Tough lessons in customer acquisition
Acquiring customers most of the times can be a laborious task:
It is often mentioned that fintech startups are in a ‘lose-lose’ situation when it comes to getting new customers. Their competitors are an established lot, they have captive customer base and they have the wherewithal to get new ones. Their only drawback is that they have inefficient infrastructure.
For any enterprise, new or old, customer acquisition is a costly proposition, in the range of $1500 to $2000 for financial services institutions, according to experts. Obviously startups want to conserve their funds and the pattern of their budgeting is to decrease marketing budget every year.
Strategies to acquire customers, therefore, gain criticality for any startup.
PEOPLE VERSUS PROJECT
Balaji Vishwanathan of Expleo states that the challenge was to build a people-based solution with a project-based approach. Also, the demand for talent and cost of talent mismatch impacts short-term profitability, he says, stating further: “The other element was to sign up with new clients and new projects remotely, which was a new but an interesting lesson on what to look for in an opportunity and also in solutions design.”
Anuj Gupta of Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic cites the company’s incapability to provide on premises solution implementation especially because of the restrictions on movement imposed by authorities during the pandemic as one of the difficulties in securing new customers. “With business uncertainty, we decided to have a more cautious approach towards undertaking new projects. Our objective was to stay stable and we undertook thorough scrutiny for new opportunities,” he states.
DELAY ROI
Chirag Patel of Acute argues that at
times, startups need to make costeffective propositions and delay their ROIs. “Not everyone is looking to invest in new mandates during the pandemic. For example, capex proposals needed to be positioned/staggered in opex model. Insisting on the capex model resulted in us getting outcompeted,” he explains.
Anand Awasthi Avhan Technologies has a simple advice: “Don’t give them (the marketing outfits) just a big picture, give them small steps to attain / achieve the big picture. Spell out each step to them in simple manner.”
Ashwin Chawwla of Escrow Play points out to the fact that hiring regulations abroad are more complicated and stringent as compared to India. One needs to be adequately funded, before stepping up hiring internationally, says he.
WHEN TO CALL OFF
Gayatri Balaji of Nanobi says often one finds that customers are dragging the decision timeframe and what starts off with a potential to close in weeks, goes on for months and one finds oneself unable to disengage. “The most important thing therefore is to have the ability to make that judgment call to not pursue the opportunity,” says she.
For Pramod Sharda of Icewarp, it is simple logic: “You can’t make every customer happy, but if you are open and transparent and most importantly available, the customer appreciates it.”
Ganesh Jivani of Matrix Telecom narrates how his company and probably similar organizations find it difficult to adapt to move to digital marketing, digital sales and remote sales. “Old habits die hard and traditional business models, processes and team structures take time to adapt to the new realities,” he says.
Rohit Mathur of Exponentia, however, says the crux of the matter is how to align interests of different stakeholders involved in decision making in client organizations for faster and efficient decision making.
Srikumar Kumar of Alpharithm states that in this new normal where most clients are working from home, one has to look at new ways of engaging with clients. “We need to understand their working patterns during the day and be sensitive to the fact that they are sharing rooms/workspaces with their kids in virtual classrooms and spouses working from home. The traditional face to face and event-based sales and marketing channels have to be replaced with new digital channels. They need to see that we can successfully deliver a project completely remotely,” he reiterates.
FIRST IMPRESSION THE BEST
“I have seen that customers especially in this age are very quick to judge a product they use and they often form a negative sentiment towards a brand if they are unhappy the way the product turns out to be,” says Govind Ramamurthy of eScan.
“Some have even chosen to voice their displeasure online which in turn can hurt the credibility of the brand. In such a scenario, it is absolutely crucial to understand that first impression is the last impression for a customer. And one must always be prepared for a crisis situation,” he says.
He is also of the view that with the everchanging landscape of cybersecurity, every CIO/CTO/CSO is challenged to keep pace with new technologies. “Failure happens if we are unable to reach across and explain the innovations to a CIO/CTO/CSO,” he adds.
SOLUTION IS IMPORTANT
For Vinod Govindan of Oceans, the most important lesson learnt from failures to attract new customers is to not be able to solve the real problem of the customer. “When we have tried to sell a product, it has always failed. The customer always needs a solution and your product is always just a means to get to the solution, perhaps not addressing the specific problem,” says he.
BRAND VISIBILITY IS KEY
Vijender Yadav of Accops says his company is a completely Made-In-India product company, competing with some big global companies in different domains. Despite having the trust of 600+ global customers, he has often faced difficulties in getting a level playing field with big international companies. “While our products speak for themselves, as a growing company, lack of brand awareness has been a concern for us. Wiser from some recent setbacks, we are now putting in serious efforts to increase our brand visibility and brand awareness. Because we want to offer the choice of technologies and diversity of vendors that organizations had been craving for all these years with respect to work from home,” he explains further.
He also cites lack of understanding a mong b u s i n e s s leaders and key stakeholders about security challenges and risks involved in the work-from-anywhere scenario presents hurdles for investments required to smoothly run and securely scale businesses. “We are using multiple channels to communicate the need for a compliant and flexible IT infrastructure to
help organizations create a hybrid, futureready digital workspace,” he says.
Well known marketing experts advise that enterprises facing challenging situations in marketing their products should give emphasis in the first place to acquaint the prospective customers about the problems the product on offer would solve.
Secondly, they should have a clear idea of the target customer - the product may be ideal for smaller-sized firms and it is waste of time and effort to target larger firms. And the most important aspect is to ensure that the product is meeting compliance norms, especially when the prospective customers are highly regulated entities.