At Sales Portal we recognize that a business’ lifeblood is customer relationships.  That is why we have created a Customer Bill of Rights that outlines our guiding principles as it relates to the three distinct but equal classes of clientele that comprise our online marketplace: consumers in the form of inbound phone leads, Lead Sellers and Lead Buyers.

At Sales Portal we appreciate that when we propose that one marketer allow another marketer with a complimentary product to gain access to their consumer through out singular cross-pitching™ platform, that there may be trepidation about just how the process works.  The Sales Portal Customer Bill of Rights outlines our commitment to creating relevancy for the consumer, as well as transparency and fairness for both the lead generator and the for those who buy qualified leads and participate in our lead marketplace.

Our lead exchange model has been successfully executed across hundreds of exchanges between Lead Sellers and Lead Buyers, and thousands of transactions.  At Sales Portal our aim is to ensure the utmost respect and care is afforded all who participate in our online marketplace. Therefore we invite you to read the document in its entirety here and thank you for your continued support of our unique cross sell model.

It’s okay when The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger sings “I Can’t Get  No Satisfaction’ — but not when consumers do when dealing with contact centers.

Customer satisfaction can lead to contact center profits – and recognizing this, contact centers train agents in the art of creating happy customers.  The investment contact centers make in training agents – and the time agents invest in ensuring customer satisfaction – should not evaporate once the sale is made or even when a call nears termination.

Sales Portal’s contact center software enhances customer experience by engaging them with end-of-call offers that are relevant to the primary product and then seamlessly transferring them on to the cross-pitching advertiser. Contact centers select the advertiser from a marketplace based on their criteria of revenue, volume, product category and so on.

After the primary sale is concluded, agents deliver a short pitch (as opposed to either a complete cross-sell or up-sell) to pre-qualified customers. If the customer opts in, they are transferred seamlessly to a live agent at the marketer’s end. Since no customer data (including credit card or other payment information) is passed on from contact center to the marketer, call centers remain fully compliant with government regulations on all Sales Portal campaigns.

Through Sales Portal, contact centers maximize incremental revenue – and customer satisfaction – while minimizing Average Handle Time (AHT). Customers find it easier to locate relevant and adjacent products or offerings without having to dial any other number. And advertisers get quality leads at a price they can afford via live phone transfers.

To sum it up: Sales Portal brings satisfaction to everyone in the equation.

Against the backdrop of today’s ever-progressing digital technology, just how effective is traditional telephone-driven lead generation? In the hands of SalesPortal: very effective.

In fact, we are proud that it is the advanced technology of SalesPortal is greatly altering the way marketers and contact centers perceive the value of phone based lead generation.

Marketers tend to think of contact centers as cost centers – a necessary, albeit costly, part of required marketing operations.  SalesPortal helps change the equation – making contact centers a major resource for generating qualified leads and by extension, a profit center that can generate additional revenues for an organization without commensurate increase in costs.

While online methods of lead generation – search engines, email marketing and social media – may be grabbing much of the spotlight, traditional phones continue to make lead generation both efficient and effective.  Either a traditional line phone or smartphone is at the immediate beck (and call) of consumers everywhere 24/7, maintaining telephone communications’ ranking as the single most ubiquitous form of interaction.

But its really what’s behind the phone that counts.  SalesPortal is a fine-tuned lead generation platform that plays the music marketers really want to hear: qualified, warm, live phone leads seamlessly to your agents.

The ingredients going into the SalesPortal mix are:

• Contact centers whose team of experienced telemarketer agents realize the value of quality customer service.
• Advertisers with offerings that are relevant or adjacent to the primary product being marketed.
• A powerful auction-based software that matches sellers and buyers of leads in real-time based on pre-defined criteria
• A simple mechanism that enables an agent to read a script and transfers opt-in callers to the winning advertisers contact center

Live interaction continues to remain the key to customer satisfaction and sales. Online technology might be a significant part of the lead generation mix – but guided by the SalesPortal platform, the phone will continue to remain the dominant real-time lead generation tool.

