A company that sells farming equipment shouldn’t be advertising in Times Square. One of the principle rules of marketing is that you cannot be all things to all people. While you may want your product or service to appeal to as wide a potential audience as possible, at some point you’ve overreached and are trying to connect with consumers that have little to no interest in your brand. While a billboard in Times Square may be seen by millions of people, what percentage of them are actually the right people? The farm equipment company would be much better off investing their advertising dollars in a print ad in a farming tradeshow publication which is bound to reach the right kind of customers, even if it is a smaller audience. When it comes to marketing and making sure your message is being seen/heard by the right people, relevancy is key!

Why is relevancy so important for partnership marketing?

Partnership marketing links complementary brands together for mutual benefit. One partner is usually looking to provide added value for their current customer base, while the second partner is looking to connect with a new audience of potential customers. Each partner needs what the other has! For instance, let’s say a nutritional supplement provider is looking to expand their existing customer base, so they decide to build a partnership with a fitness equipment company where the nutritional supplement company is allowed to offer exclusive deals or specials to the fitness equipment company’s customer. The fitness equipment company gets to provide their customers with unique value-add offers and the supplement company is connected to interested consumers. But the reason why that partnership works is because of relevancy!

It’s safe to assume that someone who purchases fitness equipment like a treadmill is relatively health-conscious. Since they are health-conscious, taking nutritional supplements is probably something that has crossed their mind, if they aren’t doing so already. Both companies are targeting the same type of consumer so their partnership makes sense; their products are relevant to each other. On the other hand, it would not make sense for the supplements company to build a marketing partnership with a company that sells pet supplies. While it’s entirely possible that the health-conscious customers the supplement company is looking for have pets there is no real reason for those two companies to be associated with one another; there is no relevancy!

Relevancy is what makes marketing partnerships really work. If there is no real, logical connection between the two companies there is no reason to assume that the customers will find true value in the offers being presented by one partner, nor will it augment the overall customer experience and build good will with the other.

SalesPortal today announced it has promoted Sujay Rao to vice president of product management. Rao is responsible for managing the entire product lifecycle from product strategy to execution and launch.

“Sujay has been vital to our product development team, and he will be an important part of our strategic executive team going forward,” said Saurabh Khetrapal, co-founder and CEO of SalesPortal. “His experience has been and will continue to prove valuable to establishing SalesPortal as a leader in partnership marketing.”

“The SalesPortal platform enables companies to easily establish multi-level (one-to-many) marketing partnerships, unleashing an untapped source of advertising and revenue generation opportunities,” said Rao. “We’re doing for the customer voice channel what Google did for online advertising — creating a transparent and real-time marketplace that enables companies to engage customers in what we call voice commerce, or vCommerce.  The opportunities for driving new customer acquisition and commerce in the voice channel are limitless.”

Previously SalesPortal’s director of product management, Sujay Rao has more than 16 years of experience in product management, software development and engineering. Prior to joining the company, he co-founded and led product management for Grasshop.com, a social advocacy network. He has also worked in product engineering for a biometrics start-up company and at Alcatel-Lucent. Rao earned a bachelor’s degree from Bangalore University in India and master’s in business administration from Virginia Tech.

Mobile is receiving lots of attention in marketing circles due to high adoption rates and the potential for rich customer insights gained through an abundance of mobile and location data.

What does this mean for the voice channel and the customer experience? What are the implications for customer satisfaction and voice-based engagement? And, how does one differentiate in a mobile world?

During our first webinar, scheduled for Thursday October 18^th at 10 AM PST, SalesPortal and Point B will explore the relevance of the customer voice channel in a mobile world — as a strategic differentiator as well as revenue center. We’ll discuss various opportunities to organize your channel strategy around the customer value chain. We also have a case study that highlights how the voice channel can be used to further the customer experience and generate revenue through strategic marketing partnerships.

Register Now!

Great Information for Marketing Professionals!

Marketing professionals will learn how to reframe your various channels to produce a powerful and unified customer engagement strategy. See how applying common, yet powerful, online partnership models to the mobile voice channel by leveraging call transfers from partner contact centers helps lower the cost of customer acquisition. See what performance-based, pay-per-call options are out there!

New Insights for Contact Center Professionals!

For any contact center professional attending this workshop, you’ll learn how to successfully leverage your existing customer engagement practices to offer your customers relevant partner products and services on the same call. Learn how you can generate revenue through partnerships and turn your contact center into a profit center!

Our Speakers:

Joe McFadden (SalesPortal) has more than 25 years of experience in executive level marketing positions, primarily delivering customer service and sales software solutions to global enterprises. He has launched several first-in-category products participating in the rapid growth of leading solutions including customer experience analytics and innovative cross selling solutions.

Mistilyn Gebow (Point B) is a business and technology strategy advisor with over 15 years of experience helping clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 50 industry leaders execute their most strategic initiatives. Mistilyn began her career in the telecommunications industry building customer activation, customer care, and billing systems for wireless carriers. In recent years, Mistilyn has turned her attention to technology strategy and currently runs Point B’s new service and business incubator.

Register For Our Webinar Now!