The experience of attracting customers in a highly competitive market: the history of a small company
It will be a question of the company which is engaged in service of computers in Petersburg. Since the target audience of this service is very far from Habramir, I believe that the “I am PR” hub will not work here: the main point of this post is not to advertise our services, but to discuss strategies for promoting new companies in old markets.
The article is not intended for SEO professionals, these are experience descriptions from the point of view of the company's management, and not an SEO specialist.
The area of ​​work of our company is the maintenance of computers and - more recently - cloud solutions (in other words, setting up a private cloud - infrastructure for rapid deployment of virtual machines at the customer). Despite the fact that three years ago at Habré there was a discussion about the dubious novelty of the first of these services, inviting an external company to service the IT infrastructure has been practiced in St. Petersburg for almost twenty years: I personally know people who have raised such a business from scratch to 90s
')
In the discussion already mentioned, it is rightly noted that IT outsourcing covers several related areas, where the maintenance of computers and the network is only one modest element. The rest is the maintenance of individual business processes or specialized IT subsystems or business applications. For example, billing, processing, telephony. But now I speak only about the maintenance of computers and networks.
Our company took up this business in 2007. What worked in attracting clients in real life, not in theory, initially surprised us. Today we bring our experience and our conclusions to your court - maybe this article will save someone the time to search for effective tactics.
Who became our customers for 4 years:
All our clients are small and medium-sized organizations - from 10 to 300 computers; moreover, those where there are hundreds of computers, more often they order the maintenance of only a part of them (they simply have no money for more).
Large international companies (which are not yet among our customers) order IT outsourcing in a broader sense: for example, some companies we worked for earlier, outsourced all telephony and computer network maintenance in offices. In such cases, their global contractor was some IT monster, for example, AT & T, and in Russia it had its own subcontractor, who hired another subcontractor in a particular city or even in a particular business center.
In the case of Russian small and medium-sized companies, the chain between the one who pays money and the one who does the work is much shorter.
Strangely enough, we now see only two reasons why companies changed those who served them earlier to us:
Tried a lot:
It is possible that the secret is in a talented sampling of those to whom to call, so that the interlocutor is not annoyed by the offer of services, and in the end it is possible to find out whether he is our service to the court. Offering unnecessary - bad business, and marvelously marketed. He checked personally by selling sneakers on Juno in the mid-90s: hungry visitors bought up two boxes in half a day.
I’ll make a reservation once again: we’ll talk about customers from small and medium Russian companies. The conclusions are made from the experience of personal conversations with customers who came to us thanks to acquaintances and telephone calls on the directory.
First, startups (not even IT, but just startups) are not inclined to hire third-party companies for IT outsourcing. The maximum that can interest them is the outsourcing of 1C-accounting, but this is easily replaced by Elba, which is gaining popularity.
Secondly, organizations of various forms of ownership and occupation give IT infrastructure service to outsourcing when the existing service method has exhausted itself: either the service suddenly disappeared (quit, went bankrupt), or the price / quality parameter rose to unacceptable values.
Thirdly, to find new customers in such a situation helps mostly cold calls and a good reputation. The share of other methods with small volumes (less than a hundred customers) does not exceed the statistical error.
I would be grateful for the sharing of experience.
The article is not intended for SEO professionals, these are experience descriptions from the point of view of the company's management, and not an SEO specialist.
The area of ​​work of our company is the maintenance of computers and - more recently - cloud solutions (in other words, setting up a private cloud - infrastructure for rapid deployment of virtual machines at the customer). Despite the fact that three years ago at Habré there was a discussion about the dubious novelty of the first of these services, inviting an external company to service the IT infrastructure has been practiced in St. Petersburg for almost twenty years: I personally know people who have raised such a business from scratch to 90s
')
In the discussion already mentioned, it is rightly noted that IT outsourcing covers several related areas, where the maintenance of computers and the network is only one modest element. The rest is the maintenance of individual business processes or specialized IT subsystems or business applications. For example, billing, processing, telephony. But now I speak only about the maintenance of computers and networks.
Our company took up this business in 2007. What worked in attracting clients in real life, not in theory, initially surprised us. Today we bring our experience and our conclusions to your court - maybe this article will save someone the time to search for effective tactics.
Who became our customers for 4 years:
- construction firms
- contact center
- small hotels
- Institute of RAS
- household appliances information portal
All our clients are small and medium-sized organizations - from 10 to 300 computers; moreover, those where there are hundreds of computers, more often they order the maintenance of only a part of them (they simply have no money for more).
Large international companies (which are not yet among our customers) order IT outsourcing in a broader sense: for example, some companies we worked for earlier, outsourced all telephony and computer network maintenance in offices. In such cases, their global contractor was some IT monster, for example, AT & T, and in Russia it had its own subcontractor, who hired another subcontractor in a particular city or even in a particular business center.
In the case of Russian small and medium-sized companies, the chain between the one who pays money and the one who does the work is much shorter.
Why did customers come to us?
Strangely enough, we now see only two reasons why companies changed those who served them earlier to us:
- those who served them, stopped doing it (the system administrator on whom everything depended, left, or the service company went bankrupt)
- those who served them bothered them worse than bitter radish (they started to work worse and worse or take more and more money).
How did we find such customers?
Tried a lot:
- contextual advertising in Yandex and Google. We did not like the result. More precisely, in a few months of advertising in Direct, sometimes (five times, not more) people called us, looking for the cheapest service on the Internet. We never dumped or promised this, so the conversion of advertising in Yandex.Direct turned out to be zero;
- blog articles on our site on all sorts of interesting topics. The result is a mass of non-targeted visits to our site with zero conversion. Everything is simple: if a person is looking for “how to configure Cisco to access the Internet” there is little chance that he will decide to hire a company to set up something in his office;
- by fax. Hand stretched minusnut? Wait a second: we did without fax spam - a well-known contact center in St. Petersburg with a good reputation and white databases of companies that agreed to fax mailings sent faxes to their contacts. There were no malicious calls, but the influx of customers did not happen;
- on acquaintance. 10% of our clients are those who came on the recommendation of our friends (some of them, leaving the sysadmins in other businesses, left us a legacy of clients).
- cold dialing. It would seem that the most frontal method should be the most ineffective. A surprise was waiting for us here: 90% of customers are those to whom we called. No, what is the name of our specialist for cold calls, we will not say, and she has a good salary :)
It is possible that the secret is in a talented sampling of those to whom to call, so that the interlocutor is not annoyed by the offer of services, and in the end it is possible to find out whether he is our service to the court. Offering unnecessary - bad business, and marvelously marketed. He checked personally by selling sneakers on Juno in the mid-90s: hungry visitors bought up two boxes in half a day.
findings
I’ll make a reservation once again: we’ll talk about customers from small and medium Russian companies. The conclusions are made from the experience of personal conversations with customers who came to us thanks to acquaintances and telephone calls on the directory.
First, startups (not even IT, but just startups) are not inclined to hire third-party companies for IT outsourcing. The maximum that can interest them is the outsourcing of 1C-accounting, but this is easily replaced by Elba, which is gaining popularity.
Secondly, organizations of various forms of ownership and occupation give IT infrastructure service to outsourcing when the existing service method has exhausted itself: either the service suddenly disappeared (quit, went bankrupt), or the price / quality parameter rose to unacceptable values.
Thirdly, to find new customers in such a situation helps mostly cold calls and a good reputation. The share of other methods with small volumes (less than a hundred customers) does not exceed the statistical error.
I would be grateful for the sharing of experience.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/147016/
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