“There’s a whole lengthy, step-by-step process that you have to go through to service the client, and Mac has helped us develop that.
“He’s creative in terms of solutions. He just knows how to do good lead follow-up. He knows what the critical steps are. He’s really helped us develop the right process for keeping people interested and involved to the point where we actually have a relationship.”
McIntosh also was responsible for helping to train the NTTC’s customer service representatives and for developing the NTTC’s process to properly qualify leads.
“There’s a whole universe of people who are out there and a lot of them are ‘tire kickers,’” Weingarten says. “You’ve got to separate the real prospects from the tire kickers.
“Mac helped us streamline the whole process and make sure we were asking people the right questions when they called in and contacted us, so we can qualify them properly.”
NASA and the NTTC planned to do a national campaign to find new prospects for partnerships. However, their target market was initially unclear.
Which companies are the best prospects? Who within those companies would be the decision-maker, with the interest and authority to form a partnership with NASA?
“What we decided to do was to survey each of the [NASA research] centers, and of the partnerships we currently have, [we wanted to know] what do they look like?” Miller says.
“Are they large, small or medium companies? Are they companies that have R&D budgets? Who are we dealing with at these companies? Is it the CEO or the chief technical officer? So we really began to target our market.”
The survey results showed that the marketing team’s best bet was to narrowly focus its marketing for prospective NASA partners.
“Mac was heavily involved in that. Mac gave us recommendations on the business decision makers that he thought, based on his experience, would be interested in licensing or co-developing space-program technology. So we all worked closely together to target the communities that we wanted to reach.”
It was decided that if a certain technology was related to materials development, for instance, NASA ads would be placed in trade journals that focus on materials development and would exhibit at materials industry trade shows.
Likewise, if commercial partners were being sought for new sensor or instrumentation technology, NASA would exhibit at trade shows and place ads in publications that focus only on those topics – not general business publications or conferences.
The marketing team developed a national campaign that consisted of advertising, direct mail, e-mail, and participation at specific industry trade shows or conferences. NASA and the NTTC also provided speakers and hosted workshops at these events and contributed articles to industry publications as part of the campaign.
In addition, the marketing team created a website, www.nasatechnology.com, that is a key to the national campaign. Many of the national campaign elements, such as magazine advertising, refer readers to the website for more information.
The site provides a wealth of information for prospective NASA partners, including a listing and description of NASA’s “most commercially viable technologies” that are currently available for development.
“These are the hot technologies of NASA,” Miller says. “We thought, if we’re going to create awareness, put NASA’s best foot forward and encourage industry to work with NASA, we’d better put out the best. We better put it in one spot that’s not convoluted with a lot of other activities. It’s very much technology focused, and you won’t see job postings, calendars of events and those types of things. You’re going to see technology.”
The final step to the newly overhauled NASA lead-management system was establishing a follow-up process.
In developing a follow-up process, the marketing team had one main problem to solve: “If you expressed interest in a technology, and we gave you the information you requested, how would we get back to you without becoming a nuisance?” Miller says.
The team decided to use “relationship e-mails” as the cornerstone of its follow-up process.
A fully automated relationship e-mail system was created — not only for follow-up reasons — but to help the NTTC’s customer service representatives keep in touch with and track prospects. For instance, after prospects contact the NTTC for more information about a NASA partnership, the prospect receives regularly scheduled follow-up e-mails thanking them for their interest, asking if all of their questions have been answered, etc.
Now that the new national campaign and lead-management system has been in place since 2001, the NTTC and NASA have been thrilled with the response. In the first nine months of 2001, a record-setting 12-15 new partnerships have been formed that can be directly tracked to the national campaign.
“The results have been fantastic,” Miller says.
Throughout the three-year-long process of creating a new lead-management system and national campaign, McIntosh has been an important contributor to the team, according to Miller and Weingarten.
Miller says he especially appreciates the outsider’s perspective that McIntosh brought to the marketing team. “Mac has a customer focus,” Miller says. “What I mean by customer focus, is he brings experience to the table that we really need. Sometimes we get hung up on how government handles things. But Mac comes at it from the client’s perspective – the people we’re trying to reach. That’s been one of the reasons we’ve had a successful campaign.
“Mac has helped us focus on what the client wants, not on how we’ve done it traditionally over the past several years.”
However, McIntosh, Weingarten and Miller all agree that each member of the marketing team contributed greatly to the success of the new lead-management system and national campaign.
“The successes have also been because of the cooperation and efforts of each of the marketing representatives from the [ten NASA] centers,” Miller says. “This has been a real team effort.”
