When you have No Fixed Office, or even more likely no fixed business location, having excellent product information is absolutely essential to building your business. Because of the nomadic traits of a mobile worker, really there is no way to properly show your clients the physical product quickly and easily. There are some options but most are impractical.
- Client Visits – While this is an option is has some downsides, such as being time consuming, impractical for out of area clients and means you physically need the product available to show. While all of these negatives can be countered with it is better for the client, it is also counter intuitive to the whole concept of having No Fixed Office.
- Showroom – Again this is possibly the ideal option for clients to get the best benefit, however again it has some downsides, it adds additional costs to your business, requires you or an additional employee to always be there or at least at appointment times, and it actually defeats the whole idea of having No Fixed Office.
So if you cannot provide a physical demonstration of the product to the client, what is the next best way. Well there are actually a few options, all of which can provide usually sufficient information for the client to make the decision, help you keep your costs to a minimum and actually can often make it easier for your client to get the information. Below i will offer some of the potential options, but it can also come down to being creative, with your own twist on an idea.
BROCHURES – You may think, wow this is such a smart idea, i wonder why nobody thought of this</sarcasm>. However while i do mean brochure in the traditional sense, you also need to add something more to it. It isn’t as easy as just taking a supplier brochure and sticking it in the mail. You either need to add to the supplier brochure with an insert of your own, and ensure the brochure has you contact details on clearly. Or create your own variation on the supplier brochure, the primary benefit in creating your own variation is that you can include your own testimonials from your customers, as well as focus on the primary points you believe your customers care about, which are not always the same points that the manufacture focuses on.
WEBSITE INFORMATION – While again a website is almost a given, it is another area that you need to go that step further. Your website should not just be a online store with a brief description of the product and a link to buy. Especially if you are offering high end products or something that requires certain levels of information for the customer to commit to purchasing, than make sure that the information is there. Rather then just listing the name and one or two points, transpose all the information from your brochure, if there is a lot of questions get asked about a product create a FAQ for that product, add a page for testimonials, and make it easy for potential customers to contact you with questions.
PICTURES AND VIDEO – While really this should be part of your website, it can be used in other ways as well. The more pictures and video that you can make available to your customer the less important a physical product for them to see before hand will be. Pictures on your website is almost a no brainer, however video is something many people are still not quite onto, especially if you can demonstrate the product working in a short video. Limiting the use of pictures and video to your website is not the only way either, you can create other marketing tools like interactive cd’s and dvd’s and even putting more picture’s into your brochures.
While there is no one way that is absolutly perfect, and you are almost always going to need to fight that little bit harder for the customers, there are many ways that you can combat having No Fixed Office, in displaying your products. There are three idea’s here, but there is potentiall hundreds of ways that you can twist these idea’s and add other idea’s to make your business work for you.