Improving Vancouver Sales, One Meetup At A Time ⇒

February 22nd, 2015 by

The last Vancouver Sales Meetup was the best attended one since my first one in September, so I'm hoping I can keep the momentum going over the next few months.

Kris Constable has a good write-up so I won't repeat that, but I will add some context.

Topics we covered:

  • on boarding follow-up tools
  • pricing
  • website engagement
  • referral tools
  • trial periods

The two most interested discussions to me, were around trials and shipping. For the trial discussion, we discussed the benefits of a resource-based vs time-based trial. For example, instead of a 2 week trial, where people might not engage or not even sign up because of the trial length, make it based on the number of events the customer can do. i.e. first 3 events are free. That way people can start whenever they want and take as long as they like to engage.

Second discussion was around whether or not to include shipping when quoting prices. This particular company, sells access to customers on a per product basis and must ship the product to the end user (who isn't the customer). So the customer wants to know the pricing before deciding on the level of engagement. But because the shipping costs depend on a few factors (quantity, product) it is very hard to quote up front. Kind of a stalemate.

Two things we came up with:

  1. Some strategies on how to get the customer engaged so they will share their budget first
  2. idea to create a very simple formula they can share (with the customer) that can estimate the costs.

Everyone said they learned something they could use in their business, so I consider the meetup a huge success!

If you'd like to continue chatting about it, please come to the #sales channel on the PixelCrafter's Slack board.

Next one March 19.

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