Progress Thread - Cloud Niche

[DisLife]

So I've had an account on this forum for a long, long time. I've started a few business in that time, most of them didn't generate enough income to hold my interest for long and I closed them down. I ended up figuring out that I was starting these business for the sake of starting businesses. I didn't care enough about what I was doing to keep at it.

Last year, I partnered with a couple of co-workers to start a business. Each of us brings an area of expertise to the company. Currently, we have a few hundred dollars of profit. Not enough for us to live on, so we each still have day jobs.

The business is centered around Oracle products. Both their cloud based and on premise offerings. We were all working for the same company solving issues for their clients, so we had pretty good first hand knowledge of what most of these types of customers would need.

We've now reached a point where I feel I need to keep applying the pressure as we've plateaued on acquiring new customers, which is why I started this thread. I believe this is an opportunity that will actually payoff if I just keep at it.

I've already tapped everyone on my network to let them know what I'm doing. That's what lead to the early customer sales. My next step is to start building a real sales funnel. I'm just not sure yet how to do this since I'm targeting businesses instead of the masses.

Anyways, thanks for reading. I hope to have some updates soon.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Late Bloomer]

Hi Dis (I didn't see your actual name?). I've also used the Oracle RDBMS and PL/SQL in corporate development jobs. There are at least a few more database geeks on the forum. I took a quick look at your previous posts and it looks like you've tried several things in business. Congratulations on getting a team and starting a business that's profitable! As you know that's farther than many people get!

The business is centered around Oracle products. Both their cloud based and on premise offerings. We were all working for the same company solving issues for their clients, so we had pretty good first hand knowledge of what most of these types of customers would need.

I see some good news and some bad news about this. As you know well, Oracle sells incredibly complicated products to organizations with a lot of money. Then many of them buy third party help, like yours. That's good news. The bad news is that Oracle could squash the little guys offering services or companion products. They could buy out a company like yours for millions of dollars, but they could also develop exactly the same products and services internally and wipe out the third party market. This makes me wonder if it might be smart for you to also handle some other Big Enterprise Data systems like Microsoft's SQL Server, Postgres, etc., so no one elephant could stomp you as it dances its own tune.

My next step is to start building a real sales funnel. I'm just not sure yet how to do this since I'm targeting businesses instead of the masses.

Another user just started a thread on sales funnels and there's not much action yet. Why not jump in there?

 

[ay47]

Ok you weren't very clear on what you’ve tried. I’m assuming you guys are in the services business. But let me give this a shot. I'm in B2B sales in my slowlane job.

I would start with target personas. B2B sales center around champions and decision makers. What does your ideal persona look like?

B2B Sales funnels are very high touch.

I would first start with finding where your target personas hang out and their method of consuming information. Go on LinkedIn and you can find that out pretty easily.