Over 501 million monthly Television Viewers can now respond to Sales Portal’s Lead Gen Offers

Sales Portal, a first of its kind Lead Generation auction platform where Marketers can buy and sell live phone call transfers from Lead Sellers over to Lead Buyers, is pleased to announce the addition of a major new television advertising client whose reach is over 501 million viewers monthly!

Sales Portal opportunities currently generate:

• Successful lead generation channels that result in over 500,000 calls per month from television commercials
• Access to millions of day time televisions viewers, identified as engaged consumers based on their topic of interest
• Potential to bid for position in those offers at a cost per lead that Lead Buying marketers set based on their own ideal target price.

Our Lead Buyer clients only pay for those qualified leads that they receive and our Lead Seller clients set whatever floor minimum that they are willing to sell such leads at.

Sales Portal is signing up new clients every day. As our marketplace grows, so too do the opportunities for our clients to maximize earnings on their calls by either selling their leads via hot transfers or by buying leads at extremely affordable rates that are typically less than what they are paying in other forms of tradtional media.

Are/Were Third Party Membership Clubs a Cancer to Our Industry?

With constant pressure to squeeze out every dime of revenue from consumer callers and responders from Direct Response offers, has the industry practice of selling third party membership clubs possibly caused more long term harm than good to our industry?

Not all that long ago, the “clubs” were like a gold mine for our industry. The “clubs” were new to the consumer callers and conversion rates were much higher then. The financial benefits to these “negative option renewal” offers of “30 day trial memberships” were tremendous for product marketers and the call centers alike. However, over the years, consumers have come to view these products as valueless and have complained in great numbers about the hard selling tactics deployed by marketers. I believe that many got caught up in the frenzy of making new revenues in previously undiscovered territory and cared less about whether they were of any value to consumers. Did we once consider the possible long-term damaging effects to our industry of this practice?

Offering non-relevant, third party upsells has gone unabated for years. One negative result (or positive) result depending on which side of the fence you’re on, is that consumers have complained enough to convince Legislators to outlaw some of the practices of “club” programs and introduce new proposed legislation that would allow “overreach expansion of FTC powers”, e.g., current consumer legislation that has been passed in regard to data pass and the proposed amendment of S. 3217, etc. This is another step in further regulating our industry, (on top of others), and further so-called protecting consumers from the blatant abuse as to how their credit card accounts are captured and then charged. Visa and MasterCard have also imposed their mighty rules to Merchants to protect their cardmembers from further abuse. The rules have changed the game dramatically!

Faced with legislative headwinds as well as consumer resistance, companies are starting to look for other methods of incremental revenue generation. Recent technological developments now provide solutions which can offer legitimate, high-value, and legally compliant alternatives to these low value and low conversion club membership Up-sells.

If the industry continues to offer irrelevant and uncomplimentary 3rd Party “club” memberships to the consumer callers, will we continue to experience diminishing response rates to toll free numbers and the web from savvy consumers who have been burned with this practice. I think so.

It is a widely known fact that over 15% of all customer-callers interested in DR products do not end up purchasing because they don’t have a credit card or a debit card. Marketers have tried different techniques – such as electronic checks – to convert these calls into a monetized outcome; however, there hasn’t been a reliable and easy-to-implement solution…until now.

Sales Portal has successfully launched monetization campaigns wherein marketers are able to generate revenue from no-credit-card callers and also consummate the sale of their products. This is achieved without the need for complex and cumbersome system implementations…in fact, marketers can be up and running with our no-credit-card campaigns within minutes and start generating revenues instantly.

There’s no doubt about it…dating service companies have had huge success over the past several years.  The success rates are impressive. Their premise is quite simple but brilliant – it’s a place for compatible individuals to discover each other and find their perfect match!. Registrants sign up for free and are asked to complete an application form that helps them describe themselves, their demographic profile, as well as their perfect match.  Once completed, through rich search capabilities, each dating site delivers back to the new member, matches that could become the perfect pairings.

