Here are some of the blog posts for marketers and contact center executives that we’ve recently found interesting. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them too!

For Marketers

How to Sell More by Focusing On Less
I remember flying to Pittsburgh in the year 2004.

It was a 7am presentation in front of about 40 people who I didn’t know. And who didn’t know me, either. And by the time the presentation was done at 7:45am, I asked the crowd a simple question.

“How many of you would like to buy this product?”

And over 50% of the hands in the room went up. Which, by the way, wasn’t the most interesting part. The most interesting part was that I hadn’t told them much about the product, or the price, or the delivery. So why were so many of those in the room willing to buy the product?

Pitching vs. Selling: Five Tips for Doing Either Better
I don’t know about you, but I grew up with the image of a “sales guy” as a kind of smarmy, ingratiating fellow who would say almost anything to make a sale. When I finally moved into a position within a sales department, the folks I met there weren’t actually like that. They were organized, likable and focused.

Your marketing includes way too much you
One of the most common mistakes marketers make is that they think their customers and prospects care about them, what they sell and how it works. The human truth is consumers really do think, feel and ask “what’s in it for me?”

For Contact Center Executives

How to Treat Your Customers Like Prospects

So how do you know if you’re successfully upselling? When it doesn’t feel, look or sound like “upselling.” Upselling is most effective when the customer is treated like a prospect. In other words, you don’t take them for granted. You strive to give them the advice, resources and education to broaden their horizons and hit a new level of achievement. As a result, they’ll naturally want more of your product.

Does Your Business Need a Customer Service Tune-up?
Just like your car needs regular tune-ups to keep it running smoothly, your small business’s relationship marketing techniques and customer service isn’t something you can “set and forget.” These days, customers are pickier than ever, and they have dozens of ways to spread the (bad) news if they’re not happy with your service—from Yelp reviews to an outraged tweet. What can you do to make sure your customer service engine is purring like a Ferrari’s?

Bad Customer Service: When Talking Back is a Good Thing
Social media has been the biggest customer service game-changer in recent memory. Now, anyone can get on a computer and share their feelings, both good and bad (but it’s usually because it’s bad). Who cares? If you’re a business, you should. Depending on who that person is, that information can influence a lot of people and your (probably no longer) potential customers. How about a Google search? When you’re looking up new information about a restaurant, a retailer, a product, etc., you do a search on the #1 search engine. What if a bunch of those negative reviews came up? You can bet it’ll impact whether a customer walks through your door.

Here are some of the blog posts for marketers and contact center executives that we’ve recently found interesting. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them too!

For Marketers

THE DIFFERENCE IN FAN AND CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
The CMO of a large retail brand stood on stage recently, proudly showing off a fan acquisition campaign that had successfully driven tens of thousands more “Likes” on Facebook. A hand went up in the audience. “Those ‘Likes’ are impressive, but how many of your products did you sell as a result?”

The CMO shrugged and said, “Well, that really wasn’t the point of the campaign. It was about acquisition.”

Do you have the Right Marketing Team for Customer Acquisition?
Few marketing teams of $100M+ companies are built for modern demand generation.

Marketing team structures too often are remnants from the days of print ad dominance.  Sure they’ve evolved, but the core structure is often the same.  Modernization has been performed by adding ‘vertical’ skills onto existing structure.  Few organizations have retooled.  New skills such as SEO or Social expertise were added to existing structure and/or outsourced.

Hey, B2C Marketers: 7 Dead-Simple Ways to Reduce Your Cost of Customer Acquisition
As with most marketing efforts, “converting” followers and web traffic into customers comes at a cost. Specifically, a “customer acquisition cost,” CAC for short. In order to keep the lights on and the product (or service) shipping, it’s necessary to keep this cost low by focusing on high-impact, highly efficient activities that boost the amount of traffic and the overall number of conversions you receive during a discrete time period.

The Art of Pulling the Trigger: Upselling Done Right
Upselling is like bringing a gun to a knife fight, or a knife to a fist fight. If you’re doing it right, and your competitor isn’t, they lose.

For Contact Center Executives

Social Media Best Used for ‘Damage Control’ by Call Centers, CFI Group Study Finds
In its annual Call Center Satisfaction Index, the Ann Arbor-based customer satisfaction measurement firm CFI Group reported that call centers are rapidly transforming into contact centers — incorporating the Web, email, and other sources — and that social media play an important role in raising customer satisfaction and likely recommendations.

