Tag Archives: sales lead generation

The Wrong Pricing – Missed Opportunities

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As edocr.com continues to grow, it has become essential for us to adopt the right tools that will make our lives operationally little bit easier. Now is the time for us to leave spreadsheets and move on to products that will bring structure to a very chaotic environment. Two tools will be key to this strategy of operational simplification.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

We have adopted Contact Manager from Salesforce.com, which is affordable and versatile enough for our needs. And we know that as edocr.com grows, we have a path for increasing the CRM functionality to match with our future needs. In addition, we see salesforce.com as a strategic partner, so it makes sense for us to also be using their products, vice versa.

Accounts

Having used Winweb for a brief period, we are now trialling Xero, a SaaS product from one of our growing customer base. I love the simplicity and the design and yet to fully test it. My gut feel says this is the right product for us. And these days, I put lot of trust in to my gut feel.

Alignment

Ideally, we love our own database of users and customers to be in sync with CRM and accounts products we have adopted. So integration and free availability of APIs are fundamental to achieve this. I have been a keen advocate to see Xero and Salesforce.com establish the ability to data exchange.

It was good to hear from Tony Rule of Xero yesterday that they have infact gone live with the integration

Pricing Dilemma

Let’s take a brief look at the costs involved for one seat license across both products for one year.

  • Salesforce.com contact manager = £36 (we have subscribed for 2 seats)
  • Xero = £144 to £228 – the more expensive option is suitable for edocr.com

Here is the problem. For me to benefit from having synchronisation of customer data across saleforce.com and Xero, I would need to upgrade my account to either:

  • Salesforce.com enterprise (£1,020) or unlimited edition (£2,040) (where API is part of the licence) or
  • Salesforce.com professional edition (£540 plus more) (where API is not part of the licence but you can add it at extra cost).

Conclusion

The combine cost of subscribing to Xero and Salesforce.com now needs to go up from an affordable £264 to over £1000 to achieve integration. This is clearly not an acceptable situation for us. I love to comment more on this aspect, but as I have a half written post on pricing strategies, I think I should better leave it till then, other than to say, at this stage, we would have to operate without synchronisation. Just to add salt to the wound, products like JavelinCRM and Xero can achieve true synchronisation without any additional spend!

Options for charging for leads – fixed or per lead basis

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Since the soft launch of edocr.com in Oct 2007, we have been delivering value to our users and customers. The value delivered right now can be categorised into “exposure” leading to “prospects contacting you”. We are now entering a phase where our customers will have the opportunity to access “leads”, delivering further value.

We now need to figure out the best way to commercialise the new value addition, “leads”. The two options available are:

1. Charge per lead
2. Charge a fixed fee

I am a great believer of simplicity and keeping all things as simple as possible. Charging a fixed fee is easy. You set up a particular subscription and demonstrate value whereby targeted customers subscribe to the additional new service.

Charging per lead becomes harder to manage. Software need to be able to calculate the number of leads after those leads which are considered to be “noise” (e.g. employee of edocr) are removed, use a set fixed or variable price per lead and invoice or charge paypal the due amount. If variable rate is used, then the quality of leads need to be considered. The customer may also object to the quality of the leads resulting in disputes. The whole issue of providing added value becomes complex to manage from edocr.com’ point of view.

I assume you are familiar with the term “catch 22″. There has been numerous occasions where our customers have asked to know the details of who viewed or downloaded their documents. Whilst this information has always been available to edocr employees, the current build will provide various tool kits for our customers to extract this data with consents where needed. I can almost smell the next catch 22, once customers have the leads, they will no doubt be seeking to understand the quality of the leads we provide.

At this stage, we can only provide details of who looked at a document or a company page (with consent). We cannot judge the quality of these leads and it should not be our role to do so. However, I am convinced that third parties might be able to play a role in here by taking our leads and dissecting them on behalf of our customers.

With that thought, our hunt for those third parties have just commenced. A clue might be in here!

All thoughts on this subject is very much appreciated.