When I first began building this website I remembered a marketing method that I hoped would get me into more businesses. It was in the archives of my mind but was something I thought would work.

Sometimes in marketing, what seems like a winning idea, can actually fall flat on its face. The only way to see what works is to test it and monitor the results.

My mind is constantly working overtime for what might work and how to improve on my existing marketing strategy. The thoughts that ran through my mind were as follows:

My thoughts:
• Clients under-utilise their IT resources and could benefit from a consultation.
• Most clients don’t want to pay money just to find out if this is true or not. It’s catch-22. They don’t know what they don’t know but can’t justify spending money on consultancy without a tangible return in site. Those in authority will often act on a “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” basis. Besides, most managers are too busy fighting fires to be concerned with technical IT issues that they aren’t aware need fixing.
• If a client can see how to use their IT resources more cost effectively, there could be some work in it for me.

My solution:
• Get telesales help to canvas clients in my locality.
• Offer a free 2 hours for training, support, consultancy or development. That way they can check us out as a supplier risk free.
• Promise to leave without asking for business, saying “If you want any work done, you call us, we won’t call you.” This removes the pressure. When you are at the clients, after the two hours is up, just ask “Would you have any objection to us putting you on our mailing list?” This one is hard to say no to. You can then stay in touch with the potential client via mail and they should be feeling positive towards you due to the free work you have given them.

All seems good so far. I got an excellent telesales person and a list of local businesses with between 5 to 20 employees. We set aside some time and started phoning.

What happened?

We were surprised. While we did have a couple of people take us up on our offer, over 95% turned us down. I was amazed. I thought how could they turn away free help which we were charging over $100 for at that time?

Then it dawned on me. Peoples perception is that if it is free, it is probably rubbish. “If they are any good, why are they offering their services for free?” The real answer is for rapid gaining of market share. But the shortcut in most peoples minds is free=poor quality. We could not get the foot in the door to even show how good our service was.

Another issue was that the person receiving our call assumed we were selling something that cost money. There is no such thing as a free lunch, most people reason. This is true in the vast majority of cases. But lunch was on us! Alas, our prospects switched off when we made the call.

Conclusion

Why have I decided to tell you about this little marketing experiment?

Certainly not to discourage you from undertaking marketing experiments yourself. Rather, to suggest that you are perceived to be worth according to your level of pricing. High pricing suggests experts with good standards of work.. Low pricing suggests amateurs who are perhaps unreliable. Free equates to someone desperate to get work.

Perhaps for home based computer training, I may have had more takers. But business users want competent people and are not afraid to pay a market rate for it. They get hit on by so many sales calls they just don’t have the time to filter out the genuine offers from the deceptive ones.

My conclusions are not empirically based - our telesales strategy could have been flawed. But the results still amazed me. Something for nothing getting turned down. Wow!