New York City-based SaleMove is looking to bring the idea of selling real-life complex or expensive purchases to the online world. With more and more consumers looking online for everyday purchases, the company hopes to resolve the hangups when it comes to things that don’t necessarily fit in an online shopping cart, namely cars, real estate, life insurance, and high-end jewelry. The company is part of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable (ERA) accelerator program in New York City, and is currently in private beta.
CEO Daniel Michaeli got the idea for SaleMove with his co-founder while working at a Fortune 100 retailer. “We were working on pricing strategy and the question that kept coming up in our minds as we worked on different things, is how are these retailers able to compete with large online retailers like Amazon, without focusing solely on price, and SaleMove is a response to that. It’s really bridging that physical sales experience with online commerce,” Michaeli said.
After signing up for SaleMove, businesses have access to a dashboard that integrates with their website and lets them view real-time and past visitor browsing activity. SaleMove will then rank website visitors based on a number of variables, like the amount of times they’ve returned to the same model of a car or real-estate posting, and how long they’ve spent on the site, and feed that information back to sales representatives on the floor. Salespeople can then choose visitors with the highest propensity to purchase, and use the platform to get in touch with the potential customer.
Individuals on the other end then receive a prompt for either a voice, video, or text chat from the salesperson, which they can choose to accept or reject, like any other sales call, except this time directly through their browser. If they choose to accept, the salesperson canchat with potential customers and address common concerns, or using the video on their iPad show customers the actual model of car or walk them around the property the customer was looking at online. The other key feature SaleMove provides is for both consumers and salespeople to co-browse a site, where the customer can be walked through important items or discover new ones that they may have not take into account. All of which, the company believes, will lead to increased purchases and essentially move sales, as the name suggests.
Since it targets visitors who quite often will just be browsing and won’t be interested in a sales pitch, the company recognizes that some online consumers may have an initial hesitation to the platform. “We think of it as just as when you walk into a store, a salesperson can see what you’re doing in a store and talk to you about it. In the same way, we don’t collect any more information than Google Analytics would for example, we just do it at a disaggregated level and provide it to operators in real-time,” Michaeli added. “This lets businesses seamlessly reach out to customers they want to focus on.”
The SaaS platform charges businesses a monthly fee for each salesperson using the platform. Companies can also add additional salespeople as they see fit, with SaleMove still finalizing the different tiers of pricing that they will be offering.
Companies are increasingly stepping in to provide businesses means to connect and interact with customers in real-time and to help give more information before they buy, including real-time chat platforms Olark and Zingaya, which let company reps chat with website visitors while they’re browsing. However, where existing tools focus more on customer service, SaleMove is focused exclusively on closing sales.
SaleMove is testing its platform with several beta customers, and will be looking to launch the public beta in the next few months. The team also has plans to develop features that would enable live interaction with individuals browsing products on their mobile and tablet devices. It remains to be seen how individuals will react to being reached out to while browsing online, and whether they’ll find it intrusive or useful.