We are getting ready to launch Front Office Box in its fifth phase. Opportunity Management has been working for real businesses for since June last year. Email integration caused us quite a problem but we got there in the end and released it at the end of January. Webrequest went to production at the end of April and we have already used it ourselves to RFI marketing businesses in Scotland. Now we are about to introduce Knowledgebase and the marketing site.
We have also taken the opportunity to clear up a number of bugs that we found over the last three months. None of these have been causing our users any problems, but its nice to know they are fixed.
We dont have that much left to do now. Pipeline Management is the big one. This will make a real difference to our users. Its like having their own sales manager working deals, without the cost. We also have to clean up the way we file correspondence and documents. These work well enough, just not elegantly. Typical for people who care about the product, we have yet to build the software which signs people up and charges them.
So now the focus moves on to commercial stuff.
We decided to have our Widespread Solutions http://www.widespreadsolutions.com business provide the on-line service and now we have to get a set of terms and conditions organised.
Now we need to offer it to the market and this brings up several big questions. We have to write down a description of who we want to sell to, why they should buy it, and how they are going to find out they should buy it.
The Who should be easy. We built it for small businesses – the people who dont have IT or Admin staff to occupy. It will be equally valuable to all the sales reps who companies don’t care enough about to provide them with systems
BUT it turns out there are more than 30 million or more small businesses in the English speaking world – that’s good of course. There are a number of limitations though. Some of them are too busy to work at organizing better and saving time. Some of them have really simple business processes and don’t need systems. Some have already got systems hand carved out of Outlook, Excel etc. and don’t have the motivation to change.
Thinking this through we figure we can sub-divide this 30 million into groups which are easier to create messages for. Within these there are some who REALLY need Front Office Box and can easily adopt it. Those are the ones we want – sales people would describe this sub group as low hanging fruit – easy to pick.
Naturally the figures on small business are mostly government estimates but the numbers are so big we can easily accommodate any margin of error. There are 3 million new businesses started every year. None of these have the problem of transitioning from existing processes – they havent done it before. They also face an immediate, and daunting, problem.
They need to get customers, in a hurry. When they identify prospects they need to provide the best possible service. They also need to keep whatever cash they have for feeding the family. The last thing they want to spend on is software. Probably they are younger and more in tune with hosted applications.
Front Office Box is ideal for these people. They can use it today, for free. Out of the box it provides them with process. It incorporates a number of viral marketing tools. It helps them collaborate with others. It comes with some seriously good advice about how to sell. Starting a business today, I would want Front Office Box in a heartbeat. When I get successful I can easily pay for it out of the money saved by not having to pay for systems and admin. support.
Our question is how do we let these people know they can have it. We decided to look for some help to find the silver bullet. Is it in Pay Per Click advertising, or Search Engine Optimization, or blogging, or social networking? We don’t know, and we don’t want to waste money finding out where it isn’t.
If there’s anybody out there that can really help with this, we will be really excited to hear from them.
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{ 1 comment }
Intriguing, how would I apply this?
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