Many marketers are so focused on growing their lead sources, including live voice leads, that they sometimes don’t place enough emphasis on the next (and most crucial) step – turning a lead into an actual sale, while delivering maximum customer satisfaction and maintaining the highest conversion rates. A customer who reaches you via an inbound call is arguably more “ready” to buy than a website visitor or a prospect reached by an outbound cold call.  However, there are still strategies a company can implement to maximize conversion rates, average order value, and customer engagement.

Here are three best practices companies may consider once they receive a live phone lead:

Build a rapport.

Even though a live phone lead has initiated engagement with your company, that doesn’t mean your agent should immediately launch into “sales mode.” It is important that they take the time to build a rapport with the caller; consumers don’t want to feel like they are being “sold.” As the old adage goes, “consumers like to buy but hate being sold.” The promotion for your product or service has clearly intrigued them, so take the time to build a relationship and the sale will eventually happen. If your sales team is too aggressive at the beginning they risk driving a potential customer away, but if a connection is built, the customer will buy, and quite possibly at a higher order value.

Focus on the end benefits for the consumer.

In its simplest form, a customer is interested in buying your product because of what it can do for them. They need it do something specific and deliver value. When dealing with a live phone lead, it is important to understand the customer’s motivations. Why are they interested in your product? What do they plan on using it for? The more your sales team can focus on the end benefits and the customer’s needs and not on product features, the more likely they are to close the sale.

Listen Carefully.

Too often sales representatives don’t really listen to what the caller is saying – they are more focused on adhering to a call script, than listening carefully to the customer. The more interactive a dialogue your sales representative can engage your customers, the more information your representative has at their disposal to make the final sale happen. If the caller isn’t ready to buy your product on the spot, your representative should understand what their concerns are. Are they just shopping around? Are the uncertain of the product’s benefits? Are the concerned about the price point? For every concern a customer presents, your representative should be able to overcome it, with the right training.  Careful and attentive listening is the cornerstone of attaining a happy customer.

Partnership marketing is a powerful tool for companies. The collaboration between two or more companies with similar marketing needs, a common audience, or complementary products is called a partnership. This can be used by both sides to increase customer awareness, sales, or simply create extra revenue.

Partnership Marketing Today

In the context of contact centers, partnership marketing is a way for a company to improve its customer experience, share leads, and grow its business with the help of its partner company and its contact center. Currently, creating a contact center marketing partnership involves two companies who are mutually exclusive to each other (a one-to-one partnership) exchanging leads for a set price. Leads flow one way, from the lead selling company to the lead buying company. This can provide a couple of key benefits for both sides of the partnership.

1. Gain access to a larger targeted customer base while improving customer experience.

A partnership marketing program is only useful if the two companies are targeting the same audience. After all, what value is there for an enterprise to pitch one of their customers with a non-complementary offer? Without a high degree of relevancy, customers will not see value in being transferred to your marketing partner’s sales center. This has the potential of negatively impacting the customer experience. Since the customer experience is of paramount importance, enterprises should strive to only partner with other brands that offer relevant, but not directly competing products/services.

A partnership marketing program ensures that both enterprises work towards mutual benefit. This gives the company on the receiving end of leads access to a large, untapped and highly qualified customer base. As for the company that transfers the customer lead, not only is customer engagement enhanced, but they also generate an efficient and optimized revenue stream.

2. Increase brand awareness.

The real beauty of a partnership marketing program is that the company receiving customer leads can use the customer-referring company as a way to build brand awareness. A smaller company can leverage the value of that enterprise’s big-name brand to introduce their products to an attentive, interested, and engaged audience. Even if the caller isn’t interested in their offer at the time, the pitch for the partner’s product creates brand awareness for the future.

SalesPortal: Partnership Marketing “On Steroids”

A marketing partnership provides great benefit to each company but only to a certain extent. A one-to-one marketing partnership is expensive and lengthy to create and offers little to no flexibility for either party; flexibility to test out partnership arrangements with multiple companies to find the perfect mix of relevancy and monetization.

SalesPortal’s cloud based-technology addresses this issue by building partnership marketing NETWORKS for enterprises. The patented solution uses an enhanced partner discovery, bidding, and mutual approval system to enable companies to connect with multiple brands and enterprises for the purposes of co-marketing and sharing of live phone leads.

