As Sydney reseller B Technologies reached its tenth year of operation, managing director Daniel Pinter realised the business was starting to change. Its target market was shifting as the reseller grew and took on larger companies.
The bigger customers were contributing most of the profit and the reseller intuitively decided to go where the money was, says Pinter. The problem was working out how to get there.
B Technologies contacted channel consultancy Go To Market who proposed two half-day workshop sessions to work out business objectives. The first workshop covered the reseller's value proposition, market opportunity and growth strategy.
The half-day session with Go To Market revealed an interesting truth. Pinter had once mentioned to his brother Balazs, co-founder of B Technologies, that he thought their business did a lot of work with growing companies.
After a half-day session with Go To Market, the brothers realised that their biggest customers were going through periods of growth and relied on B Technologies to provide them with IT systems that helped them grow.
These customers would often decide they needed different technology, improved infrastructure or greater levels of support. Now the company had to come up with a plan to find more customers of similar size with plans to grow.
Go To Market's advice was to focus on the reseller's strengths to sell itself better to potential customers. But what were they? To find out, B Technologies had to ask its customers, why do you do business with us?
"I had a lot of action items. I needed to talk to my customers and clarify if what we talked about in the session was a reality for them," says Pinter.
"What do we think of ourselves and does the reality support that? Sometimes the answers are not the answers that we expect," says Ursula Paddon, director of Go To Market.
The feedback B Technologies received from its customers was open and honest, and fortunately very favourable. "A key message was that we make IT work the way they want it to," says Pinter. "That become the tagline I used on the website because that's what small business seem to be asking for out there."
Many new customers arrive full of frustration with previous resellers who decide on a solution without enough consultation, says Pinter. B Technologies' approach of spending time to understand a customer's business and asking questions about how it operates meant that IT systems were implemented according to the customer's wishes.
After conducting the market research Pinter realised the company website undersold the value of his business and did not make it easy for potential clients to understand what B Technologies stood to offer.
He updated the website with a better, more exact explanation of what B Technologies was about. The home page now clearly emphasised the target customer base (businesses with five to 50 employees), its method of engagement (consultative and proactive), and how it carried out its services (remote monitoring, tailored maintenance, 24/7 help desk).
Pinter also updated the language in his Google AdWords advertising to reflect the company's mission. The reaction from potential customers was nearly instantaneous, says Pinter.
"If someone came to our website they may not have been able to identify who we were for. The minute we identified ourselves with a target market of 10-50 staff businesses, the phone started to ring. It was amazing.
"I'd ask them how many people were in the office and the bell would ring every single time because it would just be a perfect size and we would go out there and implement solutions, and sign on the dotted line, and we are implementing solutions as speak."
Not only were the companies the size B Technologies wanted, but they were looking for the right IT partner to help them through a period of growth, says Paddon. "It's not just responding to a phone call but providing them with strategic advice - how do I grow my company with IT?"
The reseller signed up many customers in a very short period of time. Not only had conversion rates from website inquiries improved from 40 percent to 60 percent, so had the quality and number of leads. In one month, B Technologies added "perfectly sized" customers which have had a big impact on the business.
One new customer is a 35-person business that wants to grow to 75 by the end of the year. Another has an office of 15 staff, and another has three interstate offices and 18 staff.
"These were all clients that came to us just because I changed the wording of the Adwords, the heading on my website, the structure with guidance for the customer to understand who we were and the introduction wording. There were no big changes in the way the thing was set up, going deep into every service we offer, nothing like that," says Pinter.
"We've seen customers responding in the form of higher queries that were smack bang in the target market B Technologies wanted because all of a sudden they talked the right language," says Paddon. "And that was just the traffic through the website. That's not even going out with proactive lead generation. It's sometimes not about the latest and greatest fancy design of a website. It's about getting the content right and getting across the message."
Paddon says she was surprised to see so much success at developing sales pipelines. There are great variations between industries in the conversion rate from first contact through to closed deals, but the average is between 10-15 percent.
Incoming web traffic is typically highly qualified and tends to produce good leads if the website can attract a "good" customer.
Going for gold with suppliers
The second session with Go To Market showed the reseller how much potential to improve prospects and margins lay with vendors and distributors. Pinter set about building relationships with Microsoft, Sophos and Ingram Micro last year which resulted in better referrals, better service to customers and higher profit margins.
B Technologies realised that suppliers were prepared to offer better support and financial
benefits for those resellers that wanted to work with them. The company started to ask its other suppliers what else they could offer its customers.
"When they see interest, they start to become proactive," says Pinter.
Pinter picked up the phonebook and began looking at services of other vendors to see how they worked and how much they cost.
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