We are a group of Chicago and Houston based Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains, Microsoft CRM, RMS and Navision consultants who saw the economic boom at the end of 20th century and then deep recession, which hit high tech and telecommunication sectors with extreme severity.
In our opinion this recession ended the era of old days IBM style of high tech sales techniques, when you had sales director, and group of sales people, making a lot of cold calls and then applying hard sales closing techniques.
Now – we see a lot of pure offshore companies with tiny representation in the States are trying the internet marketing, which was designed by internet retailers, selling merchandise online to nation-wide specialized niches of customers with the main emphasis on search engines, such as google, yahoo, MSN. As we see it right now – these companies are ahead of traditional US regional and local consulting companies and the situation for these offshore companies is complicated by the difficulty to establish US-based office and have customers calls accepted directly in the sates – this fact forces new offshorers go even further and try internet phones and have their sales people work night shifts.
The way for US based companies, in our case Microsoft Business Solutions reseller/VAR, to stay in business is to use internet marketing and do a lot of publicity and community work on the internet, educating their clientele.
Below we would like to share our techniques
1. Internet Marketing – in contrast to the old believe that you can cheat out internet search engine and place your web site on the top position, we state that this is virtually not possible. But the paradox is in the fact that internet is the major marketplace. So – you have to spend most of your sales efforts on the internet. There is no direct answer about the preferred method – all the methods should contribute and be tried out
2. Concentrate on your product line – your customers and prospects should see and recognize the expert in you, reading your publications. In our case – we stake on Microsoft Business Solutions Products: Microsoft Great Plains, Microsoft CRM, Navision and Microsoft RMS. We are publishing ezines on the weekly basis and trying to keep our forum answered on the daily basis.
3. Create your partners and subcontractors network – when you are small and short of resources the best you can do to speed up your expansion is to partner with other market players who could help you open the door to new prospects and close the sales.
4. Pay your people and subcontractor – There was popular technique of trying to negotiate down the price and do not pay in time. This game is not good, but it is acceptable in the case of huge corporation. When you are small – you can not play this card – your partners will not do business with you in the future.
Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies USA nationwide Microsoft CRM, Microsoft Great Plains customization company, based in Chicago, California, Texas, New York, Georgia and Florida and having locations in multiple states and internationally (www.albaspectrum.com), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer.
