How I...
- Author:
- Chris Quickfall
- Business:
- Invate
- Published:
- 10/11/2008 11:14:00
In terms of finding contacts, I find the best way to create relationships is to do it face to face, not with the telephone and you can’t build a relationship with emails.
My plan was always to identify the person that makes the decisions and then try and talk to them. Right from the start we spent weeks trying find out who made the key decisions. Once we found that out, it was a case of explaining this is what we do, this is how we do it, and we’d like to work with you.
I found that throwing in competitors helped a lot too. If I was with somebody I used to mention the fact that I was going to see their competition that afternoon. That always makes people’s ears prick up a bit more and they start to think, maybe we can cut a deal with this guy.
We wanted a strong company to align ourselves with so we could create a professional reputation. We eventually aligned ourselves with Hewlett-Packard. We had to jump through a lot of hoops on their behalf. We had to take a lot of exams, and structure a lot of our business around HP, but it certainly worked.
It also meant that we could offset a lot of our ongoing liabilities such as warranty support and PC maintenance straight onto HP. The deal cost us a little bit at the start, and it vastly reduces our financial responsibility for managing ongoing long-term liabilities.