How to Get Customers to Buy! | Marketplace Mondays
We’ve talked about what Marketplace means to Vendasta’s partners, and how it helps your salespeople learn about new solutions and close deals faster. Now, I want to walk you through exactly how Marketplace puts the products and services of your choosing right in front of all your prospects and customers, so you can get customers ready to buy. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about their experience!
For simplicity’s sake, let me break it up into three digestible sections:
- Marketplace - Discover, provision, add
- Business App - The single source of truth for your customers
- Product Catalog - Hello, upsell opportunities!
The Reason Marketplace Exists
To serve as the single platform where your company can easily manage all of the products and services you sell. Was that concise enough for ya? 😉
Discover: Browse a selection of best-of-breed products and services that your company would like to sell. Learn more about each with rich resources to make an informed decision before you start selling. 
Provision: Here’s where it starts getting fun. Click “Start Selling,” set your retail price and viola—you’ve added a new product to your suite and can start selling right away!
Add: Here’s where you make Vendasta’s Marketplace the single source of truth for your company. In a few short steps, add in all of your own products so that everything you sell lives within one interface, one login, one platform.
A Dashboard for your Customers
Local businesses require a wide variety of digital solutions to help them run their business effectively. Managing a virtual doorway means optimizing listings, effective social media marketing, responsive websites and so much more. This a serious problem for business owners, who can become overwhelmed by not only having to maintain an accurate presence online but also needing to remember multiple usernames and passwords to the various portals that are supposed to help them. With all this headache, is it any wonder why business owners have trouble seeing past the clutter and identifying ROI?
Business App is the extra strength Tylenol to that headache, the Gaviscon to that upset stomach, the diaper rash cream—you get my point! With a single login to a dynamic dashboard that’s always being updated with an interactive activity stream and analytics that show proof of performance, Business App is the single source of truth for your customers.
And here’s what I mean by that. Let’s pretend that instead of working at Vendasta, I’m a Vendasta partner and I run my own agency, Amy’s Amazing Agency (I know, I’m so clever!). I provide each of my clients with their own Business App—their own login to the single source of truth for managing their business online.
This Business App is for Green & Associates, a local law firm that Amy’s Amazing Agency is helping build an online presence. The main contact at Green & Associates is Taylor Green and this is her view when she logs in. Currently, this client of mine has three active product—Listing Builder, Reputation Management and Website Pro. They’re a large, digitally-savvy organization who recognize the need to embrace digital. And that’s where my full catalog of products comes in—there’s six additional products that they can look through. More on those later.
This is what Chris Cooper’s Business App looks like. He owns the bakery Cupcake Conspiracy and runs a small but efficient local business. His foray into tech has been slow but steady as I’m still teaching him how important a strong online presence is. He’s only activated one product, Social Marketing, but he still has the full Product Catalog to look through—if and when he’s ready.
Every business owner is unique and as their trusted agency of record, Business App helps me optimize their experience.
And yes, it’s mobile responsive.
Finally, the good stuff. Product Catalog!
You may have noticed in each of the Business App images above that there’s a section on the bottom half of the screen titled “Product Catalog.” No? You missed it? Here’s a reminder:
Business App works together with your company’s Product Catalog to help deliver solutions to businesses. It’s up to you to decide how much or how many or how few offerings you’d like to appear in each of your clients’ Business App dashboards.
How does Product Catalog get populated? This is where we come full circle back to Marketplace. Remember when you were discovering new products and services and deciding which ones you wanted to start selling? The ones you selected “Start Selling” for are the ones that appear within the Catalog.
Product Catalog provides the perfect opportunity for your company to upsell existing clients. Imagine this: your client logs into their Business App. They see their active products that you currently provide them and within the Product Catalog section, notice a new offering. Without having to make a phone call or send an email, you’ve piqued the interest of your client!
Hot leads and content branded as your own
And the best part of this system are two words that I consider almost magical: hot leads. When a client clicks through into a product that they don’t have activated (so, an offering with Product Catalog), an automatic email notification gets sent to you. That way, you can contact them with timely and relevant information.
And something else that’s neat—as our partner, you know exactly which products you’ve provisioned from our Marketplace and which are your own. But the client? They have no idea! To them, all of the offerings surfaced within the Catalog are there to help them run a successful business—all with your help.
The moral of the story? Marketplace means speed to market: discover, provision and sell. And do that all quickly. Marketplace is the single dashboard for all your clients. After all, our mission is to help local economies, and that can only be done through you.
Interested in Marketplace?If you’re a Vendasta partner, click here to start discovering! If not, get a demo to see if you’re a potential partner.