A Big Show on a Big Stage Comprehensive Network Marketing of a Corporation
The predecessor of Shanghai Saame Tools Import & Export Co., Ltd. (hereinafter called Saame) was the Shanghai branch of the tools department of Shaanxi Machinery Equipment Import & Export Co., Ltd. Shaanxi Machinery Equipment Import & Export Co., Ltd. was a provincial-level enterprisefor exports. It used to be the leader of the five northwestern provinces in foreign trade. It inherited the characteristics of state-owned units— large and integrated. As a corporation, it possessed an independent export sales department,domestic sales department, freight forwarding company, laboratories, warehouses, packaging factory, packaging factory, hardware processing factory, drill production factory, etc. I worked in the packaging factory under this corporation from 2004 to 2006. In 2005, I achieved some good performance in the businessby using network marketing technology, and soon caught the attention of the CEO of the corporation.When I left the packaging factory in 2007, I was hired as a network marketing consultant of the corporation and was responsible for the overall planning of the network marketing for each department of the company.
In the first place, the executives’ intention was to establish a comprehensive hardware tool portal by virtue of the advantages of the relationship with thousands of hardware tool enterprises. But I stood by my point. First of all, the purpose of an enterprise using the Internet should be to expand the sales market for existing products, rather than to establish an independent profit-making entity (the portal website mainly relies on advertising fees and service fees to make profits). What’s more, establishing a portal website required a lot of capital for promotion and a dedicated team for maintenance, which were both hard to meet in the early stage.So I insisted that we should build one or more websites for each factory, and rely on these websites to bring new business.
To build multiple websites, we need a large number of domain names. So the fist step was to register domain names.We planned to build 10 websites in different industries, but considering their stability, we registered 20 domain names in fact.The natural listings of a website was fluctuant. If the company had more than one website, they could promote different keywords. Once a website was ranked down, other ones could still hold up. As the saying goes, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” For instance, we had registered two websites for trimming knives, the series products of the domestic sales department: In order for easy searching and memorizing, one was named www.xiubiandao.cn, composed of the Chinese phonetic symbols of the trimming knife; the other was www.qumaoci.cn, composed of the Chinese phonetic symbols of deburring, which meant the function of the trimming knife.
The second step was to choose appropriate server space for these domain names.Because each website didn’t contain much content, which occupied only tens of megabytes of memory, and was all pictures and text,we chose 100M of space for each website, but located them on servers of different service providers. In this way, the IP addresses of websites varied, which was good for the future promotion of natural listings.
Thirdly, we made an Internet market analysis on the businesses of these enterprises, looking for products with a large initial input-output ratio as a start and having them promoted first. According to the analysis of network promotion and actual sales performance of the same industry, the imported SOMTA cutting tools from the domestic sales department were determined as the best product for network marketing (Saame was the general agent of SOMTA drills in China).The products of SOMTA were recognized as high-quality tools in the industry, especially their drill series. There was a strong market demand in the Yangtze River Delta where hardware processing and mold processing were thriving. he products were mostly used by foreign-funded enterprises because the brand was widely recognized by foreign engineers before they came to China, and they tend to use the tools of SOMTA in Chinese factories to arrange the processing technology. Once the technology was confirmed, it could not be changed, which implied regular orders in the future. After setting the direction, we started our promotion in an all-around way, especially focusing on mass postings on the Internet. I always believed that the more models the industrial products have, the greater the advantage of mass postings for network marketing there was. Please check the picture below. If you searched for ”drill” on Baidu, the entire page was about the websites of Saame and its free information (searched on October 14, 2011):
Fig. 6-1 Search Results of “ Somta drill” on Baidu
Under such an intense promotion, the sales had naturally risen. In the year following the comprehensive network marketing, the domestic sales department achieved an online sales growth of more than 2 million yuan with this brand alone. Furthermore, the domestic sales department shared its experience in network marketing with the next-level distributors. With this kind of viral replication strategy, as long as customers searched for SOMTA drills, they could only find Saame and its distributors (at least on the first three pages of the search results, which will not be listed due to space limitations).
There were about 10 series of imported brand tools in the domestic sales department. What we were to do was follow the lead and promote them one by one in the same way. In 2 years, 8 brands had been successfully promoted, and more new brands were added to the promotion list. Though the other brands didn’t gross as much as the first brand in sales, the overall sales of the domestic sales department was growing rapidly every year, and had hit 15 million yuan by 2010.
