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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

SalesPortal’s exhibit will be in booth 519.

Our CEO, Saurabh Khetrapal, says “We are very excited to be exhibiting at ICMI ACCE. Enterprise contact centers make customer experience and customer engagement their top priorities. Our technology seamlessly enables this, while generating significant revenues and profits. Our cross-pitching platform is ground-breaking and enterprises have never really seen anything quite like it. So, we are excited about this unique opportunity to listen to enterprises and also to ideate together on how we can enhance their customer engagement and profits.”

SalesPortal’s unique cross-pitching™ system enables enterprise contact centers to augment the customer experience by engaging callers with relevant offers from branded advertisers at the end of sales and service calls. Not only does this enhance customer engagement, it also provides companies with the opportunity to develop a revenue generation program that eliminates the pain-points of traditional cross-selling and upselling. The patented technology is easy to implement and contact centers are able to instantly connect with a complete ecosystem of pre-approved, branded and relevant advertisers that bid against each other for customer referrals via end-of-call transfers.

Many companies invest in various lead qualification programs, where a 3^rd party is responsible for finding and cultivating targeted leads, and then passing off interested customers to the advertiser’s sales representatives. However, these traditional lead aggregation and lead generation channels can become expensive quickly, with mixed ROI results. With these programs, there is often a fixed (and usually high) price on each lead generated; and because the lead originator (i.e. the publisher or the aggregator) is the one responsible for the advertising costs, the price is determined by the lead originator. In order for their business to be successful, the lead originator marks up their own lead procurement costs and sells each lead to the advertiser at a non-negotiable price point. Arguably, these leads should be well worth the price, since the originator has taken the time to qualify each customer before handing them off to the advertiser; but the ROI on these leads is often found to be lackluster due to either the high price of the leads or the poor quality or oftentimes both.

That’s where SalesPortal’s proprietary customer acquisition program steps in and breaks the mold.

Unlike traditional lead generation channels, where the lead originator sets the “sell” price of each lead, the SalesPortal program allows for advertiser’s to set their own “buy” price. Our unique pay per call ad network gives advertisers the ability to bid for live phone lead transfers from branded enterprises with contact centers. These contact centers have existing, “organic” phone traffic for their own products and are willing to present a complementary product offer at the end of their customer calls. We call this process “cross-pitching”, and it solves the pain points of traditional cross-selling and up-selling in contact centers. After the agent presents the cross-pitch offer, interested and qualified customers are live transferred to the most relevant and highest bidding advertiser’s sales center. Advertisers determine their own campaign parameters, including the pay per call lead price, lead qualification criteria, and daily budget. All campaign details can be customized for each of the enterprise contact centers that advertisers are interested in receiving customer referrals/lead transfers from.

One of the best things about SalesPortal’s customer acquisition program is that advertisers are responsible for paying only for a live phone lead if that customer remains connected for a minimum threshold of pre-determined time. Unlike online pay per click advertising, where advertisers are charged for every click regardless of how long that visitor stays on their site, our customer acquisition program helps protect advertisers and their budgets by making sure only qualified and interested leads are being billed and paid for. This ensures a robust ROI and takes the risk out of SalesPortal’s customer acquisition campaigns.

Interested in learning more about SalesPortal? Contact us today to see a short presentation and to take a peek under the hood of our patented technology that has been designed with your advertising needs (and ROI) in mind.

From April 22-25, SalesPortal will be exhibiting at and attending the SOCAP Symposium at the Renaissance Harborplace in Baltimore, Maryland. This year’s Symposium will offer three days of networking and idea-sharing on critical business issues facing the customer care profession including industry communities like Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Retail, Travel & Hospitality, and Healthcare.  Attendees will be able to connect with SalesPortal at booth # 104.

In addition, on April 23rd at 1:45 PM, SalesPortal will be featured in the SOCAP Business Partner Showcase in the Guilford presentation room. This no-pressure environment is the perfect opportunity to get an in-depth look at SalesPortal’s patented technology.

SalesPortal’s unique cross-pitching™ system enables contact centers to improve customer satisfaction by engaging callers with relevant offers from branded advertisers at the end of sales and service calls. Not only does this enhance the customer experience, it also provides companies with the opportunity to turn contact centers into revenue generators. Unlike traditional cross-selling programs, SalesPortal’s cross-pitching technology is easy to implement and does not require agent training or other disruptive processes. Enterprise contact centers are able to connect with a complete ecosystem of pre-approved, branded and relevant advertisers that bid against each other for their end-of-call transfers.

Our CEO, Saurabh Khetrapal, says “Businesses are always searching for ways to build on their customer engagement as this is an integral component of long term success. SalesPortal’s cross-pitching system gives contact centers the ability to connect callers with unique product offers from relevant and pre-approved advertisers, which really enhances their brand loyalty and customer experience. ”