Why I no longer advertise my company's services

Customers are the basis of any business. The first clients came to my IT outsourcing company for a recommendation. It was an unpredictable and extremely modest stream. At times, for 3 months, no one even interested in us. In order to somehow push business growth, two years after its opening, I invested in advertising and promoting the company's website on the Internet. Things went much more fun.

Over 4 years of using advertising, the staff of my company has grown from four to 25 specialists. But the further, the less it brought joy. The use of advertising blurred the goals and values ​​of the work that were laid down when the company was created. The company was turning into another “outsourcer”. As a result, in order to remedy the situation, I had to abandon the use of advertising, and in the next two years to part with the majority of clients attracted through it. Now we work only with clients who come to us on recommendation. In this article I want to talk about the reasons that prompted me to such a step.

I'll start with banal things:
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1. Advertising requires money

The more money you "invest" in advertising, the more you get from it. In the first year, three new customers provided us with a 50% growth. The next year, for 50% growth, it was required to attract 5-6 new customers. As a result, advertising costs only grew. After four years, three new customers could only compensate for the loss of old ones, but did not lead to business growth. Failure to advertise at that moment would inevitably lead to its reduction. Simply put, after 4 years we were thoroughly sitting on the “needle” of advertising.

Recommendations require satisfied customers. The more satisfied clients you have, the more often you are recommended, and the less often you lose clients. Competent specialists and attention to detail increase the likelihood of recommendation. The cost of advertising makes "a little" to save on engineers and "a few" to optimize their principles of work. By the end of the fourth year, the advertising budget of my company was on par with the salaries of two intelligent specialists. It would only be worse. But even this was not the main problem:

2. Advertising takes time

There are a lot of advertising requests and they all need to be processed. Communicate with potential customers, find out their needs, go to meetings, work out commercial proposals. In this case, nine out of ten requests will end in nothing. No one will return the time spent on them, but there is always not enough time. You have to constantly choose whom to pay less attention to: sales or current customers.

Refusal to advertise significantly reduces the number of "random" requests. Without good reasons, no one turns to you for services. There is free time, in which you can solve internal problems of the company or more carefully handle incoming requests. After the ad was turned off, I finally got around to writing articles on habrahabr, an invitation to which I received 3 years before. Interestingly, these publications also led customers that are different from advertising because:

3. “advertising” clients have less trust

Cooperation with "advertising" clients begins with a trial period. This term can reach several years. All this time, the client has been cautious about your recommendations for choosing hardware and software. Something can justify the specifications, instructions, reviews. But some things can be justified only by work experience. And this experience is often ignored by advertising clients, preferring to relive it once again on their own. As a result, working with such clients is reminiscent of “Groundhog Day” when you are struggling with the same problems that you might not have.

Customers coming on the recommendation completely trust your experience. With them you do not walk on the same rake. At the same time, the fewer errors in the work of the systems of the client, the more profitable cooperation for both. But the most important thing is that the number of problems with system maintenance depends only on your decisions, and not on anyone else. Eliminating their own mistakes at their own expense is much easier (at least from the moral side) than the mistakes made by the client. To reach the level when there was simply nothing to break in the client's IT infrastructure, we could only come to us on the recommendation of clients. Advertising clients might want the same result, but:

4. Advertising clients cannot evaluate technical competence.

Most company executives do not understand anything in system administration. All the "outsourcers" for them are the same person and differ only in the site, the location of the office and the price of services. If your company's services are higher than competitors and the office is not in close proximity, then the chances of making a deal tend to zero. Not understanding anything in the system administration of the company became our clients only when their office was close to us. It's good that our office is located next to Gazprom.

Our services through advertising were bought mainly by clients who knew about system administration or attracted familiar admins for the duration of the search. But such customers turned to ads to search for a service provider last. At first, they tried to find outsourcers through recommendations. As a result, attracting such customers through advertising had low efficiency. But it would not be such a big trouble if it were not for the fact that:

5. Advertising clients dictate their own rules.

IT infrastructure maintenance is too important a task to be entrusted to its first available company. No customer will buy your services just because your ad is on every corner. Advertising can only ensure you participate in the competition for the "best supplier". The criteria for the "best" (and the rules of work) each client sets independently. You can match them or not participate in the competition. If you have your own requirements for the client, then you most likely will not win the competition either. Simply put, if you advertise the services of your company, you need to be ready to work with any clients on any conditions. There is no need to talk about the high level of service and long-term relationships.

Customers coming on recommendation are already set up to work with your company. We are talking only about the conditions of cooperation that suit both parties. At the same time, “arranging conditions” do not mean that one of the parties needs to make concessions. If it is impossible to maintain a client's IT infrastructure harmoniously for both parties, then this is a reason to choose another solution to the challenges. We upgraded the IT infrastructure to some clients and selected intelligent administrators for the staff. Some conducted audits and "made peace" with their existing admins. But we took up the service of “recommendation” clients only when the conditions of cooperation were arranged by both parties. Due to this, it seems to me, in 8 years of work, we have lost only two “recommendation” clients, and those in connection with the closure of the business. For comparison, there are only four advertising clients left at the moment.

Afterword:

My experience with advertising says it works. If my company was selling consumer goods or one-time services, advertising would be an excellent tool for their implementation. But IT outsourcing is, above all, a long-term relationship. In outsourcing it is important to trust, openness and harmony between the customer and the supplier, which are difficult to achieve with companies that have learned about you from advertising leaflets. Despite the fact that advertising creates a sense of demand for the services of your company, this feeling is deceptive - a much more significant factor is the number of recommendations from existing customers. Refusal to advertise allows you to focus on work on their receipt. And it is for this reason that I no longer advertise the services of my company.

Have a nice day!

Ivan Kormachev
Company "IT Department"
www.depit.ru