Several years ago, when I was doing export sales, I focused a lot on selling. I was working so hard. Even after I got back home, I used to reply my potential customers’ message and upload a lot of descriptions and pictures to the B2B platform. Month by month, I kept myself busy with sending quotation and sending samples, but the contract conversion rate was keeping low. Would the saying “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have” is totally true or not? Hard work is important, but the methods we are using which is the same important or even more important!
Hard-sell doesn’t work well. Marketing is more important and effective. Our current B2B platform was founded in 2000 and it has had a high recognition based on a certain industry. If you search its name by Google, it ranks top 2. But for Chinese market, when the people search its name by Baidu, it was not obvious to be found and there was still old news before 2017. And of course there are still some negative news and comments due to the poor management from 2016 and 2017.
No matter how strong our sales pitch is, the potential members have been more or less not so confident with us once after they searched us on the Internet. We hardly had marketing budget, is there anything else we could do to help promote our platform?
Compared with one of our competitors, H company copied our platform and it was founded since November,2015. It has had a fast growth during these 2 to 3 years because they have invested a lot in the search engine, WeChat official account, regular off-line seminar, etc.
How to compete with it? We have to add more value based on the platform itself.
After our cold-calling, what sales script and documents we need to send to the potential members? A fancy brochure is necessary. The current brief introduction we sent is not strong enough because we has not highlighted our advantages with the real case studies. The history of our platform should be showed in the brochure. From the history description, the potential members may know that we have had a long history and has attracted a huge number of buyers registered and applied our platform. We will not avoid introducing the difficult time between 2016 and 2017 because we would like to be open to everybody and stop them suspecting too much about us. We did have a tough time before, but now our platform runs well! The positive data are usually more persuasive. Most potential members were curious about how we develop the buyers, how many active buyers we have had, how many RFQs were released in the past 12 months, how many orders he could make after submitting 100 quotations.
We have had found the positive influence when we started to post the screenshots of several RFQs each day on our WeChat Moment and LinkedIn since this January. And for the posting messages, at the first beginning we may say,” There are a lot of RFQs could be found in our platform, would you like to check more at www.XXXX. Com?” Later we think we need to change to some inspiring words instead, in order to encourage the manufactures in this difficult time. One day we posted, “Tough time don’t last, tough people do. 艰难的时光不会太久，坚强的人才能挺到最后。XXX与每位外贸人共勉！“There must be still a lot we could do, like sharing the latest news about Manufacturing, the skills to set up CRM system and customer development,we may even do that by Video!
Since we would not determine to invest more to remove the negative news from the Internet, but we could still “ create” some good comments by Q&A site like “知乎“，like deliberately asking “ Where to find the buyers about molding industry?” . Then I will let another person at another IP address answer,” XXX seems OK. One of my friends is using that platform.” I got this idea from my good friend John, who has strived to build his own business since last year and he thought a lot about marketing.
All in all, marketing is very important and we need to develop it and keep pace with our changing and competitive business surrounding. Add oil!
Maple
2020.5.1
用时1.5小时
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