In my last two posts I discussed the gigantic opportunity banging on the door of most webhosts that they ignore while spending their precious time and resources competing for low value clients.
Originally, I said there are two principal steps to going after the higher end customers and we’ll be focusing on step 2 in this post:
“2. Spend a lot of time via your advertising, your website and through your salesforce in managing client expectations on the front end. Not everyone should be in business and just because it’s possible to run a business from a web browser doesn’t mean the underlying rules of business have changed. Spend your time finding people who are capable of running a business, then focus on point #1 (E-Commerce Hosting and Client Management – Part Two).”
So what on earth do I mean by this? I mean you have to become the expert on behalf of the customer. You need to learn what works, what doesn’t and what’s the best way for your customers to get there. With all of that knowledge it’s your job to help set your customers expectations so they know what’s coming.
Otherwise what will happen is you’ll be subject to the whims of the dreamer who thinks throwing up the “next big thing” online is all they need to do and it should’nt be hard (read it shouldn’t cost much). When the obvious happens and their “next big thing” is a miserable failure and they have zero sales, they’ll place the blame squarely on YOU.
By becoming the expert you can provide deeply valuable information to your customers, which leads to you providing excellent service and most importantly it helps weed out all the people who you DON’T want as a client. By refusing to lower your price, because you can articulately explain all the steps involved to succeed and refusing to cut any of those corners, you’ll naturally find the customers who value what you’re selling.
Along the same lines as the customers you don’t want, there’s also hundreds of partners you don’t want as well. If you have any footprint in this space, you’ll get bombarded with offers from companies who think they have the perfect add on for your clientelle. In 99% of those cases, they’ve never stopped to figure out if this will really help your clientelle, taken the time to find some beta clients and prove it will actually help your clients and there real underlying motivation is to leverage your credibility to increase their income.
In the end, the only way to provide superior service, find high quality clients and protect yourself from client and partner parasites, is to truly understand what it takes to succeed in the world of online commerce. If you combine this level of expertise with Rule #1 from the previous post “Good service delivered on good hardware, consistently.” you will wake up one day in 3 or 4 years and have a business that is the envy of your peers, is very successful and most importantly ridiculously profitable.
About Rick Wilson
Rick Wilson is the Executive Vice President for Miva Merchant a popular online shopping cart software.
Rick has been with Miva Merchant since 1999 when he began at the original Miva Corporation as an outside sales representative and took over as Vice President of Sales in 2002 and ultimately as Executive Vice President in 2007.
Rick's more than 12 years of executive-level sales and marketing experience also includes his tenure as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Providence Systems, a privately held sales training company. At Providence Systems, Rick developed and executed the sales and marketing strategies that helped lead a successful corporate turnaround between 1998 and 2002.
Through his WHIR blog, Rick will cover ecommerce trends, products and services from the perspective of the online merchant. He will focus on best practice thinking, tools that help them improve their business and be on the look-out for the information that provides merchants the competitive edge to be successful.
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