NYNY Solutions

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.

Will Google take the plunge and become the world’s largest meta search site, too? It’s already a price-comparion service through Google Product Search, but will it go after more specialised areas such as Travel Search Engines?

For some time time, I’ve argued that Google is ideally positioned to do just this; to execute and launch travel search similiar to kayak.com, dohop.com, et al.

Indeed, they’ve meddled with a special search interface for quite some time.

Just try googling “London To Berlin” and watch the enhanced travel search interface appear, together with selected Online Travel Agencies to finalize the search at.

This is not meta search, in fact it’s very very basic stuff. But I’m pretty sure there is substantial data mining going on in the Googleplex in order to evaluate future steps. There are companies out there to buy (kayak.com if you want the industry leader, dohop.com if you want the coolest technology) that would kick-start a Google travel search engine, or Google could just decide to steal with pride and polish to perfection.

A caveat: Considering the fact that the TSEs of the world are pretty big SEM spenders today, a Google TSE would result in an industry massacre and reduced AdWords revenues for Google. Live and let live, or control more of the value chain directly?

The answer might be to do a little bit of both. After all, there are hundreds if not thousands of travel search sites out there scraping and reading feeds, working hard to keep as many traffic sources as possible alive and showing in search results. All of these search engines have duplicate data, but it’s locked in. For every market entry by a new TSE, the duplication and traffic inefficiency gets worse. OTAs get more requests from ever increasing numbers of TSEs, so they in turn have to query their GDSs. Even airlines have some elements of cost involved when searching their own data.

Now, wouldn’t it be great if all of this could happen much faster, centrally and the data could be shared effectively and still support a healthy, competitive market?

So - what if an industry leader took the role of

A) Outlining and enforcing an implementation standard of results

B) Worked with whoever wanted to be included to ensure that centralised data mining happened (compare this to setting up your sitemap in Webmaster tools, spending countless hours managing your AdWords account - if it’s Google it’s usually worth it, so you do it, even if you’re e.g. Expedia).

C) Offered it to clients (just like Google offers AdSense to website owners)

If I was running a large affiliate network, like CJ, Zanox or TradeDoubler, I would seriously consider moving in and cornering this position - before Google does. Because they should. And then I’ll say I told you they would.