SalesPortal has been selected as a winner of Red Herring’s Top 100 Americas Award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the North American business region.

Red Herring announced its Top 100 in recognition of the leading private companies from Americas, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.

“Choosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across North America to the Top 100 winners. We believe SalesPortal embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. SalesPortal should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong.”

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their sector peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in Americas.

“We are honored and excited to have been named a Red Herring Top 100 company,” said Saurabh Khetrapal, co-founder and CEO of SalesPortal. “Our team has done a tremendous job of developing our patented technology and the systems around it, and they deserve this award. We believe SalesPortal will change the way companies build and get value from relevant marketing partnerships.”

Red Herring’s Top 100 Americas list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube and eBay would change the way we live and work.

SalesPortal’s CEO Saurabh Khetrapal was recently a featured author in the Electronic Retailer Magazine, the official publication of the Electronic Retailing Association. Here is an excerpt from his article, Marketers: Strike When the Iron is Hottest!

While direct marketers are typically well attuned to the potential of upselling and cross selling, the unique moment in time characterized above also lays the foundation for another kind of opportunity: cross-pitching. With cross-pitching, marketers are no longer limited to the ancillary products they have in their arsenal, but instead, they can leverage complementary products and services from other, symbiotic brands. So, for example, a marketer of diet products who is not in the fitness equipment business can give the consumer a chance to double down on her commitment to getting healthy by offering a discount gym membership or the chance to acquire a new-fangled piece of workout gear. This sort of proposition works after the original reason for buying has been committed to; in other words, once the consumer is fully on board. If a consumer is agreeable to the second offer, a warm transfer occurs to the second marketer’s telemarketing environment. All parties then benefit: The originator of the inbound lead is financially rewarded by the lead buyer; the lead buyer is able to leverage the consumer’s new commitment and zeal; and the buyer is afforded a new opportunity to embellish her original commitment.

Under this scenario, the direct marketer essentially has the consumer in a mental space akin to the auto dealer sales manager’s room, with one important distinction: The buyer is not trapped – he has willingly opted in to hear the cross-pitch. This explains in part why, in many instances, more than 20 percent of consumers offered such secondary pitches agree to hear the second offer.

Keys to Success

However, the most successful cross-pitches possess a set of distinct characteristics that direct marketers should be aware of in order to maximize the opportunities these rarified moments of customer compliance afford.  Optimally, such pitches should be:

• Relevant

• Complementary

• Enhances

• Anticipates Need 

• Contains An Incentive

Read Marketers: Strike When the Iron is Hottest! in full here!

It’s no secret that happy customers are much more likely to become repeat customers. It’s also conventional knowledge that it costs less to keep a current customer than it does to acquire a new customer. When a customer calls in to your contact center, the entire customer experience boils down the level of efficiency and speed that you exhibit in solving their issue. And these callers are incredibly valuable to your company because they can have significant impact on your bottom line: happy customers are perfect candidates for a new revenue enhancement program called cross pitching^TM.

Cross pitching^TM involves your call center agent offering a relevant product to your customers at the end of sales and service calls and transferring interested customers to your marketing partners. Your company is paid for the customer referral and your customers are engaged with complementary product offers. Cross pitching programs provide a seamless and highly efficient way to monetize your contact center and increase your company’s revenue, while engaging your customers with product offers that they want and appreciate.

But how does customer experience factor into your cross pitching strategy?

A recent study found that over 80% of customers who are happy with your call center agent’s performance are willing to listen to an additional offer, whereas only 53% of unsatisfied customers were willing to consider an add-on product offer. So, in order to maximize the incremental revenue potential via cross pitching, it is paramount that contact centers focus on delivering top-notch customer service during the “primary” portion of the customer engagement.

The happier your customers are with the customer experience you deliver, the more likely they are to become valuable referrals (via call transfers) for your marketing partners, and the more money your contact center lead transfer campaign will generate!

SalesPortal has been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring’s Top 100 Americas award,  honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from North America.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across North America. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an valuable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

Finalists for the 2012 edition of the Red Herring 100 Americas award are selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the several months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in the, security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, life sciences, cloud, mobile and other sectors completed their submissions to qualify for the award.

“We are honored to have made the list of finalists in the Red Herring 100 Americas,” said Saurabh Khetrapal, co-founder and CEO of SalesPortal. “We are in good company on that list, and we are looking forward to presenting our strategy for enabling enterprise contact centers to build valuable marketing partnerships.”

The finalists are asked to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring Americas Forum in Santa Monica, Calif., May 21-23, 2012. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony the evening of May 23 at the event.

Quick question—which employee in your company is responsible for brand management? Many businesses would say their brand managers, the PR and marketing team or maybe even the CEO should be held accountable for public brand perception. The truth is that every single employee in your company, especially the front-facing teams like sales and customer support, are all responsible for brand management. This specifically includes your contact center staff, a branding resource many businesses fail to leverage effectively.

Your contact center employees are responsible for creating a positive customer experience for each and every caller, which directly impacts brand perception. In fact, a recent Purdue University study found that 92% of customers judge an organization based upon the interactions they have with a company’s call center. In many cases, a contact center agent is the only human interaction a customer will have with your company after making a purchase. That single agent becomes the face and voice of your entire brand; in those few minutes they will either support the values your company claims to adhere to or will fail to meet that customer’s expectations. How they handle the caller’s service or sales issue will influence that customer’s perception of your brand and may determine whether or not they continue to do business with your company in the future. (89% of customers say that a negative experience with your brand will send them to a competitor for their next purchase).

