Change Can Create New Opportunities

One of the great benefits of being a Cazbah Account Manager is that I get to spend time with small business owners and learn about their businesses.  I have had some customers for 10 years and I have seen many of their businesses go through tough transitions.

Many of these transitions are caused by external pressures that force my customers to reconsider how they do business.  These days the search engines, the government, and manufacturers are busy working to level the ecommerce marketplace.

They are all in the midst of major changes to remove any “unfair” competitive advantages.  For more details on this topic read my last blog post “Don’t Suck at Marketing – Help Your Customers!”

With these changes taking place my customers are forced to think about the true “unique value” they can bring to their customers and their marketplace.  Many of my customers come to me looking to simply copy their manufacturer or supplier product information to their web site, do some SEO and wait for the orders to come in.  There was a day when this used to work, but that is not good enough anymore.

This week I was fortunate enough to sit down with one of my long term customers and talk about this very topic.  His online business has suffered greatly, not because he doesn’t have a great site or he doesn’t rank well for important industry keywords but because his industry online has completely changed.

The search engines have moved everyone’s organic rank down the page and replaced it with their own advertising, his manufacturers have required all their online resellers to use the same prices, and state governments are putting more and more pressure on the online resellers to pay taxes in their states. So that has left my customer to take a closer look at his business to see where he could provide true value to his customers and industry.

My customer sells a product that requires complicated installations.  If these installations are done improperly they can cost the customer and the installer a lot of time, money and pain.  My customer spent a lot of time talking to his manufacturer and listening to his customers and found out that there were a lot of Mom & Pop operations doing installations in his territory.  Instead of trying to fight to take business away from these Mom & Pop operations my customer came up with a new business plan to help them.

To provide them with one stop shop products, tools, and resources so they can complete their installations on time and on budget.  No one in his industry is doing this right now.  It is quickly becoming his true “unique value”.

So what does this have to do with my customer’s web site?  A lot.  It changes our focus away from being just another national ecommerce vendor to one that is very focused on providing local services to Mom & Pop operations.  This will require changes in content, local SEO, advertising and how we measure success.