Sales & Strategy Consultant | Experienced BD Professional | Mentor | Blogger | Start-up Growth Expert | Entrepreneur
I will give you a simple and an easy solution. You have done a great job setting up so much stuff. You are a content guy and more of an operations guy. All you need is a good sales partner who can just focus on sales. Both of you can do wonders. The potential is phenomenal... Just try this and you would thank me a hundred times.
Am sure you would got the answer by now, with these responses. I would only ask you to do one thing. Take a candid interview of some of your old clients and ex-employees. You would know the real answers to the challenges you are facing. They know what exactly is going wrong.
Not everyone is going to believe and at the same time, you don't need to convince everyone. Identify your target segment and start building trust slowly.
How did Subway prove to the clients that they use fresh ingredients? - They make your sub right in front of you.
1. Live packing - Take a video of every order that is placed and send it along with your delivery. That's the personal touch they would like to keep.
2. Take videos of your farm and convince your prospects that the flowers are for real.
3. Give a certificate with every order and make them special. (That's what the gold jewelers do when you buy gold)
4. Magnifying lens - Just to make the concept wacky, send a small magnifying glass with every order so that clients could see the details on the petals, stem, etc. Give them a small manual explaining every part and make the whole experience interesting.
You could use this strategy to get your initial set of clients, who your Innovators (2.5%). Take feedback and implement at the earliest so that you could convince the next set of Early Adopters (13%). Once these clients are happy, create a ripple effect by asking them to refer you to their friends and family.
More ideas can be discussed over a call.
Screw it, let's do it.
If you believe that your idea has the required potential to become a niche player, then find ways to continue it, by keeping your costs low. If you think its an amazing idea, don't stop. Once you take a pause, you stop forever. It depends on how much convinced and committed you are.
1. Do a paid pilot with a set of end-consumers and see if people are willing to pay for this kind of service.
2. If they don't, try and create a value for the restaurants or hotels and charge them.
3. In both cases, if they like the product but are not willing to pay, then you haven't created enough value for them. Take feedback from them and work towards adding more value. Go back to them and re-do the pilot. Success is inevitable.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ideas-everywhere-idea-execute-shivadhar-soma?trk=mp-reader-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/entrepreneurs-dilemma-shivadhar-soma?trk=mp-reader-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/spirit-entrepreneurship-shivadhar-soma?trk=mp-reader-card
It purely depends on how do you envisage your journey. Depends whether you want to be a fish in an ocean, or a pond. The learning is a lot more faster and hands on, in start ups. You get to work with the senior management directly and you can make a difference, if you want to.
If you are looking for a stable job with guaranteed monthly salary, then join a corporate. Corporate gives you a steady growth (not exponential compared to start up), gets to work on a smaller piece of the whole project.
The choice is completely yours. Go thru some of my articles that might open up some thoughts for you.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-sme-vs-corporate-shivadhar-soma?trk=mp-reader-card
Frankly speaking, growth hacking is much more than offering discounts or freebies.
1. Facebook login is required, because you can straight away take them to your Facebook page and show him what you got. If he or she finds the clothes interesting, they would anyway buy. They wouldn't need a coupon or discount. If they don't like them, they don't buy even if you offer 50% discount. The philosophy of discounting is getting outdated. The in-thing is to make it relevant and offer the right price, so that he makes that decision right away. The relevance can be targeting the right audience. Don't waste money on carpet bombing. Identify your target segment and run focused campaigns by following your target clients.
Engaging your prospects is the key. If you are targeting premium clients, have a cozy blog with interesting articles, tips, HD pictures, etc.
You could go thru couple of my articles that could open up some of your thoughts in this space.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/paradigm-shift-sales-shivadhar-soma?trk=mp-reader-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/honey-shrunk-marketing-campaigns-shivadhar-soma?trk=mp-reader-card
Wow, this is an interesting space to be in. Things are heating up and if you have some edge, I strongly recommend to pursue it further.
With the e-commerce boom, we are witnessing a lot of traction in men's wear, which was never the case earlier (about 10 years back).
If you focus on the basics, the rest would fall in place automatically. So, before selling you need to identify who your customer is. That's positioning. To which segment do you want to sell your products or services? Since e-commerce is a crowded place already, you need to choose who do you want to focus. Based on that you can design your marketing and promotional campaigns. And this will get you sales.
If you see merit in the discussion, I would be glad to assist you.
The best thing to do when you are buying over a business is to get unbiased/ frank opinion from their existing employees, customers and vendors. Only they can give you the correct picture or state of affairs. If you don't have the skill or the bandwidth to do this, appoint a good third party to do this secretly.
Everything else like accounts, client base, revenue and profits are secondary.
If you are genuine in your approach, you will be God to small companies. Because, you are bridging a gap that they are not able to.
I suggest you try with a small transaction and learn few lessons and then work on bigger ones.
If you know the audience well, get to their top 3 problems. Once you know this, relate yourself or your company to these.
People find interest only when you relate to them or their problems. It doesn't matter if you have the perfect solution or not, but they give you the attention that you needed. At the same time, don't boast about your achievement, because that again puts people off. How does it matter to the audience If you won the best company of the year! Its good for you, not them.
Start with a story as they have more power to drive things, because "Facts Tell, Stories Sell."
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