Swim with your arms and kick with your legs

One of the key differences between BuyReply and Lind Golf is that BuyReply’s business model gives us control over our inbound and outbound sale efforts.

Unlike Lind Golf, BuyReply does not rely only on inbound activity. We can also generate outbound activity at a pace of our choosing.

When selling products online via an ecommerce model, much of your effort is focused on generating inbound traffic. That means setting up Google Ads, building an email database so that you can market to existing customers (who were acquired via inbound strategies) and running ads on Facebook and social media platforms. Generating inbound traffic is expensive and risky. You need to invest a lot to get results.

The problem with this is that once things are humming it is difficult to do anything that has a material impact on your business. You can’t close a massive deal which takes things to a whole new level in terms of sales or revenue. You can’t do this because doing deals is an outbound activity. You need to wait for somebody to visit your site, and hope that they are the 1% that converts.

Traditional and online retail is mostly an inbound game. The way to grow these kinds of business is to try and best convert the traffic that you get by merchandising and pricing your offering well, delivering excellent customer service and offering a great user experience.

You can grow your business by growing your product range across categories, therefore increasing your total addressable market, however, that is often an expensive and timely exercise. Bricks and mortar retailers generate their inbound traffic by paying high rent in high-street locations.

What we are doing differently this time around, is building a product and business model where we can drive outbound sales as well as inbound traffic. We still have the same inbound marketing strategies in place, such as Google Adwords, PR, social and so forth, however because we are selling a service we are able to identify who would want to use our product, and contact them directly.

Running a business that solely depends on inbound sales is like swimming with your arms only. You are only utilising half of your potential. What you really want to do is swim with your arms and kick with your legs at the same time.

That is how it felt at Lind Golf as we relied 100% on inbound sales. We considered opening a wholesale division however our low Internet/direct pricing was working against us because stores had their own home brands and our range was not priced at a premium price point so there was no room for a wholesale margin. We were swimming with our arms and frustrated that we couldn’t kick with our legs.

With BuyReply we are able to segment our market, target specific use cases of the platform, contact customers directly and set up meetings. Phone calls are a lot cheaper than Google Ads and you have so much more control. We can see our customers, speak to them, learn from them, address their concerns and make our business (and their businesses) better because of it.

Furthermore, BuyReply is much more scalable. We can close a really large customer that could double our business, in a matter of days or weeks, whereas closing a single customer at Lind Golf may have ended up in a $300 order. Having direct control over our sales is really exciting coming from an environment where we had fairly little control over sales and scale.