The Thing Nobody Mentions that is Vital for Good Customer Service
Situational awareness is key in great customer service. In order to take advantage of opportunity, you have to be knowledgeable about what is going on in your environment – emotionally, physically and spiritually.  Here’s a few ways it can help:

Close the loop: Turn customer feedback into customer insight
Regardless of the products it sells or the work it performs, no business can be successful for long if its customers aren’t happy. To learn where they stand in this regard, many companies issue satisfaction surveys in the hope that analyzing a collection of aggregated results will eventually lead to a positive return on investment.

Upselling and Cross-selling by Customer Service and Support Teams
While sales teams have long had goals for upselling and cross-selling, more com­pa­nies than ever are ask­ing their cus­tomer ser­vice reps to do the same. And they’re ask­ing their sup­port engi­neers to  rec­om­mend prod­uct upgrades and con­tact cus­tomers to renew war­ranty agree­ments. This grow­ing trend is par­tic­u­larly true in the finan­cial ser­vices, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, high tech­nol­ogy, and ser­vices industries.

Here are some of the blog posts for marketers and contact center executives that we’ve recently found interesting. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them too!

For Marketers

Where’s The Leak in Your Customer Acquisition Funnel?

The analogy of a customer acquisition funnel is ubiquitous within the digital marketing and web analytics community. Visitors go in and lifelong customers come out– it’s a simple visual representation of a slightly more complicated relationship between organizations and people and it gets the message across. While simplicity has its value, the idea of a perfect funnel actually paints an inaccurate picture of what’s truly going on.

3 Tips to help you get massively better sales results

No matter how great your product or service is, unless it’s marketed with compelling copy (wording), you will struggle to achieve the sales results you want. People need to read your message and then feel inspired to take action; to buy from you, call you, email you, visit your store, etc

The New 4Ps of Marketing

In a day where customers seem to know everything about your business, the old marketing mix that the 4Ps offers is increasingly at odds with how business is done today.

First, we need to look at the fundamental problems with the old way of doing things. Then we need to identify a framework that can cover the same fundamentals, but that is more aligned with how business is conducted today.

New species of marketers in the marketing kingdom

“As a marketer, you have two choices: adapt and survive, or stand still and die. The ones who do the first the best will emerge at the top of the marketing food chain.”

That’s the concluding quote from Gord Hotchkiss’s latest article on MediaPost: Evolving On The Fly: Growth Hackers, Agile Marketers, Bayesian Strategists And CMTs.

Gord’s Search Insider column is my weekly go-to source for big picture thinking in the evolution of marketing. This week he proposed that such evolution is following a pattern known as punctuated equilibrium, which I’ve illustrated above.

For Contact Center Executives

We read this story of customer service, and we’re wondering how to duplicate it.

Remember when you were 7-years-old, waiting all year for Christmas to come, because when it did, you just might be getting the coolest-ever, most-enviable, life-changing toy you could ever imagine? In the case of Luka Apps, this toy (a term that is surely a gross understatement to him) was the LEGO Ninjago minifigures kit. And he didn’t just receive these tiny wonders for Christmas; he actually spent all of his Christmas money on them. So, again, imagine being a 7-year-old boy and losing (yes, losing!) one of these tiny treasures just days after purchasing them. Heartbreaking.

The Need for More Functionality Pushes the Contact Center Market in EMEA

As enterprises have offered their customers ever more channels for interaction, including telephone, Web, email, social media and SMS, the need to coordinate service acros these channels for consistency, accuracy of information provided, and management of the customer experience has grown exponentially. “This challenge will require IVR and voice portal solutions to be more tightly integrated with other customer contact and business applications in order to effectively manage the growing use of multi-channel customer contacts,” concluded Bhattacharjee.

How the Wall Street Journal and Comcast Penalize Loyal Customers and Create Anti-Evangelists

New customers get rewarded for “trying” the service for the first time, but loyal, committed customers who have spent a lot of time and money with you, to the exclusion of your competition…they get punished with price increases for the exactly the same service you were delivering yesterday. Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will have the same kind of material — and likely the same quantity of it, give or take — as yesterday’s. Except it will cost three times more.

