B2B Conversations Now

While the internet has given small businesses access to a vast number of potential customers it has also made it tougher to respond to the influx of quote proposal requests.  Many business owners are ecstatic when their web marketing efforts begin generating traffic on their website.  The unexpected burden comes when prospects begin requesting more information, often detailed in nature.

I met with a client last week that provides a one-stop shop for business infrastructure services; phone, web, accounting and such.  He was complaining that his website was working too well!  His creative copy and well-designed site was capturing the interest of many people; so much that many of them were requesting specific pricing for certain services.  His days were being spent responding to all sorts of proposal requests that relentlessly come in day and night.  Admittedly he was only getting back to a small percentage of the requestors and even then it was hours or days later.  His problem, as he saw it, was that every customer needed a custom price proposal based on their individual needs and in order to get that information he needed to contact the prospect and ask them several questions.

After discussing his services and the request issue we began analyzing how he might solve the problem.  His site was already organized into product categories but the main problem was that every service had many options, each with their own criteria.  We first determined that the goal was not to provide a perfect, custom solution for every requestor but rather provide something helpful as quickly as possible so we could engage the customer.

The Solution - Package it.

What we did as a first attempt at simplifying his process was to create several “typical” packages for each service.  For instance, a “Phone Starter Package - Small Business” was targeted at a new, base customer with a specific number of employees.  “Phone Upgrades” was another category that included several key options along with pricing.  By simplifying and packaging his services into pre-configured proposals based on the same descriptions as what was described on his website he was able to respond to 90% of requests within minutes. 

Are you being inundated with proposal requests that go unanswered?  You’re spending good money to funnel those prospects to your site in the first place so be prepared to respond with something - quickly.  Try to setup your process so that you can send a generic, yet content-rich proposal to your prospects easily no matter where you are located when the request comes in.  Your prospects will appreciate it and the ones that represent real business will become customers.

Tags: B2B Marketing //