It’s imperative that brands reach out to customers on their channel of choice. Be it online, voice, chat, or any other platform, your customer expects you to be there when they need you. But when you are where your customer expects you to be your brand is given the unique opportunity to leverage the customer’s immediate interests and needs. Your most powerful marketing asset is to know something about your customer.  And the contact center and your voice channel know a lot. In fact, with the right tools your online marketing and offline marketing efforts can easily tie into each other to create more touch points, preserve the customer experience, and generate new leads for your enterprise.

Leverage the same offers through your online and voice channels.

Would a customer that reaches out to your company online versus a customer that calls into your customer service or sales call center be looking for completely different offers of information? Probably not. Although their preferred method of communication might differ, their end goals are going to be very similar. Your online channels and your voice channels can be used to present your consumers with the same or more relevant, complementary products and services.

For instance, when customers book a flight online, they often see a rental car offer on the confirmation page, or even as part of the flight booking process at the very beginning of the transaction.  That same offer could be used in the voice channel, so that when a customer books a flight with an agent over the phone, they can hear the same rental car offer.

Create special promotions with each of your partners.  Partner with multiple companies to target your customers specific needs at the time.

Most enterprises have established partnerships with some number of companies in order to present the most relevant offers at the right time.   For instance, a home insurance provider could develop promotions and offers with home security system providers, home warranty services, or cable / satellite services.  These offers can be presented on a case-by-case basis based on the reason for a customer call, recent purchase histories, customer demographics, etc.  Thus,, creating an even more unique customer experience. One of the advantages of marketing in the voice channel is that one-to-one personal interaction between agent and caller. You don’t get that kind of personal experience with most online marketing efforts, no matter how personalized the offer might actually be; the voice channel is uniquely human.

Prioritize offers based on consumer interest.

Once you’ve created a partnership marketing network with a variety of relevant partners and have invested in various special promotions it’s important to prioritize those offers based on consumer intent. Not every offer is going to have the same kind of impact on your customers and target audience and you don’t want to waste your customer service and sales agents’ time, or turn your customers off, with the wrong offers from your partners. The same logic has to apply to your voice channel efforts. Being able to personalize products and services presented to your customers based on interest, purchase history, demographics and other data gives your enterprise the ability to customize and enhance the customer experience.

Even in the face of the rising usage of online self-service, the voice channel is still the preferred channel of choice for many customers. In fact; a survey from Forrester found that well over half of customers prefer to interact with a customer service representative via the phone. Contact centers field an average of 45.4 billion calls per year-that’s a lot of one-on-one interactions! For most contact centers the average cost of an inbound call is just under $6. That means call centers are spending around $270 BILLION dollars a year just to keep the phone lines going.

Many enterprises are looking for a way to offset these operating costs and turn the call center into a profit center and they are turning to partnership marketing networks to help them do just that.

Now the cornerstone of any great marketing partnership is relevancy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a local dog walker that partners with a nearby pet store or American Airlines partnering with Hertz-if the partnership isn’t relevant than it won’t be a successful relationship for either party.

Here are 3 relevancy factors that can help your contact center find the right partners:

1. Products and Services.

Companies that exist in similar, but not directly competing markets often sell complementary products. For instance, American Airlines sells flight tickets, which means that their customers are travelling. What other products and services might a traveler need—a rental car, a hotel room, tickets to local attractions and so forth. When you have a customer on the phone that is in the mindset to buy and you can offer other products and services to enhance the customer experience your partners’ offers become that much more relevant.

2. Customer Demographics.

Let’s say your business sells organic supplements and vitamins. What kind of customer buys your products? A relevant partner would be someone who is targeting the same kind of audience but selling a different product—a gym or personal fitness company, maybe a brand that sells organic workout gear or an all-natural diet plan. Both you and your partner are targeting health-conscious individuals. This means your contact center becomes a valuable lead source for your partners, and your partners in turn pay your company for those live transfer leads, augmenting your company’s income.

3. Decision Trigger Events.

Buying a home is a big trigger event and the fallout is even bigger, which means the potential for marketing partners is also bigger. For example, when someone purchases a home through they might need to talk to a mortgage lender, a moving company, a contractor, home security and alarm system retailer and more. That one trigger event (buying a home) created a whole new set of customer needs, which means opportunity for both you and your marketing partners to offer relevant services right then and there.

At the end of the day you want to align your contact center with partners that add value to your brand and support your brand interests. Relevancy is crucial to establishing the right kind of marketing partnerships that are going to last and provide the most value and opportunity for each partner.

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 looked at online affiliate networks and ad networks like Google AdSense and saw an opportunity to leverage the same lead generation model but for customer phone calls.    We thought to ourselves, why can’t we do the same for phone traffic?    Where web publishers monetize their organic web traffic by publishing relevant ads from advertisers, sales and service contact centers can monetize their call traffic by presenting relevant product offers to callers and transferring opt-in, interested callers to affiliate partners.    Where the website owner gets paid for a click through, the contact center gets paid for a customer transfer.  And where the advertiser has a steady stream of targeted traffic coming over to their website, the contact center partner receives a steady stream of calls and pays for the call transfer as a lead.

Why can’t there be a partner network that helps companies with contact centers, either in-house or outsourced, to monetize their phone traffic by pitching a highly relevant pre-approved product at the end of their customer service and sales calls. That call transfer (instead of the click) results in the monetization. The contact center is acting just like the publisher of a website and taking advantage of the steady flow of organic traffic coming in.

SalesPortal is that network. We are the Google AdSense of phone leads.

The SalesPortal partnership marketing network connects contact centers and brands that exist in separate, yet not directly competing niches, to discover each-other and exchange relevant live phone leads. It allows companies that have a touch point on the phone (the contact center) to enhance customer engagement and the overall customer experience AND generate additional revenue by offering relevant products to their customers at the end of their calls. By monetizing their organic phone traffic, call centers can help counter some of their high overhead costs and become a source of revenue for the company.

Our partnership marketing network also allows advertisers and marketers to receive calls from the interested customers of those contact centers to fuel their sales pipeline, and at a price that works for them. Marketing executives are able to lower their customer acquisition cost, improve lead-to-conversion rates and develop marketing partnerships in the voice channel, a source of quality leads that many companies have not yet fully leveraged.    Participating partner companies see lead-to-sale conversions of over 17%.

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!

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!