As the chief marketing officer at web-collaboration company WebEx, David Thompson witnessed firsthand the frustrations of salespeople trying to get good leads. He also experienced the communication gap between sales and marketing personnel when it came to exchanging key data.

So, the exec decided to ditch his cushy job to start his own company that would try to tackle some of these problems.

On Monday, after 18 months of work, Mr. Thompson’s company, called Genius, came out of stealth mode. The company is offering a sales productivity tool aimed at helping salespeople track web site traffic of potential customers in real time.

The Genius Tracker aggregates web traffic information on a company’s web site and delivers it in real time to the desktops of salespeople so they can start chasing the leads. Although web analytics companies like Omniture and Web Side Story provide similar features, Genius said its advantage is that it provides the data nearly as soon as the customer starts surfing the web site.

Among the features, the tracker will notify the salesperson of potential customers’ presence and track the web pages they are visiting. The information is delivered through a small chat-like window on the desktop that carries a list of customer names and leads.

The tool also keeps track of all email activity and the salesperson can get a log of the activities at any time.

Mr. Thompson, Genius’ chief executive officer, calls his company a hybrid of a customer relationship management and a web analytics company. Like a growing number of software companies, Genius offers its software on demand, meaning it’s hosted over the Internet and installable in minutes.

“It’s kind of a bottoms-up view of your web site,” he said.

Genius is a part of the new wave of startups looking to fill in gaps in sales productivity. The company’s software is built with the latest web technologies such as the AJAX development tool, which allows web pages to become more responsive, so changes can be made on a page without reloading it (see Browser Booster AJAX Expands). Last February, another startup called SalesGene that helps salespeople streamline the sales process, was launched (see CRM Upstart Eyes Hot Market).

And although the market for CRM-related software is getting crowded, Gordon Ritter with Emerge Capital, an investor in Genius, believes there is a place for the company’s tool.

Demand for On-Demand

“The marketing automation space is the biggest segment that has not had an on-demand leader,” said Mr. Ritter, an early investor in on-demand leader Salesforce.com. “When we looked at Genius, we saw an on-demand leader that could instantly provide value to a sales and marketing professional.”

Mr. Ritter and Mary Coleman, general partner at Walden International, financed Genius’ first round of $5.1 million in funding, which was announced at the end of March.

Mr. Ritter is aiming high. He’d like Genius to become as big as Salesforce.com, as the plan is to eventually expand Genuis’ capability beyond just sales and marketing professionals.

Although it might be too early to tell if Genius’ functionality can match that of Salesforce.com, Leslie Ament, director of customer intelligence at Aberdeen Group, said Genius’ capability to offer insight in real time is compelling.

“I can’t think of a reason why organizations won’t want yet another intelligence tool,” Ms. Ament said.

A Number of Competitors

Genius’ competitors are marketing web analytics companies like Omniture, CoreMetrics, and WebSideStory. They offer a similar kind of web activity data but not in real time and usually serve the marketing department, Ms. Ament said.

“These are companies that have the capability to do what Genius is doing, but they don’t package it the same way and they haven’t targeted sales [personnel],” she said.

Genius has more than 100 test customers and after using Genius’ beta version, one of them, WebEx, saw a 10 percent increase in qualified sales leads, Mr. Thompson said.

Version 1.0 of the software will be available starting May 1 and will be priced at about $49 per user per month.

However, users of Genius Tracker have to be careful with the information they get, said analysts. Salespeople could bombard prospects with information they don’t need, said Ms. Ament. What’s more, a turf war could erupt between the marketing and sales organizations about who will have more ownership of the data, Ms. Ament added.

Also, this tool will not be useful for customers who don’t extensively use the web as a means to gather information on leads, said Sheryl Kingstone, analyst with the Yankee Group.

“If the [customer] doesn’t do a lot on the web, it’s not going to be the biggest bang,” she said.