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A Marketplace Projects for Vendors How Can You Grow Business at Low CAC?
Market places have been one of the most successful models that evolving technologies have ushered in before and after the pandemic, in all sectors across the globe.
Digital transformation is not anything new but it has accelerated during the ongoing pandemic, mostly because it has become indispensable for businesses to survive and grow. Its relative importance, however, varies from industry to industry. The current trend of business transformation is not temporary; it is going to stay with us even after the pandemic.
>More businesses, in recent times, have gone online, adopted the work-from-home method, and their technology sourcing has pivoted to the SaaS model, in the process shifting the investment model from conventional capex to opex. The way we live, avail healthcare, entertain ourselves, receive education, do shopping, and conduct businesses have changed drastically and rapidly and are on a perpetual change path.
The emergence of the cloud computing environment and Industry 4.0 technologies have revolutionized the digital transformation itself. While digitalization and digital transformation have always been a priority particularly for medium and large enterprises in recent years, the adoption rate has seen an increasing trend during pandemic days more out of necessity to maintain the continuity. While businesses in retail, financial services, healthcare, education, have adopted and transformed their business models swiftly, not all sectors have been on the same pace.
One particular sector - project-driven business model - has been struggling to figure out how it can transform its business to be in sync with the emerging trends. The conventional methods of acquiring customers and their projects need a substantial amount of effort, time, and cost. For example, the companies that are delivering solutions to their customers through project mode have been finding it difficult to sustain and grow their businesses because the pandemic has disrupted the way they used to operate, for multiple reasons. It will continue to be so in the future because a large number of organizations in other sectors - the probable project customers - have adopted digital technology to move forward.
While the acquisition of customers is only the beginning of the business cycle, the platform offers you the means to avail manpower and technology resources from various sources like cloud environments, related portals, etc., to complete the upcoming milestones of a project. Let us examine how the platform helps to solve the pain points of the project vendors.
B2B or Enterprise Project Marketplace, a Solution to Customer Acquisition Pains
The business globally has been sluggish in all sectors but more so for solution providers (project vendors) across the globe for many reasons, especially after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The companies looking for solutions (customers) particularly SMBs were not sure of who could deliver their needs with the required quality. at the budget, they have allocated, within the timeline. Large enterprises are better off here because of their positioning and solid backup of resources and impaneled vendors. However, in all cases, there will still arise the need to search for a provider for certain specific solutions that call for niche skills and capabilities.
The conventional ways to acquire a customer or business are expensive and time-consuming. In other words, the CAC (customer acquisition cost) will be high. This will add to your total cost and resultantly make your project pricing uncompetitive. It will also eat into your margin. The solution provider or project vendor will have to go through multiple layers of the selection process such as bidding, screening, evaluation, and finalization steps by stretching their bandwidth and there still exists a risk probability of losing the project at the end.
We are living in a time when there are marketplaces and aggregators for almost all kinds of products and services but project businesses lag here. Project marketplace is a concept where you can showcase your capabilities, testimonials, competitiveness, rates, etc., to help solution seekers (project customers) make informed decisions. This also works as a better tool to send RFP responses to the prospective customer, source and manage resources, and track the project.
The platform helps the project leads to identify the best fit project vendor who can address their requirements in all senses because the marketplace portal has all the details of the vendor, that are required to help a solution-seeker take a decision. Once a customer has evaluated and finalized a vendor through filtering with the help of information and data available, the next step is RFP and response to it. The portal provides templates for the customer to customize the RFP for the vendor to respond to it with ease.
What is a Project?
The project can be defined as a specific, finite group of activities that produce measurable results under certain preset requirements and plans. Through projects, we can plan and do activities like building a house, running a marketing campaign, developing an online portal, implementing an ERP, organizing a tour package, or anything of that nature. It involves multiple tasks and diverse resource types.
A project is a temporary, unique, and progressive attempt made to produce tangible or intangible results such as a product, service, benefit, competitive advantage, transformation, etc. Any project can be characterized by the following key characteristics:
- Projects are temporary. This characteristic means that every project has a finite start and a finite end.
- They have unique Deliverables. A project has to have some deliverable(s) which can be a product, service, or another result.
- It is based on the concept of progressive elaboration. This means that the project moves from one milestone to another with improvements and changes in plan, in a progressive manner.
The Advantages of B2B Project Marketplace Over Traditional Methods?
In the W2B model - coining a new term ‘Worker to Business (W2B)’ - a worker bids for a project but it is unlikely that one worker can execute the project completely. What this means is that it won’t be possible for the enterprises to offload all the pains to the workers in such marketplaces unless they resort to assembling multiple workers of different skills and profiles from various sources. Managing a project this way will be cumbersome for companies and as well they cannot be sure of meeting the quality and timeline.
On the other hand, the B2B or enterprise project marketplace is where a company can search for a vendor company that can deliver the project as per their requirement, timeline, and budget. You stand a chance to win the deal if you match their requirements and criteria. Instead of you chasing projects, the projects come to you in an unbiased manner.
How Does the Marketplace Help Your Business?
Whether it be during the normal period or crisis times like today, businesses want to scale and grow. The strategies to drive growth differ from industry to industry. Marketing is one of the strategies to sell your services and products, and expand your market by penetrating new territories. Conventional marketing can be expensive unless you identify marketing methods that are cheaper or free. Go-to-market, one of the components of growth strategies involves substantial investments if done conventionally.
So, how do the marketplaces help you grow your business as a solution provider or project vendor? It provides you a platform to reach out to a large number of enterprises that are actively looking for solutions to their problems. You don’t have to do much marketing and selling here because the customer has already identified their needs and is looking for a vendor. You only have to ensure that the data of your company attracts the customers, takes you to the filtered list, and convinces them of your credentials. Let us take a look at some of the major benefits that a project marketplace provides to you as a solution vendor.
- Better visibility of your credentials, testimonials, capabilities, management, to your potential customers at a low cost
- Helps build a quality pipeline of leads and prospects
- Provides a better understanding of your prospective customer to help you manage risks
- Converts major portion of CAC from fixed cost to variable cost
- Omnichannel functionalities to manage many needs, all in one place.
- ○ Customized RFP quickly and easily,
- ○ Customer Relations - CRM,
- ○ Supply chain,
- ○ Inventory management,
- ○ Receivable management,
- ○ Human Resource,
- ○ Logistics,
- ○ Risk management,
- ○ Financial management,
- ○ Project tracking
- ○ Cryptocurrency payment
- Ensures that all taxation and regulatory compliances in the countries of both parties are met
- Provides visibility and transparency of the projects to both parties
- Facilitates seamless two-way communication flow
- Enables Warranty, Guarantee management, and post-project completion service
It is a Win-Win for Both Players
Unlike in most marketplaces where one is a business that sells its product or service and the other a consumer who buys them, in the project marketplace both parties are doing business. The beauty of this marketplace is that both the players’ benefit; one by providing services to another business and the other by taking the services to run their business. Both of them get the best of the world in terms of quality, cost, and time which are the major factors that determine the success of an enterprise particularly the business driven by projects.