How to survive customer service blunders in the world of social media

The basis for handling any customer complaint is believing that the customer truly thinks they have been wronged. Will customers lie? Are there really people out there who are so isolated, frustrated, or even perverse they would want to destroy a business? Of course the answer is yes, but for the most part the best way to handle a customer complaint online, by phone, by email, or in person, is to stop and listen. Too many agents begin speaking before the customer is even finished, but taking a deep breath, relaxing, and listening becomes an integral part of any problem solving, since we can’t figure out a solution until we know the problem. Next the seasoned customer service representative will want to repeat the problem back to the customer. In cases where the customer is rude, angry, or even vulgar, the better part of valor dictates one waits until the customer calms down.

SalesPortal today introduced a proprietary offer personalization engine. Offer personalization enables consumers to receive targeted product offers relevant to their immediate needs at the end of sales and service calls. The new personalization engine segments consumers by demographics, purchase history, and/or pre-dispositions, and presents relevant offers customized to the individual. It is the voice equivalent of ad personalization for online ecommerce.

SalesPortal’s partnership marketing platform enables companies to collaborate with other brands in order to engage their customers with relevant, end-of-call offers from partner brands. The result is a much improved customer experience by virtue of satisfying the consumer’s immediate interests through a broader set of products and services delivered through partnerships and across brands. The latest capability allows enterprises to leverage CRM data to deliver highly relevant offers to customers. Just as CRM data transformed call dispositioning and routing, it is now transforming customer engagement by delivering the right product or service offer to the right person at the right time.

“This is a game changer,” said Sujay Rao, SalesPortal’s vice president of product management. “Leading ecommerce companies like Amazon and eBay use personalization to present targeted advertising to consumers. We’ve brought this vital functionality to contact centers, making customer phone engagement as personalized as online transactions. For marketing organizations, we generate higher ROI on their customer acquisition spend.”

Offer personalization uses filters to determine which callers should be presented with an offer and which offer is best suited to the specific caller’s needs. Filters can include customer demographics, purchase history, reason for the call and any criterion that resides within a CRM application or other data sources.

With SalesPortal’s offer personalization engine:

• Brand marketers can provide highly targeted, relevant product and service offers to qualified consumers.
• Enterprise contact centers can generate revenue and improve customer engagement by anticipating and responding to callers’ needs.
• Consumers receive targeted offers of the most relevant products and services.

The SalesPortal platform can receive data from any source, including CRM applications, and is available immediately to enterprises in North America and India.

Here are some of the blog posts for marketers and contact center executives that we’ve recently found interesting. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them too!

For Marketers

Shoppers Will Switch for Customer Service

Consumers know time is a commodity too, like ball bearings and Barbie dolls. So when they’re doing their holiday shopping or are online looking for a good deal on gifts, they don’t want to wait or find problems completing a purchase, and they expect fair treatment from retailers.

For Customer Experience, “Just OK” Is Not OK

Excellent customer experiences fuel growth, drive loyalty, are emotionally rewarding, and inspire people to become vocal champions of brands and the organizations behind them. In 2012, three out of every four organizations recognized this and told Forrester that their goal was to “differentiate on the basis of customer experience.” In real life, most brands scored in the “OK” or “very poor” categories, according to Forrester’s 2012 customer experience index. Only 3% were ranked as “excellent,” a sharp decline that started in 2007 and is now at an all-time low.

What’s your WIFM?

WIFM of course if the What’s In It For Me, and your customer communications need to make that clear.

Is Customer Service the New Marketing?

Today, good companies realize the power and the voice of the consumer. And they cater to them with this in mind. Good customer experiences mean stronger word of mouth and potential brand advocates that can help spread your message more efficiently than any marketer. That’s all true.

Surprising Customers With Exceptional Service

Customer expectations for great service every time they interact with a company are increasing, mainly due to increased competition that’s pushing organizations to outdo themselves in providing a fantastic customer experience.

For Contact Center Managers

Contact Center Management: Hire the Right People

Hir­ing the right peo­ple can make or break a suc­cess­ful con­tact cen­ter team. Find­ing the right mix of skill set and dis­po­si­tion enables faster onboard­ing, and reduces employee turnover. Undoubt­edly one of the most impor­tant tasks for any­one in a con­tact cen­ter man­age­ment role, recruit­ing the right peo­ple for the job can be a tire­some process.

Customer service: the cat and mouse game

In all likelihood, when customers contact your customer service team, they will be searching for a straight answer to what is not necessarily an easy question. Most of the time they will also know exactly what they are looking for: a result.

5 Steps to Improve your Contact Center Results

Even as the contact center continually evolves to handle new channels and greater complexity, improving the efficiency and productivity of your customer experience agents doesn’t have to be complicated.