The storage and transportation department of Saame Group (Shanghai Saame Freight Forwarding Co., Ltd.) provided warehousing, logistics, freight forwarding, customs declaration and other services for the group. Having a warehouse of 6,000 square meters, equipped with a fleet of vans and small but integrated working teams, and located at the hub of Shanghai’s freight route for foreign trade, it should be the first choice for customers, and thus was of large potential for network marketing. But because it had only been providing internal services for the group for a long time, it seldom undertook external business. After a detailed analysis of the basic workflow of the storage and transportation department, I decided to start from two aspects. One was to let customers find us, and the other was to let the upstream companies engaged in shipping and air freight services (service providers of the storage and transportation department) find us. At first, we did the most basic work, which was to build an independent corporate website, showing the strength of the company in terms of location, warehouse, working environment, etc; and we had the website optimized and promoted to make it rank highly on Baidu.
Apart from attracting customers, we also needed to attract our service providers. Therefore, we specially add our demand information to the website and published a large amount of demand information (for shipping and air freight services) during mass postings. In so doing, we could get instant quotations of the latest international logistics from the suppliers, and give prompt feedback to customers.
The international freight business was characterized by its demanding expertise. A new customer tended to absorb a lot of relevant knowledge on the Internet first to prepare for further negotiation with freight forwarding companies. So answering customers’ basic questions about freight forwarding (such as the way to calculate FCL shipping, and to calculate the volume of the container) marked the real contact in business. Therefore, we prepared a great deal of basic knowledge on the corporate website and answered similar questions on the Internet actively.
The freight forwarding business was somewhat similar to the export business, which was the main focus of the group Some factories that didn’t have the right to export would hand over the export business to Saame while negotiating the shipping business. The coordination was also manifested in the packaging factory and its laboratory. Having noticed that Saame possessed such a large-scale and standardized packaging factory, some Shanghai trading companies transferred the packaging process they used to complete in small factories to the Saame packaging factory, which not only facilitated the inspection of goods in the last link (completed in the laboratory), but also guaranteed the quality of external packaging. Some foreign companies even handed over to Saame all of their export business, covering packaging, transportation, customs declaration, export, and other one-stop services, giving full play to Saame’s advantages that it could provide comprehensive services in spite of small scale.
While the domestic sales department and internal affairs department were getting good performance on the Internet, the external sales department was also increasing its investment in advertising on various foreign trade information platforms and registered as a VIP member of Alibaba and Global Sources. We also promoted and optimized multiple websites on world-famous search engines and invested in a certain number of advertisements. Due to the variety of the tools, it was a huge workload to upload product information. Every industry platform or enterprise website needed thousands of pieces of product information. We didn’t set up a network marketing team to address this issue, because no one could know all the products. Instead, we distributed the uploading work to dozens of existing foreign trade teams in the company and asked them to complete the job during their spare time. It was just like the ants moving their house. The information on cutting tools was to be uploaded by the foreign trade team that specialized in the export of cutting tools, and the information on hand tools was to be uploaded by the team that specialized in the export of hand tools, and the like. Everyone was responsible for their familiar products, which could also minimize errors. This kind of mode had improved efficiency. In just half a year, the work was completed. If we had chosen to ask three or four people to do this, it might take about two years. After the uploading of product information, the network marketing department distributed the pre-collected list of free information platforms in English to each department. These departments would arrange for idle personnel to publish a large amount of free information on the Internet for the long term, and the marketing department just needed to assess their completion and report it to the head office leader.
The work lasted for two years until the various free information platforms in European and American countries and the mainstream search engines were full of information of Saame tools. A Spanish buyer sighed once when negotiating business with a salesman of Saame, “We have no choice but to work with you. My boss can always find the information of your company while searching for products. Before I came to China, he told me that no matter which product I chose in the end, I had to make a comparison of it and the one of Saame’s first.”
Although there were not many customers secured by the foreign sales department on the Internet over the years, the order volume continued to grow steadily. By 2010, the cumulative customer sales brought by the network marketing had exceeded 100 million.
In summary, the success of Saame in network marketing lied greatly in its comprehensive hardware system: a variety of sample rooms like supermarkets, a packaging factory and a warehouse as large as a football field, and the sales team of hundreds of people with a clear division of duties…Big customers valued these resources more. This was exactly a big show on a big stage.