Re: Practical Thread: Advertising to businesses

On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 01:48:41PM -0800, DV Henkel-Wallace wrote:
>     Date: Tue Mar 4, 2003  13:10:56 EST
>     From: Faber Fedor <[email protected]>
> 
>     One thing that surprised me is that several people approached me
>     off-mailing-list and said they have been lurking in here (some for
>     years?) looking for practical information on how to run their fsb
>     but were disappointed not to find much.
> 
> Well, remember that a mailing list is a community, and you get out
> what you put in.  If you lurk, you get messages about what the
> non-lurkers want; this has been mainly messages by people who have run
> FSBs.

Yeah, but some people are just too shy to post.

> So your messages are just as welcome, even if there haven't been so
> many like them.  

well thank you.

> Though I must say much of what you ask isn't all that
> FS-specific.  

Quite a bit of what I see in here is not FS-specific. :-)

> From what I can learn about linuxnj, that Small Time
> Operator should have tons of useful advice 

I'm going to look for it tomorrow.

> (if you do decide to get it, of course please do not buy it online).  

Huh?  Why not?I could have understood it if you said "don't buy from
Amazon" but "don't buy online"? :-?

> Another investment I highly recommend is the Dale Carnegie sales
> course.  It's hokey, and somewhat expensive, but it's really worth
> it.

I hadn't thought of their sales course!  I've taken two others (the
basic one and the one for managers) and I enjoyed those.

> It seems to me that the people you're working with _are_ the right
> ones -- to learn about the stuff you're asking us about!  You want to
> run a business like theirs?  Ask them how they did it!  Take them to
> lunch or whatever works for you and them.  Do they work with the kinds
> of customers you want?  How did they acquire them?

I have!  Client A received a gift of 100K USD, rented space and hired a
bunch of salesmen.  Client B took 111K USD worth of stocks, raised 1.2M
USD in private financing and bought the company.  Client C hooked up
with two other fellows whom he met in M.B.A. school who each invested
35K USD in the newly-formed company.  

Now do you see why I asked my first question about the necessity for
having a large nest egg? :-)

> Since your ads attract the wrong kind of lead, _don't use that kind of
> ad again!_.

Duh!  Hence my question here! :-)

> How did you get your current customers?  

They literally came to me.  They went onto the net, searched for "Linux
consultant new jersey" and I was one of, if not the, top result.  After
that, 'twas my charming good looks what swayed 'em!

> I went to your web site and I see you're at a conference.  That's
> great.  But I notice that you pitch to the already-sold prospect.

Hello!  You just pointed out something to me that I was not aware of.
Could you please elaborate?

> Maybe that's appropriate -- maybe the only people who come to your web
> site are those who want Linux support.  Or maybe it doesn't work.

Those are the people who came to my site.  And it's no longer working
well enough for my tastes.

> Wouldn't they love to have access to the same high-quality server
> technology that companies like Amazon use rather than low-grade
> products that fit them into a box?

That's precisely the concept I want to get across to them! But to 
sell them that concept, I have to explain the concept to them.  That is
(one of the places) where I fall down because I can't fit that into a
30-second elevator speech (although I thought I did with "get more out
of [your] computers" but I was obviously wrong :-).  It often takes me
weeks to get it through the heads of MCSEs, CCNPs, and the like in my
training classes; getting it into a sound bite to convince a business
person is something I'm still working on.

> So your web site may be starting out on the wrong foot.  Hell, I don't
> even want Open Source or "get more out of [my] computers."  I just
> want stuff that works and that I can poke at to do what I want.  Free
> software is what does that for me.  But I want FS because it gets me
> what I want, not the other way around.  I suspect your customers feel
> the same way.

And that's where I thought I was going with the website. :-(

-- 
 
Regards,
 
Faber                     

Linux New Jersey: Open Source Solutions for New Jersey
http://www.linuxnj.com