Your company’s contact center is just as important to your brand as your retail stores, website or advertising campaigns. It could even be argued that a call center is MORE important than other customer interface channels, because it’s where your brand is going to be put to the test every day. For many businesses, the contact center is the foremost connection gateway for their customers, whether it is by calls, email, social media channels, or live chat. Unlike many other communication outlets (social profiles, customer forums, blogs, etc) the call center is one of the few places where the brand’s image remains solidly in the hands of the company, not the customers. You have the power to create a great customer experience by delivering on your brand’s promise. Prove yourself to them and help solidify public brand perception!

Businesses would be wise to remember that at the end of the day, most customers are not going to remember the name of the customer service employee they spoke with. They will just remember that they contacted your company with an issue/question and how quickly and efficiently their inquiry was handled. How that one contact center employee handles the call will directly impact your customers’ perception of your brand.

The SalesPortal lead exchange network is an innovative way for you to reach new customers and drive more qualified phone leads into your sales center.

SalesPortal’s technology enables advertisers to receive live phone transfers from companies with contact centers that target a similar audience and sell related (but not directly competing) products. These lead transfer partners pitch your product at the end of their sales and service calls, qualify customers and gauge their interest in your product offer before transferring these customer phone calls to your sales call center. You provide the qualification criteria and the sales script; this way, you define the pitch and messaging that is read to prospects. Unlike traditional 1-to-1 lead transfer programs, SalesPortal enables you to receive live phone transfer leads from multiple relevant companies, helping maximize the ROI of your customer acquisition program.

What also sets SalesPortal apart from other lead generation platforms is that you as the advertiser have the ability to set your own cost per qualified call. The opportunity to define a pay per call price as well as what you define as a qualified lead (in terms of call connect time) means that the SalesPortal lead exchange network is much more cost effective and advertiser friendly than all other advertising and lead generation channels.

The platform also enables you to control how many agents in your own call center will be available to receive lead transfers from SalesPortal’s lead exchange network. If no agents are available, SalesPortal won’t transfer new calls until a representative on your side is free to handle new customer inquiries. This ensures that your company is only receiving leads when a sales agent is ready to handle them, effectively eliminating the risk of “missed” leads.

SalesPortal is the world’s first network that delivers highly qualified customers and prospects to enable your company to enhance sales conversions and lower customer acquisition costs.

Contact us today to learn more about the SalesPortal lead exchange network!

A key to marketing success is to have strong online and offline advertising campaigns. But there is another powerful form of marketing that is under-utilized by enterprises: Partnership Marketing (also known as Affinity Marketing). For example, when someone calls an airline to book a flight, at the end of the reservation, the agent might offer that customer a car rental at the destination. This complementary service allows the airline to enhance the customer experience by emulating a full service travel agency or “concierge” for their callers, while generating additional revenue for the customer referral. The car rental agency is being handed well-qualified leads that are ready to buy their product. That is partnership marketing at its finest—companies in the travel industry often share customers and leads for their mutual benefit, which is in turn also to the customer’s advantage!

However, many companies aren’t able to build marketing partnerships in a way that is scalable, easy and seamless. While one-to-one cross selling partnerships in contact centers are not new, these traditional partnership programs have a lot of inherent issues – most notably around the business development and legal processes required for setup, and the rigid 1-to-1 nature of the agreements that typically have 2 to 4 year terms. Many of these relationships fall short of both parties’ expectations and testing new partnerships is often difficult, if not impossible.

Getting marketing partnerships to be effective in your voice channel (i.e. call center) is not easy, but that’s where the SalesPortal platform steps in and streamlines the process. The patented technology of SalesPortal’s pay per call ad network helps companies generate additional revenue by referring customers from their contact center to other highly relevant brands that are interested in receiving such referrals in the form of live phone transfers. The partners that receive these customer leads enjoy a rich source of new customer opportunities. And most notably, enterprises and brands are not limited to 1-to-1 marketing partnerships; in fact, SalesPortal’s technology and its customer success team build complete ecosystems of like-branded and relevant companies for the purposes of creating highly relevant and robust “multi-party” marketing partnerships, where one enterprise can link up with several mutually approved customer referral campaigns and lead transfer programs.

Interested in learning more about SalesPortal’s CEO, Saurabh Khetrapal, and the SalesPortal process? Check out the latest Enterprise Radio SalesPortal interview here!

SalesPortal today announced it has named Bo Mullan senior vice president of enterprise sales.

Mullan is responsible for driving the company’s expansion among enterprises that can utilize SalesPortal’s expansive network to enhance customer engagement while generating significant revenues for companies with a call center monetization program and reducing customer acquisition costs for advertisers. In addition, he will create strategic partnerships with other contact center technology and solution providers.

“Bo has the depth of sales experience that will be a tremendous asset for SalesPortal as we grow and continue to expand our footprint in the contact center space,” said Saurabh Khetrapal, CEO and co-founder of SalesPortal. “He will work closely with enterprises that wish to benefit from enhanced customer engagement and efficient and seamless monetization of calls in contact centers.”

Prior to joining SalesPortal, Mullan was a senior strategic account executive with Salesforce.com where he launched their Service Cloud and helped establish it as the fastest growing product in the company’s history. With more than 25 years of sales and executive sales management experience, Mullan has worked with a number of customer management companies, including TellMe Networks (acquired by Microsoft), RightNow (acquired by Oracle), Convergys, eLoyalty and Aspect Communications (acquired by Concerto Software). Mullan has advised various start-up companies, including Jobvite.

Learn about the rest of SalesPortal’s management team here!