1. Reduce customer acquisition costs.

In traditional pay per call lead generation programs, the cost per lead is determined by the lead generator, or the lead aggregator. Since the lead generators are responsible for the bulk of the marketing and advertising costs that went into acquiring the lead, the price per lead is often very high. Although this relationship may be a good source of well-qualified leads for the advertiser, its fixed cost system can become prohibitive for several enterprises.

Contrarily, SalesPortal’s partnership marketing network allows advertisers to set their own cost per lead and fine-tune this price to fit their target metrics, such as cost per order. With SalesPortal’s Cross-Pitching system, multiple companies can bid for call transfers from other companies that have similar demographic targets and/or complementary products. Essentially advertisers are bidding for the cross-sell component of the call – i.e. the end-of-call “real estate” where the original agent handling the customer call has the opportunity to recommend other relevant products to the caller after the main transaction is satisfactorily completed. In this way, SalesPortal gives advertisers access to a whole new customer base and provides them the flexibility of controlling the price parameters of their lead generation program – without the onerous process of arranging one-to-one agreements with their desired marketing partners.

2. Combine the benefits of online advertising and offline media

The major appeal for offline media (television, radio, print, direct mail, etc.) is that it generates highly-coveted phone leads that deliver very high sales conversion rates; calls usually convert at 10 times higher rate than clicks. The downside of offline advertising is that most of it is NOT performance based – advertisers pay on a CPM basis. This is where online advertising shines and most online channels, especially search, are performance based, for example, cost-per-click. However, given the abysmal conversion rates for clicks as compared to calls puts advertisers constantly in the position of choosing between high conversions (i.e. phone leads) and performance-based marketing (i.e. online traffic). SalesPortal has solved this dilemma by offering advertisers BOTH: high-converting and qualified phone leads on a pay per call basis. So, by leveraging SalesPortal’s technology, advertisers finally have the best of both worlds!

An enterprise contact center could easily handle millions of customer service and sales calls in any given year – either in-house or at their outsourced BPO provider. Assuming that the average handling cost per call is around $4, an enterprise could easily spend tens of millions of dollars each year on their in-house and/or outsourced contact center. But what if you could turn your contact center into an efficient revenue center and make every touch point with your customer an opportunity to generate revenue?

Before we answer this question, let us examine another phenomenon…in the advertising and marketing arena.

In order to lower their customer acquisition costs, advertisers are always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to reach targeted audiences that may be interested and qualified for their products. However, reaching the right customers at the right time with the right offer is proving more challenging…with Do-Not-Call regulation and anti-SPAM laws, legacy channels of targeting your customers via outbound calling and email campaigns have become obsolete. Even in traditional online and offline media, consumers are bombarded with marketing messages – commercials on TV, ads on buses and subways, outdoor billboard ads, search engine marketing, display ads, flyers and inserts, direct mail, SMS, etc. And consumers have become de-sensitized and have learned to tune these marketing messages out. Capturing the attention of a target audience is getting harder and more costly for advertisers simply because there is so much clutter and noise that their message has to contend with.

That is where partnership marketing comes in. Here is how it works:

In your contact center, at the end of a customer service or sales call, if the agent has done their job well, then you have a happy customer…the agent has just delivered great customer experience and developed a rapport with the customer. So, there is a “moment of magic” once the customer’s transaction is successfully completed and the customer has a sense of satisfaction…and even joy. This is when your agent has the opportunity to recommend a RELEVANT product offer to the customer – a complementary and targeted add-on product or service that your customer would appreciate getting more details on. Customers interested in hearing more about the add-on product would be transferred to the “advertiser’s” call center and your company would get paid for the customer referral! With little extra effort on your part (and thanks to the skills of your agents) your contact center can leverage this simple process to make each call generate significant revenues for your company, while enhancing customer engagement by presenting RELEVANT product offers that deliver tangible value to customers.

Advertisers are incredibly interested in live phone lead transfers and are willing to pay top dollar for qualified customer referrals. They end up lowering their customer acquisition costs by tapping into a rich source of new customers. Your contact center becomes a veritable revenue center; and your customers get a complete buying experience. Now that’s a WIN-WIN-WIN!