Turning Agent ‘Best Practices’ into Standard Practice

Best practices are a rarity in the call center environment. And even more so in the work-at-home call center environment. There, I said it. Who’s to blame, the call center leader? What does the at home agent do when they don’t know the answer? There’s no person next to them to ask and training is over. Calling the supervisor is an option, but could eat away at valuable time of two resources that are now unavailable to talk to customers.

6 Customer Service Trends to Watch in 2013

As we look ahead to what will affect and change our customer service priorities in the year ahead, it’s interesting to note the strange tug-of-war going on between digital mastery and the human element. As consumers increasingly spend more of their lives online, businesses and organizations are competing to become a part of it.

SalesPortal today announces executive team changes to support the next phase of its growth. The new team reflects the adoption of the company’s partnership marketing network and services by large enterprise customers and the need to deploy and support those solutions. 

SalesPortal has named Carol Snell, formerly SalesPortal’s executive director, as chief executive officer and hired Dan Reed, formerly an advisor to SalesPortal, as chief revenue officer. In addition, the company has named co-founder and former CEO Saurabh Khetrapal as its chief strategy officer.

“Going into 2013, we’re excited by the traction and pull that we see for our services among Fortune 1000 enterprises,” states Snell.  “We’ve assembled an experienced team to address the opportunity and accelerate our business.”

Snell has deep executive experience in high-growth, venture-funded companies delivering leading-edge customer service solutions. She has a broad range of experiences that includes venture financing, refining market direction for technology-focused businesses, building management teams and establishing strategic alliances. Her career highlights include co-founding Aspect Communications and being CEO of two early-stage startups, executive of a global communications company and board chairman for venture-backed startups.

As chief revenue officer, Reed is responsible for direct sales and indirect channel development, as well as driving the expansion of SalesPortal among large enterprises. He has co-founded two companies focused on delivering cloud-based virtual contact center solutions. He has held senior executive positions with companies in contact center and customer acquisition and care industries where he worked closely with Fortune 500 customers.

In his new capacity as chief strategy officer, Khetrapal will guide the vision and strategic direction for market opportunities, products and partnerships.

“We’re fortunate to be setting the pace for an extraordinarily underserved market opportunity of partnerships in the voice channel,” Khetrapal said.  “SalesPortal provides solutions that allow corporations to realize the full revenue potential of their strategic partnerships.”

SalesPortal today announced it has won the Red Herring’s 2012 Top 100 Global Award, a prestigious recognition honoring the year’s most audacious and far-reaching private technology companies and entrepreneurs from across the globe.

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated award contenders on quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, technological innovation, management strength, business strategy, customer acquisition, and market penetration. SalesPortal was selected from more than a thousand of the most cutting edge private technology companies in North America, Europe and Asia.

“Choosing the best out of the previous three years was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed down our list from 1,200 potential companies to 200 finalists. Trying to get it down to 100 companies was a task upon itself. The top 100 companies who were chosen should be extremely proud; the competition was difficult.

SalesPortal enables companies to collaborate across brands on marketing programs that extend value to consumers. The company’s partnership-marketing platform allows contact centers to present their customers with relevant offers from marketing partners at the end of sales and service calls, generating new revenue streams in the process. Interested customers are live-transferred to the partnering companies, providing these partners with a new low-cost, high-quality customer acquisition channel.

“As a winner of the Red Herring Global 100 award, we are in great company,” said Saurabh Khetrapal, co-founder and CEO of SalesPortal. “We’ve realized some of SalesPortal’s global potential with our partnership marketing networks in North America and India, and there’s much more to be discovered. Our technology is changing the way companies build value and mutually beneficial relationships with like-branded partners.”

Global 100 winners were announced during the Red Herring Global Forum in Los Angeles last week. In May, SalesPortal was named a Red Herring Top 100 North America start-up.

SalesPortal has been selected as a finalist for Red Herring’s 2012 Top 100 Global Award, a prestigious recognition honoring the year’s most audacious and far-reaching private technology companies and entrepreneurs from across the globe.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the companies demonstrating the most innovative technologies and business models from more than 1000 companies from more than 40 nations. These companies, representing past Red Herring Asia, Europe and North America award winners, are judged on a range of qualitative and quantitative metrics, including technology innovation, financial performance, growth criterion, management’s execution standards, potential globalization of the strategy and market share improvement.

