10 Reasons Why I Don’t Buy From You

No matter how great a product, service, category or industry seems, there is always room for innovation that can drive more sales.

Ed Yourdon via Flickr

Often times we unknowingly create barriers to purchase simply because we don’t understand they exist as they aren’t insurmountable, just annoying. Or, we leave industry-accepted barriers in place because that’s just the way everyone does it.

One of the surest routes to drive new sales is to look for ways to remove as many barriers as possible. Entire industries have be reconfigured by people (usually from outside the industry) that look to some combination of the following elements for clues to the keys to innovation.

1. Price – I don’t understand your pricing model or I don’t appreciate the perceived value you attach to the price. Explain why you priced it like you have and go to work on a price/value combination that blows everyone else away. (Hint: Don’t just lower the price, heap on value!)
2. Package – I don’t get why I can’t buy it the way I want. Why can’t I bundle, mix and match and create pairings that make sense to me. Deconstruct how products and services are generally sold.
3. Access – I want to buy direct from the source, see the product being made and talk to the people I might engage. Find ways to break down normal distribution channels and put faces on the people that do everything in your organization.
4. Payment – I will gladly repay you Tuesday for a . . . today. Find ways to create the most favorable payment structure you can afford.
5. Quality – I don’t want what the industry puts out there. Go over every inch of what you sell and find ways to make it better and demonstrate just how much attention is given to your quality. Define your processes so I know what I’m getting has a great deal put into it.
6. Training – I just don’t think it will work for me. Teach me how it works, assure me that you’ll be with me until I get the result and perhaps long after as I try to get even more from my purchase.
7. Accountability – I’ve been down this road before and I know I won’t use it like I should. Add a level of accountability. Show me how you will make it work for me this time, create a feature that allows me to track my progress or better still tell me that you’re going to work with me until it works this time.
8. Design – This doesn’t wow me at all. What if you used design as a point of difference? What if you caught my attention because your space, packaging, product, communications and materials were stunning in field where everyone else just did enough to get by?
9. Proof – Sure it sound good on paper, but . . .Get data, get tangible proof, get customers so thrilled with the actual, measurable results they’ve received that they are willing to sing your praises to the point where the proof in your promise is overwhelming.
10. Assurance – The truth is I don’t really trust myself. Let me know that if it doesn’t work out, for any reason at all, for absurd, no fault, it was just an impulse and now I changed my mind, I can get my money back!

by John Jantsch

Quote of the Day

"Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value."
Albert Einstein

Your action for today is to contact one of your clients or customers regarding something unrelated to your product or service that would add value to their lives.

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"One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat

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"In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story."
Broadcaster, Walter Cronkite

Your action for today is to revisit a situation where you made some conclusions about something or someone that may not be totally accurate because you didn't have all the facts.

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"Here's the key to being free from the stranglehold of past failures and mistakes: learn the lesson and forget the details."
An Unknown Author

Your action for today is to reflect on a lesson you've learned from a past mistake.

With A Focus On Childcare Centers, Mom Trusted Raises $1M+ For Its Early Education Marketplace

Mom Trusted, a startup describing itself as a “social marketplace for early education and care” (which for parents means it’s a killer place to find nannies, babysitters, daycare centers and preschools), has raised $1 million+ in funding. The round was led by Blumberg Capital, and saw participation from 500 Startups, Birchmere Labs, and other angels investors.

The company is tackling a problem that every new parent has at some point faced – finding good childcare. It’s also helping parents connect and communicate with each other, while providing childcare centers with tools manage their outreach efforts and communication efforts with their own community of parents.

The company, co-founded by Chaz Giles, formerly of Procter &  Gamble, and Angela Conley (both parents themselves), has been flying under the radar a bit since its quiet launch in January 2011 in Cincinnati. Since then, Mom Trusted has slowly expanded to San Francisco, New York, then other states including Ohio, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, and Virginia.

“You become a parent, and people or society just expects that you’re imbued with all this set of knowledge, like ‘oh, I now know how to do everything!‘,” explains Giles of the challenge they’re tackling. Any new parent, of course, will tell you that’s far from being the case. (Trust me, there’s a lot of googling involved with parenting.) Giles himself faced the problem that Mom Trusted now aims to solve when he was at P&G – he couldn’t find anywhere he felt comfortable leaving his daughter during the day and simply told the company he would be working from home for a while. Of course, many of us don’t have that same option, which is why Mom Trusted makes sense.

Today, moms (and dads, despite it not being in the startup’s name!!) do web searches, they talk to friends and other parents…maybe they use a site like Care.com or something similar, if they’re looking for individualized care. But finding a good childcare center? Total crapshoot.

On Mom Trusted, parents can search for care providers, save and share the ones they find, access the business info and read the descriptions, and see other recommendations for similar centers below the one currently being viewed. While the site considered experimenting with Yelp-like user reviews, the idea was scrapped, as reviews tend to gravitate towards the negative. Instead, it wants to provide tools to connect parents with other parents for more private communication.

Today, Mom Trusted is open to all – nannies, babysitters, and centers alike – but its focus is on childcare centers. “There’s Care.com, there’s Sittercity, there’s UrbanSitter, there’s things out there that target sitters and nannies, but that’s only twenty-five percent of the market,” says Giles, explaining how Mom Trusted differentiates itself from the competition. “The rest of the market is centers. And no one has focused on solving the biggest chunk of the market because, honestly, it was the hardest to solve.”

With zero marketing, the company has now helped 300,000 parents find childcare (that’s not user registrations, however – Mom Trusted doesn’t require sign-ups. But by analyzing the actions on the site, the company could tell the difference between a parents’ search and those from others). In addition, over 5,000 childcare centers have joined, claiming or establishing their profile page. The site’s listings are currently pulled in through public data sources, mainly by keeping track of business licenses in the states Mom Trusted operates in.

Currently, Mom Trusted is still very much a work in progress. The social features which will allow parents to communicate and network with each other aren’t fully developed. Some regions have more activity than others, and some are lacking social groups, for example. There’s also much in the works on the childcare center side of things, in terms of building out freemium tools to help manage the centers’ marketing and outreach efforts as well as their communication with parents, via a dashboard-like backend. (More on that in the future). The Mom Trusted business model is also still in flux, but will either be a SaaS model and/or on a transaction basis. But, says Giles, the company has already generated over $40 million in revenue for childcare providers, a figure they’ve determined through surveying and sampling their userbase regarding conversions.

The company’s seed round was actually closed this March, but the company has kept it quiet until now. Soon, Mom Trusted will be talking more about the tools it has created for childcare centers, but in the meantime, parents can begin using the site search and social features here.

by Sarah Perez

 

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Clergyman, Peter Marshall

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"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
Will Rogers

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