As I blogged about previously, we’ve grown mainly organically up until now and that is also how most of my peers have grown. We’ve now realised the time has come to grow our business aggressively, to start to see some of the returns we need. In my marketing post I talked about the various angles we were trying, of those email marketing fell flat on it’s face. I know in theory it will work, unfortunately we partnered with a company who couldn’t deliver and were not a pleasure to work with. Given the right offering, we would look at email marketing again, but for now it’s on the back burner.
Front of mind for March is telesales or telemarketing as it’s known in other parts. We were on course to hire a part-time telesales person, but our first interviewee didn’t bother to show up. So for now this work is falling to myself and my business partner, Alex. This takes us both out of our comfort zones, even though Alex has a sales background – it’s always been face-to-face stuff, rather than cold calling. As for me, I have zero sales experience, but as some peers have pointed out that’s no excuse. Alex and I started Sirona Solutions with clear roles, Alex was sales and I was tech. But that is no longer an excuse, we need to grow and I am determined to do my part.
We’ve spent a lot of time finalising our service offering, something that has changed many times over the last three years. There is still a little tweaking to do, but we have our cloud solution finalised and have some exciting ideas to help us stand out in the Managed Services space. Once these last few bits and pieces are put together we’re going to put services to bed for the next six months and focus entirely on sales. We will of course continue to serve our current customer base while we do this, that will always take priority. On that front we have some exciting prospects on the horizon which could boost our helpdesk capability three fold.
The marketing guru I referred to in my marketing post doesn’t think telesales is the only answer and all being well we’ll also be working with him to run some direct mail campaigns. On that front we’ve also ordered 2000 postcards to send out to businesses in the region, with the aim to raise our profile. The direct mail will be more focused, but what we’ve come to learn is that the majority of marketing is about timing. You need to contact a business when it has a need, that might be a server/PC crash, lost data, bad experience with current IT supplier, etc. That’s partly why you need to contact as many people as possible, but at the same time the benefit of telesales becomes apparent. If your first contact in telesales doesn’t find a need, ideally you want to find out when their current IT contract is up for renewal so you can try to get a competing quote on the table.
Well this is my first post for a while, even though I’m bound to be even busier going forward – I will try to find time to write.
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