Imagine doing that in the business world for the purposes of creating more commerce between companies.  If one company is non-competitive to another, and they both market to the same consumer profile, why not create a “dating site” in which the compatible and complementary companies can meet each other and decide, based upon each company’s profile, if they would like to cross-market one another’s products to their consumers?  In such a case, at the end of each phone interaction, Company A (lead seller) tees up a consumer-caller by asking if they would be interested in hearing about an incredible deal that they have secured through an alliance with Company B (lead buyer). And the process can go both ways, where Company B is the lead seller and Company A the lead buyer.

That is what we’ve done at Sales Portal.  We’ve created the world’s first online marketplace – some would say “dating service” - where businesses can meet each other and bid in an auction style environment for the purposes of cross-pitching one another’s products.  To see a high level overview of how it works, click this link to view a short 3-minute video – http://salesportal.com/demo/demo.html.

Honor Recognizes Ingenuity and Creativity in Direct and Digital Marketing Technology

Oct 13, 2010 – Sales Portal was the People’s Choice for the most innovative product at the Direct
Marketing Association’s prestigious Innovation Awards. The award was given to the product that
attendees and exhibitors of the DMA2010 Conference voted as the most creative and ingenious
amongst a pool of twenty finalists. Sales Portal’s revolutionary approach to revenue enhancement has
been enthusiastically embraced by the direct marketing and call center industries since its launch earlier
this year.

“To be nominated as a finalist for the DMA Innovation Awards was an honor in and of itself,”
commented Sales Portal CEO Saurabh Khetrapal, who continued, “And now to have won the People’s
Choice Award is extremely gratifying. We are very excited to be part of the wave of innovation in direct
and digital marketing technology.”

Sales Portal’s platform enables companies with phone-based sales and customer service to further
monetize their phone traffic; and marketers on Sales Portal generate highly qualified inbound phone
leads on a pay-per-call basis. Unlike traditional third party upsells and cross-sells, which have come
under advancing regulatory scrutiny, Sales Portal’s proprietary cross-pitching™ process offers callers the
opportunity to hear about a complementary and highly relevant product after a caller’s principal reason
for telephoning has been satisfied. A compliant lead is then warm transferred to a lead buyer’s
telemarketer whereby an entirely separate pitch for the relevant secondary product occurs. There is no
negative option marketing and no data is passed in the patent-pending, FTC-compliant model. The Sales
Portal platform is auction-based and both lead sellers and buyers can choose the companies and
products that they align themselves with.

Honor Celebrates Advances in Direct and Digital Marketing Technology

PRLog (Press Release) – Sep 30, 2010 – Sales Portal has been selected as a finalist for theDirect Marketing Association’s prestigious Innovation Awards. The awards recognize outstandingadvances in direct and digital marketing technology for a new product or service introducedbetween November 2009 and June 2010. Sales Portal’s creative approach to revenueenhancement, introduced earlier this year, has been enthusiastically embraced by directmarketers, a phenomenon that now extends to the competition’s distinguished judging panel,comprised of leading industry peers.

“We are honored to be in such rarified company,” commented Sales Portal CEO SaurabhKhetrapal, who continued, “For some of the industry’s leading lights to validate the innovation ofour online, auction-based lead model at launch, is extremely exciting.”

Sales Portal’s aim is to replace traditional third party upsells, which have come under advancingregulatory scrutiny, by offering a paradigm shift in the form of cross-pitching™. Marketers whogenerate inbound leads offer consumers the opportunity to hear about a complimentary product,once a caller’s principle reason for telephoning has been satisfied. A compliant lead is then warmtransferred to a lead buyer’s telemarketer whereby an entirely separate pitch for a relevantsecondary product occurs. No data is passed in the new, FTC-compliant model. The SalesPortal platform is auction-based and both lead sellers and buyers can choose the companies andproducts that they align themselves with.

As a finalist for the DMA Innovation Awards, Sales Portal will compete to be one of six categorywinners. A Best of Show winner will also be announced as part of the DMA’s 2010 Conference &Exhibition at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco October 9-14. Sales Portal will bedemonstrating the “next gen of lead gen” on the conference’s exhibition floor at booth 1034.