by Admin on August 20, 2010
Nothing is more rewarding for any business than taking an account away from a competitor. Successfully persuading a competitive user to leave their existing vendor for you takes an enormous amount of patience, skill, and strategy. Unfortunately, most business people don’t approach the strategic issue of competitive loyalty properly, and they pay for it with limited success in their take-away efforts.
To be successful in taking accounts away from your competitors, you have to begin by looking objectively at the situation from the viewpoint of your potential client. Consider for a moment the implications to your prospect. By asking them to move their business to you, you are essentially asking them to:
1.) Tell the current supplier that they are fired;
2.) Go through the process of setting up an account with a new supplier, including all of the tedious, time-consuming paperwork;
3.) Get to know a whole new set of people to work with;
4.) Get to know a whole new set of different and unfamiliar procedures;
5.)Take the risk of making a bad business decision, and paying the consequences.
This collectively adds up to a sobering fact that you must accept and work with: Unless your prospective client is having a major problem with their vendor, trying to persuade them to abandon that relationship is an exercise in frustration and futility.
Does this mean that you should abandon your efforts to sell to the competitive user? Not at all. The key to success here is to abandon the notion that you can immediately replace the existing supplier. Instead, re-think your strategy for success. Look for ways to supplement the existing relationship without replacing it, by providing a product or service that meets a specific special need that the primary vendor is either not capable of addressing, or has chosen not to.
Unless your prospect is having a major problem with their vendor, trying to persuade them to abandon that relationship is an exercise in frustration and futility. This approach is much more productive, and gets you over the two major obstacles you face in selling to the competitive user:
(1) You find a way to get your foot in the door and prove yourself.
(2) You turn the prospect into a customer, opening the “pipeline” for additional opportunities if you deliver.
My biggest new client one year was a competitive user who told me initially that they were happy with the resource that they were using, and weren’t open at that time to new alternatives. Accepting this, I was able to persuade a decision-maker within the account to allow me the opportunity to supplement their existing relationship by delivering a specialized service that the current supplier was not addressing.
This initial program soon led to more opportunities, and before long I had successfully acquired a full business relationship that has proven to be one of the best I have ever had. This strategy worked because I requested — and received – a small opportunity to prove myself, without threatening the existing vendor relationship.
Look for ways to supplement, not replace, the needs of the competitive user. By delivering value on a small scale now, you can position yourself to reap big rewards later.
*This is a guest post by Landy Chase, Author of Competitive Selling: Out-plan, Out-think and Out-sell To Win Every Single Time
by Admin on August 3, 2010
Yesterday afternoon I took a break from being so busy to catch up on news making rounds in the tech world and one that particularly caught my eye was Adam Ostrow’s Mashable piece: Social Networking dominates our time spent online. I wasn’t really surprised by the stats, I mean everyone saw it coming at some point but it did get me thinking. It got me thinking about just how useful Social Networks can be to the ambitions of Entrepreneurs and the destiny of their startups.
At the moment, big companies especially have found ways to leverage the high numbers seen by social networks and seen good results too. However, for some reason, startups are still struggling to understand the dynamics. It was even more glaring when I saw a Starbucks commercial and a Mazda commercial simultaneously and at the end of each commercial, there was a link to the facebook page of each of the two brands. Neither of them bothered to put their website URL or other contact information, just a link to their facebook pages. On the other hand, I look around me and start-ups are so focused on getting people to their website that they give little thought/attention to their brand position on these social networks. These big companies know what the deal is, I mean there are well over 600 million members of social networking sites, including atleast 60% of wealthy consumers in the United States according to a survey by the Luxury institute. The survey went on to say that “American consumers with an average income of $287,000 and an average net worth of $2.1 million typically have memberships in 2.8 social networks”. They know where the people are and where the money is, so they are constantly looking for ways to tap into this resource.
There is an obvious increase in the activities of start-ups on social networks, no doubt, and we can all see they are trying to engage fans and convert them. But if there’s anything we can learn from these big brands, it’s the need for us to take it one step further! Start-ups must learn to spark conversations around their brands. It’s cool to set up a page on facebook and get people to fan you or even give you feedback when you ask for it on your status updates but it’s beyond cool to not just be a part of the conversation, but be THE conversation.
While working for a client recently, I was looking for ways to engage moms who typically are the most popular users of the site and found myself on a social network called BabyCenter. I later found out that Johnson & Johnson had started the site in order to get moms around the country together in one place where they could share experiences, tips all while promoting the company. Reports show that BabyCenter reaches an amazing 80% of all moms to be and new moms in the USA. By doing this, Johnson & Johnson have managed to engage a whopping population of their target market for a lot of its products. They have sparked conversations around them which has in turn led to significant increase in sales.
