Do you refer visitors to your competitors? Is it time to start?
Under tight economic conditions, why would any company give up business to their competitors? There are several perfectly rational (and economically sound) reasons. Here are a few:
- If your product can be used a particular way, but really shouldn’t be. Our BoldMail solution is extremely powerful and our customers use it with tangible benefits to their business. However, it is a tool intended for the management of inbound emails. We turn away prospects who want to use it as an outbound email marketing solution. It can be used this way, but because it wasn’t designed to be, it would ultimately fail to satisfy them. To see how BoldMail works, check out this short video.
- If the customer needs something you don’t have. If your product or services simply will not fulfill the needs of the prospect, don’t sell it to them. Instead, refer them in the hopes that when a new need arises that does match what you do, they’ll come back. We often refer clients who are looking for outsourcing options. We sell the software that enables live chat, but we don’t offer a staffed chat solution.
- If servicing the customer will not be profitable. Some companies are not set up to deal with the demands of certain customers. In BoldChat’s case, for instance, we often refer customers who only want to utilize our Visitor Monitoring capability on extremely high traffic websites which don’t facilitate live chat interactions. While our server infrastructure can handle the volume, it doesn’t fit into our normal back-end monitoring processes. As such, we would need to incur more cost to have parallel processing. In short, it’s simply better to refer the customer elsewhere.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:03 am
I could not agree with you more one point number 2. I hear many times from prospective clients or ours that they purchased a product that the sales person was either not aware of the need(s) or too eager to make his quota to realize the product was not going to meet their need(s). It is unfortunate that some software companies do take advantage of non profits that are really strapped for resources as it is. We always recommend that churches do demos of the software to ensure it does everything they need. Run the reports, add data in every part of the system, verify the security reacts the way you think it should, attend a webinar if offered, etc. I know this takes time but to properly fit the software to the church it should be done no matter how long it takes. The time the church invest here will pay off 10 times later because they will not have to invest money down the road into another solution. I will make one more point and that is when it comes to the second purchase of software. The church (or other organization) is very skeptical at this point which makes it really hard for the software company that does have a solution that will fit their need(s) to gain the trust of the organization. Once an organization is burned they become very cautious and I don’t blame them. It is the software companies that sell something that does not fit the organization that should be looked at.