Oh no, a customer calls!
Does your organisation distinguish between online sales and telephone sales? If so, why?
I believe many companies that are able to sell their products online almost consider a telephone sales an inferior result - proof that the almighty webshop wasn’t up to the task.
Well, in some cases it’s probably correct (a lot of webshops really are crap wrapped in HTML).
But in general I think it’s a negative notion, born in the light of online marketing back in the 90s: “if the customer finds you online, you should be able to sell online, if he finds you offline, it’s OK to sell offline.”
Back then not everyone had online access, companies might even have separate online and offline sales and marketing organizations - each clawing for results. If your company is stuck in this mindset, you might be hurting your sales.
Instead, I think it’s important to take a look at what a good telephone sales rep is able to generate, compared to your webshop. Look for positives:
- Are phone conversion rates much higher than online CR?
- Is it easier to generate upsell on the phone?
- Are phone sales complete and confirmed once the customer hangs up?
But how to generate cost-efficient traffic to your money-making phones? Time to try a pay-per-call setup like TradeDoubler’s td Talk?
Maybe, but start by looking at your own website first. Are you actively displaying telephone numbers next to your webshop? What are you telling customers - should they call, when and why?
I think the first and most important realisation is - it’s not a failure to get sales on the phone, instead of in the webshop.
Tags: conversion rate, online sales, pay per call, telephone sales, TradeDoubler, upsell
April 28th, 2008 at 6:41 am
Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Chris Moran
April 28th, 2008 at 8:25 am
The positive aspect of getting a sale over the web (or through pay-per-click solutions like td Talk) is that they are more easily measured than your standard phone call.
Even though you should welcome incoming calls and not be afraid of them, you can’t really ask the customer 20 questions about where they saw your ads before calling, how they found your number, and so on.
I am a big proponent of click-to-call solutions, since they save the history of what the customer was doing before (s)he called you. You may be able to use that info (like what products or info the person viewed) to upsell or guide the person to the right products.