Most recently, the entire web world couldn’t get enough of the “old spice guy”. Prior to this campaign, Old Spice was pretty much second to Axe for most men when it came to grooming but how things changed in only a month. Old Spice decided they couldn’t continue merely chasing customers on social networks, it just wasn’t working! And so they decided to do something to get people’s attention. With the success the campaign saw, they started engaging customers via video by responding to tweets sent in to them from both celebrities and general public. Mashable later reported that Old Spice saw their sales double as a result of this campaign.
Entrepreneurs are creative and innovative people afterall, so coming up with ways to spark conversations should be no trouble. It is bound to be rough and tough for those scraping the barrel in terms of funds but not every campaign requires you to max out your credit cards. Take a step back, think of ways to promote your brand, ways to be the that start-up that keeps them coming back but in all you do, keep it real with your consumers.
by Admin on August 2, 2010
In my most recent blog post, I stressed the need for Startups to focus on gaining early adopters before looking for any sort of funding whatsoever. These days, the cost of building a tech start-up is considerably less than it used to be, Dave McClure knows all about that and was kind enough to share his investment thesis with the rest of us. (I intend to get some money from him for Causerific someday, but not now. Dave is a very astute investor man, tells it the way it is and as long as you don’t mind the vulgar language that sometimes greets you when reading his articles or listening to him, you are bound to come away with something useful. Even Fred Wilson agrees.)
I have found that the value of a start-up to customers and investors alike rises when there’s notable dynamic growth in user-base versus a stagnant number. It sounds funny to me that some people believe ‘building the product’ is the single most difficult part of a start-up, this is definitely not the case. I have worked with enough start-ups to know that selling it to your ‘market’ is just as difficult if not more (especially if you are bootstrapping). Remember that saying “build a product and the users will come”? load of toss! It takes significant hours of research, sales skills, serious balls, creativity and a bit of luck. The most recent start-up I worked for as VP, Marketing & PR is completely bootstrapped and as such I have limited cash flow to work with. Majority of what I do along with the rest of my marketing team is on social media and word-of-mouth (from blog interactions to casual chats at booths of tech events like Disrupt, Tech week etc.) We certainly don’t have the resources to do big paid search marketing campaigns or buy the Leaderboard ad spot on TechCrunch, and so growth might be a bit slower than what a start-up like Milo for example has experienced. In situations like this, I always advice focusing on your early adopters and getting them to like your product/service enough that they tell other people about it. In our case, the users most certainly didn’t JUST come, they came eventually and still come in BUT only after serious work on our part.
So, these early adopters, how do you find them? where do they camp out? and most importantly how do you convince them to check you out? The truth is that early adopters are usually not that difficult to convince and here’s why:
1.) Early Adopters should be people who have a passion for the ‘niche’ you are building your company in. If your start-up is a website service that lets people rent fancy clothes from a huge collection submitted by fashion enthusiasts like yourself, then your early adopters are mostly made up of people who love fashion as much as you do. They are the fashion bloggers, the fashion designers, working class women with a secret desire to leave their office work and make a mark in the fashion industry etc.. These people already like the ‘industry’ with which your start-up identifies, so when they find out that there’s a new product/service that somehow changes niche they already have a strong passion for, it’s a no-brainer.
2.) Early Adopters are often open minded. These are people who are willing to give new ideas a chance. By nature, their personality supports a penchant for finding things they love and giving it a chance to grow on them.
Finding these early adopters depends on your ability research and your willingness to spend long hours scouring the web for people who are passionate about your industry. Unfortunately, there is no easy button that you press and a list of people appears! Now converting these early adopters depends on your creativity and sales skills. If as an Entrepreneur, you are not creative, then you really have no business being an Entrepreneur. Not even those business books and such would save you here.
If you don’t have the money to bring customers to your site (ads), then you must go to them and talk to them. Look for people who blog about the industry you are in, send them emails and give them phone calls (when it applies). Tell them about what you are doing and how it will make the industry different. Get on forums where the fanatics and enthusiasts hang out, start discussions and sell them on your brilliant new product! There is no doubt that things like these take time and it won’t bring you 100 members your second day, realistically, it takes time before you will start to notice constant flow of sign-ups or purchases. But who said Rome was built in a day? Patience is a virtue possessed by the most successful people in the world!
In conclusion, never give up on your start-up because 3 months in, you only have 50 active member. The fact that they are ‘active members’ is evidence you have done something right. You might need to take another look at your marketing plan or that display of patience. I have seen guys build a ‘website’ today and send emails to WSJ, TechCrunch and VentureBeat the next day hoping to get covered. It’s never going to happen! If you know of one, please feel free to leave a comment below. These things take time, get those several bloggers to talk to their mini-communities about your product, leverage the power of social media, make use of videos that could catch on etc.. and soon enough your Early Adopters will be the ones doing the marketing for you!
