Increasing New Customer Base - Companies Approach

Today it is great challenge for the companies to increase their new customer base. Different companies follow different system to achieve this.

Yesterday, I was talking to one vendor for decorating a hall (it is a theme based decoration), he was ready to do it for Rs. 5000. I was wondering, the same decoration that we have made some times back on our own costs Rs.2500 (materials alone) and nearly seven of our friends worked on it one whole night. Then I asked the vendor, whether he has any set already? He said, that he doesn’t have one. 

I asked him about his profit, he responded that as I am a new customer he wants only very less profit but he wants appreciation from us and our guests on the quality of decoration, so that he will get more orders latter.

This is how normal businesses will work. First time companies will give discounts/offers to increase their customer base. 

In the recent past companies like Google, BMC, Salesforce, and Solarwinds etc. acquire companies and increase their customer base. They do the acquisition by identifying companies that are doing business on products related to theirs. If they do acquire right products and project the right story, then they can cross sell the products and they can see the growth.

There is another approach in the cloud business. Many companies are integrating their product with other third party products so that they can provide a solution. So if you make your product highly extensible, many vendors will integrate their product with yours. This way you will get more exposure and you can increase your new customer base. 

Many vendors like Zendesk, BaseCamp, GetSatisfaction etc. integrated their product with JIRA a bug tracking software.

The third approach is product companies can develop new products that are related to the existing products and integrating it and provide it as solution. For this JIRA is an example. They have integrated their own products like Confluence, BitBucket etc with JIRA. 

In all the above cases, if we do a wrong approach, we will not succeed. In my view integration of salesforce with JIRA is not a big value addition compared to JIRA Zendesk integration. Some time even the acquisition of products will be a failure due to many reasons like integration problem, wrong identification of solution, culture problem etc. 

Saravanan.