PERQ is on a mission to improve big ticket online shopping

If you’ve been shopping online for a new car, a new apartment home, new furniture or other bigger ticket purchases, chances are pretty good that your online shopping experiences have been pretty bad.

Amazon, Zappos and other expert online retailers may have revolutionized shopping for the smaller, less expensive and straightforward items that are shipped to your door, but the experience of shopping online for complex major purchases has lagged behind.

“If you’re searching for a new apartment at 9 p.m. at night, you don’t want to fill out a form and wait until the next day to get a call back,” said Scott Hill, executive chairman and co-founder of PERQ, an Indianapolis-based website engagement and conversion technology company.

“Our technology creates an interactive experience that’s fun and engaging and moves shoppers further down the decision-making path instead of putting an abrupt stop to their shopping with static lead forms.”

Hill and PERQ Co-founder Andy Medley have gone so far as to claim that lead forms are dead. It’s a provocative sales conversation starter that’s working well for them as a go-to-market strategy in their primary vertical markets — automotive dealerships, furniture and multi-family housing.

Of course, Hill and Medley admit that lead forms have a purpose and a place in the mix of tools that make up effective websites, but they are adamant that lead forms alone aren’t getting the job done when it comes to sales and how shoppers use the internet.

“Companies will spend $58 billion on digital advertising this year driving customers to their websites where they have all the relevant product information and pricing (hopefully), but when those visitors need more than that their only option is to fill out a form and wait,” Medley said.

“What’s missing from most sites is a creative way to capture visitor information through a deeper, richer experience that converts them to a true prospect or sale.”

How PERQ’s FATWIN Web Engagement Technology Works

PERQ’s FATWIN Web Engagement technology increases website traffic conversions by replacing static lead forms with interactive experiences that engage visitors through quizzes, assessments, calculators, trivia, special offer unlocks and other promotions.

PERQ has more than 170 automotive dealerships using FATWIN Web Engagement along with large representative clients in furniture sales and multi-family housing, and results across the board in all industries is a 50 percent to up to 200 percent lift in conversions.

One of PERQ’s key selling propositions is that its clients don’t actually have to spend a million dollars overhauling their websites or even learn a new back-end platform in order for FATWIN Web Engagement to be added to their sites and start working.

“We install a little bit of code on their website and that’s it,” says Medley. “Now we are able to add all these buttons and banners and sidebars — we call them smart CTAs (calls to action) — that function like a transparent layer on top of their website. All our clients have to do is sit back and enjoy the results and start planning for new ways to deploy all the data we’re delivering.”

What’s Next for Fast-Growing PERQ?

Co-founders Hill and Medley started out in business together a little more than 15 years ago under a different company name in the advertising services industry where they learned about consumer behavior. They had a lot of success in the direct mail/direct response print sector, which they continue to serve today under the PERQ umbrella.

“Over the years, we’ve become really good at getting consumers to take action,” said Hill. “We did it with direct response advertising and that knowledge base has served us well. Understanding customer behavior and creating and applying our technologies to the digital world has been a great success for us in the B2C market for big ticket items.”

Now that the company has a significant presence in automotive dealerships and strong footholds in furniture and multi-family housing, PERQ plans to make in-roads into related businesses like banking and real estate.

PERQ has an impressive 25 member strong engineering and product development team with 90 full-time employees total. Hill and Medley said they have aggressive plans to hire 30 talented individuals for sales positions. This includes the obvious experienced sales reps, but also inexperienced sales individuals who fit PERQ’s profile for success. They are heavily invested in continuing to improve a process that trains and coaches new and hungry individuals ready to build a career in technology sales.
They plan to hire 12 account executives, marketers and customer support staff before the end of this year alone. You can learn more about the open positions in TechPoint’s jobs board.
“Based on the strength of FATWIN Web Engagement, we reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue in less than a year with a very small sales staff and with no cross-selling to our existing customer base,” Hill said. “We need to attract some new talent with a fire for making things happen on the sales and marketing side now, and we’re excited about growing together and continuing to be one of the best places to work and top workplaces in the city!”

PERQ is well-known for its company culture having been recognized with several community awards like IndyStar’s “Top Workplaces” and Indy Chamber’s “Best Places to Work.” The company also received the TechPoint Mira best-of-tech award for marketing tech in 2014 shortly after introducing the technology platform upon which FATWIN Web Engagement is built.