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MarketSoft Corp., a marketing software company best known for its lead management software, announced Monday a new application dedicated to the holy grail of cross- and up-selling.
The new application, MarketSoft Cross Sell Hub, is designed to meet businesses need to sell more products and services to current customers. Company officials said their new product is targeted specifically at the financial services industry, which they say is still struggling to find ways to benefit from deregulation that broke down the walls between different financial services such as banking, brokerage and insurance.
Cross Sell Hub is in effect a business process engine that connects opportunities—whether they be sales referrals, event-triggered opportunities, customer retention alerts or leads generated from marketing campaigns—with the line of business and the channel most likely to close the sale.
Cross-selling—selling multiple products and services to the same customer when the customer already has indicated an interest to buy—is hardly a new concept. Most marketing software companies, like E.piphany Inc., NetPerceptions Inc., BlueMartini Software Inc., and Unica Corp., claim to support it at some level in their products. Yet, MarketSoft claims to be the first company to automate the entire process from identifying the opportunity to making the offer to tracking the customers response.
MarketSoft officials in Lexington, Mass. said that employees using Cross Sell Hub, whether they are in sales, marketing or the call center, will be able to identify cross-sell opportunities and refer customers to the specific group within a company that can create an appropriate offer.
Cross Sell Hub comprises five components. One of these components, the Referral Manager, is a Web-based tool that routes cross-sell opportunities automatically to the appropriate sales entity and channel within the organization.
It then tracks the opportunity to see if it results in a sale and processes sales incentives on the fly. Another component, the Coordination Manager, works in tandem with the Referral Manager to match opportunities with the right agent, channel and line of business.
The Delivery Manager meanwhile handles the delivery of the opportunities and offers back-and-forth communication between customer, sales channel or contact center, typically using e-mail, the Web or some form of offline media.
Cross Sell Hub also includes a Distributed Rules Engine that allows employees closest to the customer to set business rules without having to rely on the IT department and plug-and-play integration with CRM applications from Siebel Systems Inc., PeopleSoft Inc. and SAP AG.
Cross Sell Hub is available now, with pricing for the suite starting at $500,000.
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