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Warriors, would like to get your opinion on this....

by Michael Lee
3 replies
Hi Warriors,

A marketer contacted and offered to sell my product through their call center. Here's how it works...

- They will give me a free, dedicated toll-free number for me to display on my landing pages/pitch pages .

- They work with me to put together a script and train their sales staff to handle incoming calls for my product and close the sales.

- Their sales team closes my sales on the call, collects the customer payment information, processes the payments and remits the payments to me (less their commissions), along with the customer order information for me to process and fulfill.

This sounds all good, but I was wondering if this would affect the affiliates promoting my product.

That's because a person that an affiliate referred would have 2 options - pay online or via phone. If the person can pay online but decides to pay via phone, the affiliate loses the commission.

Any advice you can give? Should I take the offer? If I do, what could I do to still give my affiliates what is due them? Thanks, Warriors and advanced happy holidays!
#opinion #warriors
  • Profile picture of the author Devon Brown
    Question for you: How's your product selling now? If it's selling well, then don't fix what's not broken. This way you don't have to worry about affiliates.. because let me tell you.. if you don't have them behind you now - then you also won't have them on your next big launch.

    With that being said.. it is a good idea to have a toll-free number for customer support and inquiries, and also that person can make the sell if need be. Or set up customer support via email and then the person can continue making their purchase online.

    Just a thought dude.
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  • Profile picture of the author Exire
    I would assume the affiliates wouldn't like this very much. One way to compensate might be to increase the affiliate's commission, if possible, or offer bonuses/prizes to stimulate them to send more traffic. The more traffic they send the more likely it is that a greater portion will be lazy and simply buy through your website, thus generating them sales to offset the phone orders.

    You could, of course, do what Devon suggested and have the phone number on the site labeled "customer support or inquiries" rather than "Order by phone." This way the affiliates can presell the product and will mostly send traffic that's already going to buy anyway, thus they'll order online. Anybody who shows up but isn't sure they're ready to buy can call the number and that way you don't lose a sale. Affiliates shouldn't really get credited for those anyway since the person probably wouldn't have made the purchase without the phone number.
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Here's an idea for you...

      Get a coder to set up a simple script for your site. If the referring URL contains an affiliate ID, you don't show the phone number. If there's no affiliate ID, show the number.

      It's not perfect, but it seems fair...
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