Well, I’ve talked a lot about my history, I guess it’s time to start talking about where I want to go. While I am still consulting, my real focus has been launching SAP applications that I can sell. In this past year, I’ve got Rapier SAP certified, but I’m still struggling with the marketing aspect. Sales hasn’t been my strong point, so things are moving slower than I’d prefer. There are so many things to do in order to start sales & marketing for a product. First and foremost, is finding potential customers. For that I’ve taken multiple approaches. The first step I took was to actually purchase a list of contacts that use SAP. This isn’t as easy as it would seem. First, there aren’t a ton of companies out there selling contact information like that. Second, who knows how accurate it even is. Third, the contact names you get… well, let’s just say I’ve learned to be a lot more specific in what I request for the future.
The company I used was called SAP User List. I ended up buying almost 1600 contacts, and it was roughly $.55/name. What I didn’t know is that I was getting a lot of names from the same company, and many of the companies weren’t in industries that would use my product. The biggest take away from buying the list was to be very specific. I originally said I wanted everyone in the NC/SC, and all companies less than $100 million. What I needed to focus on was the position/job title. I really needed to find all of the service managers and IT managers out there. On the plus side, I was able to determine a lot of companies that use SAP. The next step, is to test the list that I received and see what kind of response I receive. Next time, I’ll talk about how I organized the list I received, as well as how I’m growing it to mine for other opportunities
Mike