Call Center Services Featured Article

Lead Buyers and Sellers Find Each Other on SalesPortal

By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor

(Editor’s Note: This article refers to a video interview shot in San Jose as part of TMCnet’s “On the Road” video series. To view the entire library of videos from Road Shows and other industry shows, as well as product demos and interviews in our in-house studio, visit the TMCnet Videos home page <http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/> .)

Recently TMC’s CEO, Rich Tehrani (News - Alert), had a chance to sit down and interview Saurabh Khetrapal, the CEO of SalesPortal. He explained to Tehrani that his company is an online exchange where business can buy and sell live qualified phone leads.

Lead sellers on their platform are call centers, Khetrapal said, explaining that it doesn’t matter what the call center is, whether it’s in-house or outsourced, handling sales or customer services calls, “It’s an opportunity for them to sign up on our platform and monetize the phone traffic they already getn coming into the call center.

And on the buying side, he said, they’re advertisers, mainly direct marketers, looking for inbound, qualified phone leads on a pay-per-lead basis. “As you know,” he said, “the direct marketing industry has an insatiable appetite for qualified inbound phone calls from interested customers.”

Online advertising generates a lot of clicks, Khetrapal said, “and the problem with clicks is the conversion rate. Offline advertising has a much higher conversion rate and stickier customers.” The way it works, basically, is that if somebody calls in a question about, say, exercise equipment, at the end of the phone call that person would be asked “Are you interested in hearing an offer for a special deal on gym membership in your area?”

If you can imagine a network of such lead buyers and sellers, he said, “our platform is where they discover each other.”

To see the video in its entirety, please click here or watch below: