{"id":2237,"date":"2016-02-15T16:36:39","date_gmt":"2016-02-15T21:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/?p=2237"},"modified":"2016-02-05T17:02:14","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T22:02:14","slug":"inside-sales-performance-marketing-and-making-a-human-connection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/inside-sales-performance-marketing-and-making-a-human-connection\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Sales, Performance Marketing, and Making a Human Connection"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"256H\"A couple of months ago, I spoke to an audience of business executives involved in the \u201cperformance marketing\u201d business. If your business buys a digital ad on a publisher\u2019s website and you only pay when people click on the ad or take some other action, you are in the performance marketing business, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau\u2019s\u00a0most recent definition of the concept<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Performance marketing is more appropriate for some types of products and services than others. Insurance, for example, is a complex enough purchase that real investigation is required. A person shopping for a new home insurance policy will usually explore several different alternatives, and they\u2019ll need any insurance company they seriously consider to give them a quote, based on the particulars of the house or property they\u2019re planning to insure. So if an online news website sells display ads to an insurance company, it can charge the company based on the ad\u2019s actual performance, measured in terms of how many quotes are requested from visitors to its website.<\/p>\n

Insurance, cars, education–these are the kinds of consumer products your marketing professor would call \u201cconsidered purchases,\u201d usually marked by a consumer\u2019s careful fact finding and evaluation efforts. Similar deliberation accompanies the purchase of many services by purchased by small and medium businesses (SMBs). If you\u2019re selling a considered purchase to consumers or a product aimed at SMBs, then performance marketing is often a very efficient mechanism.<\/p>\n

Of course, getting someone to click on your ad and then to request a quote, or to configure the product or service, is only the first step. In any sales process involving more than a commodity product, the potential buyer will often want some kind of personal interaction \u2013 perhaps to get some knowledgeable advice about a particular product attribute or service feature, or perhaps just to be reassured that the product or service is actually for real.<\/p>\n

Without this kind of\u00a0personal<\/em>\u00a0connection the sale is less likely to happen, but for digital marketers that creates a problem. The whole point of digital selling is to automate and streamline the transaction, and while personal interaction is helpful, it\u2019s also more costly.<\/p>\n

A number of large enterprises, when they sell to small businesses, employ inside sales forces \u2013 people who interact by real-time chat, phone, or email with a prospect, but don\u2019t actually go out in the \u201cfield\u201d to meet with them physically. \u00a0Large e-commerce companies such as Facebook, eBay, Apple, and Google all sell products and services to small and medium businesses, but the economics of these transactions won\u2019t support more than an inside sales approach, which can easily be managed either at a contact center or using at-home agents.<\/p>\n

So with the rise of digital sales and performance marketing, the inside sales function has become a burgeoning field, with large e-commerce companies and others outsourcing all or part of it to any number of vendors. My own parent company, TeleTech, handles inside sales functions for quite a few large e-commerce vendors, selling anything from adwords and computer equipment to telecom services and tax advice. And the \u201cperformance\u201d that marketers are willing to pay for will be based on each marketer\u2019s own business objectives. One of our big clients, for instance, paid us to sell its products to small businesses at a contracted rate that was based more on customer satisfaction than it was on actual sales volume!<\/p>\n

One thing we\u2019ve learned is that speed of response is critical to the success of any performance marketing effort, whether measured in terms of sales or the quality of the customer experience. Having the capability to chat with a prospect online, or to answer questions, or just to provide reassurance and affirmation, shows a prospect that \u201creal people\u201d are available to help them through the process.\u00a0 And\u00a0research shows<\/a>\u00a0that responding to a web-generated lead within 5 minutes, rather than 10 minutes or more, can generate nearly ten times the contact rate!<\/p>\n

At the performance marketing conference I spoke to, one of the key areas of agreement was that despite the proliferation of chat windows, social media, and email messaging, the single most effective and cost-efficient follow-up tool in many cases is a simple outbound phone call. And some publishers are now actually making that initial call on behalf of their clients and charging them for it, in effect combining the performance marketing and inside sales effort into one offering.<\/p>\n

So whether you\u2019re a marketer buying click-throughs or leads from the website publisher hosting your ad, or a publisher generating online quotes and inquiries for your clients, the performance marketing business model and the inside sales function are two processes being driven ever closer together by technology.<\/p>\n

Because ultimately, the most efficient connection between a buyer and a seller is the human connection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of months ago, I spoke to an audience of business executives involved in the \u201cperformance marketing\u201d business. If your business buys a digital ad on a publisher\u2019s website and you only pay when people click on the ad or take some other action, you are in the performance marketing business, according to the… Inside Sales, Performance Marketing, and Making a Human Connection<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":2238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[840,1034,1035,1036],"class_list":["post-2237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strategy","tag-customer-experience","tag-digital-marketing","tag-inside-sales","tag-performance-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2237"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2249,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions\/2249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}