Making Partners out of Customers and Upselling Value
It has been a great couple weeks since making the decision to focus full time on my online projects and specifically my Geo projects. One of the problems many businesses have when initially launching is focusing on quick, small deals to get money in the bank and losing out on what can be larger opportunities to either create a partner out of your customer or in some cases not go after the quick deal and create a larger opportunity by focusing on ways to bring additional value to your customer.
This is the type of thing that keeps me up at night while bringing new people into the business that is my focus today and I am sure this is what keeps many small business owners awake, will the feet on the street be able to recognize opportunities for what they could be and not go for the quick buck on a smaller deal.
We recently had a customer that we went and presented too, the original opportunity had been for a single ad on a single page but when researching the business it became evident that they would benefit from a larger regional ad and we could ad even more value by creating a network of sites that added even more value for the potential advertiser. Based on this we created a proposal that was several times the original deal but the impact on the customers business was even larger. Based on this we won the deal. So what was a small deal was now a large deal.
Based on us spending the time to create something specific for this customer (that is repeatable for other customers) they perceived enough value and goodwill that they are now bringing us into their customers to present our solution, they are now a true partner and will help us grow our business and really become extra "feet on the street", thats the best reference from a customer you could ever get.
The point of all this, if you are selling advertising on your website make sure you think of the larger picture and create real value for your customers, at the end of the day they may become your best partner and the most cost effective sales team you could ever imagine.
How much traffic does Missouri.me receive? If traffic is very little b/c you just launched and people don’t type .ME names in, what are you selling to advertisers ie what value do they get from advertising on your site?
Also, do u think any locals will take issue with the fact that .ME is the cctld for Montenegro?
Why are you censoring my comment??
First off, to answer your other comment, why am I censoring your comment, I was not, lots of stuff going on and I prioritize accordingly. Although I do have a new rule that I will not respond to anonymous comments, I use my name openly and do no hide my identity whether I am being critical or positive and from here forward anonymous posting, positive or negative, will not be approved.
Now, to answer your questions, I know you are trying to find faults but in reality you are hitting on our strong spot. Although I will not give exact details to our overall plan and proposals we give to customers I will say that you are not seeing everything that is offered or that we are doing. As such you question cannot be answered directly, most of our customers buy an online marketing package that is considered a solution not an ad.
But to answer as close to direct as possible your questions here ya go:
1) Traffic to Missouri.me – Not really a valid question although we are doing quite well with traffic, I have been extremely pleased with our growth and over the past couple weeks it has really taken off. We only sell in areas we are targeting our marketing efforts. I will not give the exact community names (for competitive reasons) but there a few that we have targeted and are driving more traffic to their community sites on Missouri.me than the local newspaper sites receive. BTW, I have some solid .com names that receive type in traffic but I could also buy the same .net, .me, whatever and always get more traffic to them with proper SEO than I could type in traffic to the .COM.
2) .ME being country code for Montenegro – Only domainers care. The businesses and consumers we are dealing with love the fact that what we are doing is about them. .ME is perfect for what we are doing. Its about branding and building something of value. No one outside the domainer community cares. They just don’t. Thats like asking any of the successful .TV sites (that major networks and websites use) that people care that .TV is from Tuvalu, the users don’t care. It really just does not matter. I have day to day proof of this.
Thanks for giving me the chance to give a bit of detail here, I wish I could give more detail but have to keep some stuff internal:) All in all when we target a community the customers have seen success. We have had 3 different customers either come and visit or call and let us know that they have had people already say they found them on the Internet, all 3 were customers the previously had zero presence. What we are doing works……