re: 10 tips on how you and your customers can easily market their business

David Overton — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 06:17:30 GMT

Andrew,

thanks for the really positive feedback. I will pass the comments onto the bCentral team to see if they have any further feedback too.

ttfn

David

re: 10 tips on how you and your customers can easily market their business

andrewbettany — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:52:19 GMT

Hi David, great to have all these links in one place.

I recently attended a marketing course, and it is nice to see the similarities - I guess marketing is marketing, but thanks for Microsoft for putting it all there for everyone to benefit.

Just a few thoughts of mine on the marketing game...

The main problem we currently have, is finding new clients, as inexpensively as possible - it is a continual thing, but the major frustration I have is that most SME's don't know about the SBSC (yet at least…) and if they need a consultant they tend to approach a major player in the marketplace and this can leave them with a solution which is OTT complicated, costly, both in terms of TOC and effort to implement/maintain. This then leaves them slightly miffed with the IT industry....

I appreciate that this whole SBSC push is really going to change the above and open up the opportunities in the short term. Although I guess that many of the Gold Partners will very quickly push to also gain the SBSC. Possibly then we will be all part of the mixture again – yes in theory the client should benefit, but will the MCSE qualified Gold Partner company ever install SBS? I am to be convinced – my experience is that they really shun the “network in a box” product because they don’t understand the product (or the SME market)

The stats say that in the 3 months to March approx 20k used the postcode based “find a consultant”, but what happens to these "hot" clickers - can we have the breakdown of the stats - maybe they could be on a SBSC members only site, to see the click through rate - or lets enhance the site, so that there is an entry/exit survey/questionnaire for them to complete - which qualifies their interest....

Also.... on many of the MS registration pages where you sign up for newsletters etc, there is a tick box where they may agree for MS partners to send info to the SME. Who gets access to this pool of info - it would be really nice for the local SBSC groups to be fed live info (on SME companies) to distribute and make contact to them of say the bCentral members?

At the end of the day, we all need each other – we want to consult and help small businesses with their IT issues, SME’s have the pain, and Microsoft, well Microsoft just wants to be the SME’s friend for life!

Please keep helping us to make friends....

Regards

Andrew