“Technology companies are becoming the bright spot in the economic outlook based on their increasing role within macro-economic environments,” stated Alex Vieux, chairman of Red Herring. “2012 has confirmed the sector’s vibrant activity and its resilience to widespread economic problems. An unprecedented number of entrepreneurs are attempting to jump ahead of the competition and aspire to make a difference. Breakthroughs obsolete each other faster than ever before. SalesPortal has performed exceptionally in its field and strongly deserves to be singled out as one of the Red Herring Global Finalists. At this stage, we are left with the daunting task to select the best qualified companies for the 2012 Top 100 Global Award.”

“After winning the North America award, we are honored to have made it to the next level,” said Saurabh Khetrapal, co-founder and CEO of SalesPortal. “This award is significant for SalesPortal in that we’ve gone global this year with our expansion into India with a new network. Our technology is changing how new and valuable marketing partnerships are created.”

Global 100 winners will be announced after finalists’ presentations during the Red Herring Global Forum in Los Angeles, Nov. 27-29, 2012.

SalesPortal today announced a new capability that provides enterprises with the flexibility to rank their marketing partners to provide priority access to their customer audiences.

The new capability allows users to rank partners by setting the specific number of times an offer is read by call center agents for a priority partner campaign before moving to the next priority partner.

With the partner ranking capability, users have the option to override pre-set algorithms by configuring campaigns to prioritize and rank specific partners over others. Users might choose to override the algorithms for several reasons: to favor established partnerships, support existing exclusivity agreements, align with specific brands or align with current co-marketing / advertising investments with specific partners.

“The partner ranking capability is another example of our responsiveness to the marketplace,” said Sujay Rao, SalesPortal’s vice president of product management. “This ability to favor established partners in the call transfer and routing decisions is important to our large enterprise customers. It allows for better control and configurability to prioritize higher value partners within the context of our automated algorithm-driven model.”

Prior to the introduction of the partner ranking capability, SalesPortal automatically determined which partner would receive call transfers based on a number of algorithm-driven factors such as product relevancy, hours of operation and the cost-per-lead bid by a partner, among others.

This latest SalesPortal capability is available within 30 days to current and new customers using the cloud-based, patented technology.

Here are some of the blog posts for marketers and contact center executives that we’ve recently found interesting. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them too!

For Marketers

Five Surefire Ways to Fail at B2B Customer Acquisition

In an era of hyper-connectivity, our biggest failure as B2B marketers very well could be our ignorance of how connected the world has become.

Who is Responsible for “Challenger” Lead Generation?

Dixon and Toman write, “Put differently, the average rep fills orders by reacting to existing demand; stars sell where customers learn (not just where they buy), shaping demand and teaching customers into the sales funnel. The best sales reps, it turns out, are just as good at marketing as they are at selling.”

Making Assumptions About The Buyer’s Journey

If the cycle takes 9 months, that’s a lot of gray area for each stage. And all stages are not created equally in length of time or objectives that must be met for the continuation of forward motion. Plus, it occurs to me that the construct above is for us more than it is representative of our buyers.

Value Propositions Produce Instant Relevance

Relevance Marketing and Selling point to the fact that any sales or marketing message must be expressed so prospects see themselves solving their problems, reaching their goals and objectives, and enjoying the success that comes from doing so.

Do You Really Understand Your Lead Gen Sales Activity Funnel?

Do you really understand the how and the why behind what your outbound lead generation team should be doing on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis?

For Contact Center Managers

Employee Performance Gaps: How to Identify Gaps in Call Center Agent Performance

There are three steps to iden­ti­fy­ing per­for­mance gaps in call cen­ter agents:

1. Cre­ate a bullet-proof mon­i­tor­ing form
2. Develop a com­pan­ion Call Qual­ity Guide
3. Hold fre­quent cal­i­bra­tion sessions.

Building a successful business requires customer loyalty

Loyalty comes with a number of perks, therefore pleasing everyone we can with a “wow” experience attracts more and more business.

If you want better customers, provide better service.

Does a customer owe a tip for “good” service at a full-service restaurant in the United States? Yes. Should a supermarket customer always have to return her shopping cart to a designated cart corral? No. Perhaps she has a crying baby in the backseat or it’s starting to rain. Her only obligation is to pay for her groceries.

A Contact Center Must Follow Basic Customer Support Principles

The following principles sound like they would apply to telemarketing. But in reality, you will need to apply them to all channels if you want your agents to provide quality service and maintain (if not improve) retention.