By Chris Bucholtz

The most encouraging aspect of the current economic conditions (if there are any encouraging aspects) is that it’s forcing companies to seriously consider new sales tools that look at aspects of the selling process in different ways, or at least in more efficiency-driven ways, and that most assuredly goes for areas that have been overlooked in the past. For example, last week, DemandBase released the second version of DemandBase Professional, and according to CEO Chris Golec, the company’s seen “traffic exploding” in visits to the company website for trials.

We talked about DemandBase Stream way back around the time of DreamForce 2008. At the time, the company was essentially giving away this product; it provided a “ticker” to reveal who was looking at a website at any given time, and correlate that to the company and location of the viewer. Professional takes that a bit farther, allowing this raw data to be processed, analyzed and integrated into a CRM solution, with the user paying on a per-lead basis.

“Analytics is already a huge market,” says Golec. “If you can apply some analytical power to track lead “‘click quality,’ you can cut through traffic on your website and boil it down to the visitors that really matter to your company.” Discovering, evaluating and acting on those leads is tremendously valuable, Golec says, and since 96 percent of the clicks on corporate website are not acted upon, it’s easy to see that this web traffic represents a significant opportunity.

DemandStream examines traffic to the website and identifies activities by user; DemandBase takes those activities and examines them to develop an initial idea of just how good those leads are. The product lets marketers build a qualified marketing list based on target audiences identified within actual site traffic. Those contacts can be added to a shopping cart and checked out whenever the organization needs them; from there, the solution can be used to break out opportunities by territories and automatically personalize one-to-one email communications to the right prospects.

Since the solution is priced based on the amount of site traffic and the number of leads generated, cost-conscious users can adjust the number of leads they purchase to fit their budgets, and Salesforce.com users get automatic de-duplication when they import the data (DemandBase is part of Salesforce’s AppExchange). The company’s offering a 30-day free trial to illustrate the power in its solution.

Demandbase won’t be the answer to every company’s demand generation issues – but that’s kind of the neat thing about where we are. There is no one set way of doing things like demand generation anymore, and the economy is such that users have an incentive to try something different. What that might be will vary from company to company, and what works for an inbound traffic, web-oriented company might be different than for a company whose leads come from other sources. But could this proliferation in approaches have been possible in flush times, when doing things the way they’d always been done still worked? I’m not sure that sales aids like DemandBase would have been received as enthusiastically as they have been, so perhaps the recession is good for something after all.