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Q: How do you sell a software program that costs up to a quarter of a million dollars?

A: Through a cheap but precisely targeted electronic lead-generation campaign.

Ask Captaris Inc. It got 1,458 leads this summer from a multipart effort promoting Alchemy, its Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance software. (Sarbanes-Oxley requires companies to thoroughly document their revenue figures for accuracy.)

The cost? $30,000.

“This campaign delivered not only a large number of leads but highly qualified ones as well,” says director of marketing Mark Littrell. The targets were IT managers, directors and other executives in firms with 100 or more employees and annual sales between $100 million and $1 billion.

Captaris attracted prospects via e-mail, online banner ads and Web site SearchExchange.com. The site is used by more than 115,000 IT professionals who manage Microsoft Exchange and Outlook messaging and e-mail systems, respectively, for their organizations.

Captaris also ran banners on Bitpipe.com, a provider of IT industry information, and on Businessweek.com. What's more, it sent e-mails to 10,000 names on an opt-in list, and delivered a Webcast at SearchExchange.com.

Pricing for Alchemy software starts at $10,000 and can go up to $250,000 depending on a company's size and how many workstations use it, Littrell says.

Once the leads were obtained, Captaris handed them either to in-house salespeople or to one of its more than 1,000 value-added resellers for further qualification and closing. While no sales were finalized at deadline, Littrell says his company has moved several leads to more advanced stages of qualification. The sales cycle for Alchemy is about nine months.

The campaign was built around “The Impact of Regulations on Archiving,” a white paper by Michael Osterman, president of market watcher Osterman Research. The paper notes the importance of keeping records regardless of format or a company's size. It also explains how to implement a system to capture, index and archive all electronic communications.

What's next? Captaris is so satisfied with the effort that it was expanded in November. All the company's products are now being offered at the TechTarget site SearchCIO.com.