text | Tess
public account: Tess Foreign Trade Club (Tess_2006)
salesperson question:
Tess, Hello! Let me first introduce myself.
I come from a rural area and graduated from junior high school.
I accidentally heard about Ali International Station in 2009. I found out that the price was only 29,800 yuan, which was not too expensive, so I registered as a member.
I don’t understand English, so I used translation software to publish products and communicate with customers with the mentality of giving it a try. Unexpectedly, I received an order just one month after the website was launched.
In this way, I recruited a fresh graduate who studied English and embarked on the road of foreign trade step by step.
After joining Alibaba , he often goes to training on foreign trade knowledge, company management, etc. Driven by the account manager, two more salesmen were hired.
was okay for the first one or two years, but the effect was not very good later. There were more and more rules for international sites, and the effect of was getting worse and worse.
Later, Alibaba launched an innovation team. With the people, the platform was not enough, so I added another platform. At the peak after
, there were 12 salesmen and 3 platforms were opened.
It’s just that there are people and a platform, but the performance is getting worse and worse, and most salesmen can’t even keep their own wages.
In order to give them confidence, sometimes I would save money and take sample orders for them, but I still didn’t get through it later, and people slowly left.
It was at this time that we put our hope and energy into the factory.
My timeline for building the Ali International Station is as follows:
opened the Ali International Station in 2009;
2012-2014 was the best time;
opened two platforms in 2016;
opened three platforms in 2017. ;
At the end of 2018, there were only two foreign trade salesmen left;
The Alibaba platform was closed in 2020, and all the foreign trade salesmen left;
In December 2022, the factory still suffered a lot of losses and owed a lot of debt. This month I also closed the factory. (The price is too high)
I am writing you an email because I want to start doing foreign trade again.
Because I have jumped through too many pitfalls before, I no longer dare to believe the words of any platform account manager, so I would like to ask whether it is better to build my own official website or build a platform.
I initially planned to build an official website and then advertise and develop customers, but one question is whether the trust level of the official website is relatively low?
If you are a platform, the trust level will be relatively higher if it is endorsed by the platform, but it still takes a lot of energy and money for the platform to be effective.
After experiencing so many things, my heart has sunk and I am ready to start from scratch.
Please give me some advice, thank you very much!
L
Tess replied:
L’s help email made me feel that he has deeply understood the lessons of the past. For example, cannot blindly believe in the nonsense of some platform account managers. When one road reaches a dead end, it is necessary to change another road.
However, due to the serious brainwashing, some key issues are still being washed, such as: "When developing customers, customers do not trust the official website. It is easier to gain customer trust with platform endorsement."
It is estimated that in the past ten years or so, some unscrupulous account managers have been instilling in him the importance of platform endorsement in order to get him to renew his contract. So far, he has closed his international account and started a new one. He is still affected by these misconceptions. (Visual inspection showed that this company had a high probability of paying for "Jinpin Chengqi" for a long time)
It can be seen that if a person only accepts input from a single channel for a long time, he will gradually lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong. At the same time, L can also let us realize how important independent thinking is to a person. The problem of
L can be summarized as one. For development customers, is the official website reliable or the platform?
In my opinion, official websites and platforms are just different types of ways to develop customers, with their own advantages and disadvantages. As a user, you can just use your strengths and avoid weaknesses.
1. Platform selection
When you choose a platform, it is best to select a time period (5 years is recommended) to see what the traffic trend of this platform is.
is not a shame, just look at the data.
In 2016, the traffic of Alibaba International Station was 445.50M, which is more than 445 million.
By November 2022, the number of visits to alibaba.com will be 98.27M.
(Using the same method, you can also find data on other B2B platforms.)
In addition, if you look at the number of users corresponding to this platform within 5 years, you can roughly see whether it is reliable to invest in a certain platform.
If the platform traffic is decreasing and the number of users is increasing, it means that the cost of acquiring customers on this platform is rising. There are too many monks but too little rice!
If the traffic of a platform has been rising, even if the number of users is also rising, the customer cost will be less in comparison.
At the same time, we can also see from the traffic trends whether some platforms are going downhill or uphill.
At this point, can we explain the problem of requester L, why the effect of their international website is getting worse and worse?
The data does not lie. If you are going to launch on a certain platform, at least check the traffic of this platform first. If the traffic of the platform itself is not good, how can you expect to rely on the platform to gain customers?
2. About the official website
As far as I am concerned, it is necessary for a company to have an official website. Even if it is not to develop customers through the official website, it is also necessary to display the company's products.
However, there are too many pitfalls in building an official website, especially if you want to do marketing through the official website.
If L could attend the Club's annual meeting last week, I believe his problem would be solved to a large extent. He would not write an email to me, but would have already contacted the sharing guests and asked them to give him more professional opinions.
In general, a good official website can be achieved as long as three points are achieved:
To put it bluntly, it is
1. Good web design.
2. The server should be good and the loading speed should be fast.
3. Website content must be professional and valuable.
My thoughts on these three points are this.
A.If you have sufficient budget, find professionals to do web design. If you don’t have much money, design it yourself, because simple style will never go out of style. Refer to Google home page. The
B. server is easy to get. You can know which servers are good by searching online, or you can consult some professionals or third parties.
They should be able to tell you which servers are more reliable. Because when these people see you asking questions, they will think that you may be their potential customer.
C. The content of the website must be made by the company itself, and third parties cannot help at all.
In summary, to build a good official website, the budget will not be too high, but the premise is that you have to avoid some pitfalls.
The video clip shared by the guests has been edited. I will put it in the member welfare warehouse so that everyone can understand after watching it. The entire sharing time of
lasted one and a half hours. The guest used three failure cases and three success cases to analyze in detail the pitfalls of finding a third party to build an official website and independent website, and how to avoid them.
I hope that after reading this, L will be able to have a clear idea of the model for developing customers in the future.
Tess
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