hamed
28th February 2006, 13:28
Hi everyone,
This is my first post on this forum...
(This seems to be along post, but it actually is a question, i felt like i have to give some background before presenting the problem)
Introduction:
My company has created a Business 2 Business Online Marketing facility where all the manufacturer, distributors, brokers or a certain industry can meet, and advertise their inventory online and find new customers/trades.
The website is quiet a complex one and has been accumulated based on features found on its competitors website as well as new ones to create an edge in the competition.
The services is free, but cenrtain extended features are only available to paying members.
Existing competitors are charging companies in the regions of $30 to $100 per month for the access to their website. The big gap is due to more features found on the higher end sites, as well as the site is more up to date with more members.
We have a list of 7000 potential users/companies who are already members of those other competitors or who are more likely to be interested on such service.
Tasks/Problems:
In order to operate such service, we require three different operational areas:
1) Billing, majority of this is already done by the back-end software, however certain payment processing tasks are required. This area can be done in-house with hire of accountants/book-keepers etc.
2) Customer Supports, this is to support the users with technical problems once they call or send emails. However the main job of customer support is to keep the website updated based on the inventory database files received from members which needs to be imported to the database keeping the database with fresh info. Again this is something that can be managed internally.
3) Marketing: The main problem is here. The users are world-wide, could be from China, to Australia, to USA to Brazil, to EU. The other competitors call the potential customers individually, as well as advetising on major publications related to that industry. The first thing they do is setup a trial account and demo.
The more successfull competitors have account managers where they look after you while your membership, for example if you fail to email/update your stock/product/inventory information in a while, to keep the website up to date, they'll call you and personally make sure you give them the updates.
This sounds all simple, but the main obstacle is the employee salaries, and the fact that they need to be at least familiar with the industry or be capable to pick up the general sales theme of the industry after training.
The whole time-zone difference means that a potential sales person should work at out-of-hours times... no office present is really needed and they can work from home, but how would you know you have the right person before start paying them?
I beleive a comission based system where if a sales person brings X amount of paying members they'll get comission of their pay if they also manage to keep the member. But i dont have human resource experiences, are there sales agents who are willing to work dedicated but with no fixed salary?
I taught maybe a marketing/product launch company could be ideal? But then again they must work on comission bases... my company does not have a fixed budget on getting this serivce off its feets... Even so, anyone knows of any good "international" marketing companies who are flexible enough to work with small companies like us?
I know i have given a long description, but feedback you can give in respect to how we can launch this service is greatly appreciated...
Thanks
Hamed
This is my first post on this forum...
(This seems to be along post, but it actually is a question, i felt like i have to give some background before presenting the problem)
Introduction:
My company has created a Business 2 Business Online Marketing facility where all the manufacturer, distributors, brokers or a certain industry can meet, and advertise their inventory online and find new customers/trades.
The website is quiet a complex one and has been accumulated based on features found on its competitors website as well as new ones to create an edge in the competition.
The services is free, but cenrtain extended features are only available to paying members.
Existing competitors are charging companies in the regions of $30 to $100 per month for the access to their website. The big gap is due to more features found on the higher end sites, as well as the site is more up to date with more members.
We have a list of 7000 potential users/companies who are already members of those other competitors or who are more likely to be interested on such service.
Tasks/Problems:
In order to operate such service, we require three different operational areas:
1) Billing, majority of this is already done by the back-end software, however certain payment processing tasks are required. This area can be done in-house with hire of accountants/book-keepers etc.
2) Customer Supports, this is to support the users with technical problems once they call or send emails. However the main job of customer support is to keep the website updated based on the inventory database files received from members which needs to be imported to the database keeping the database with fresh info. Again this is something that can be managed internally.
3) Marketing: The main problem is here. The users are world-wide, could be from China, to Australia, to USA to Brazil, to EU. The other competitors call the potential customers individually, as well as advetising on major publications related to that industry. The first thing they do is setup a trial account and demo.
The more successfull competitors have account managers where they look after you while your membership, for example if you fail to email/update your stock/product/inventory information in a while, to keep the website up to date, they'll call you and personally make sure you give them the updates.
This sounds all simple, but the main obstacle is the employee salaries, and the fact that they need to be at least familiar with the industry or be capable to pick up the general sales theme of the industry after training.
The whole time-zone difference means that a potential sales person should work at out-of-hours times... no office present is really needed and they can work from home, but how would you know you have the right person before start paying them?
I beleive a comission based system where if a sales person brings X amount of paying members they'll get comission of their pay if they also manage to keep the member. But i dont have human resource experiences, are there sales agents who are willing to work dedicated but with no fixed salary?
I taught maybe a marketing/product launch company could be ideal? But then again they must work on comission bases... my company does not have a fixed budget on getting this serivce off its feets... Even so, anyone knows of any good "international" marketing companies who are flexible enough to work with small companies like us?
I know i have given a long description, but feedback you can give in respect to how we can launch this service is greatly appreciated...
Thanks
Hamed