It is highly recommended for every business to define their ideal client. It helps businesses focus their efforts on the right target audience; it helps stay in business and serve their customers well.
When we started Winberry, we knew exactly who our clients were going to be. What we didn’t know was their full story. By sharing a story of our typical client, we hope to save time, money and frustration for our future customers.
Not all network marketing (also known as hybrid marketing) companies are created equal. But the ones that last, usually invest heavily in two aspects of their business: building a team of passionate reps and relying on technology that is scalable and fits their needs.
Their team members are fanatical brand ambassadors, skilled business people, and loyal customers. Their technology is built to last, yet able to adapt, and is custom. Custom is a magic word, but most our clients don’t arrive to the glorious stop of custom applications directly; most take quite a few detours.
A typical client of ours is a rapidly growing, yet relatively new, hybrid marketing company. They are usually going through an expansion of their network while watching in horror how their application is bursting at the seams.
Their growth is in danger due to inadequate software. Their reps are growing increasingly frustrated. Their online portal is antiquated, anything but user friendly, unresponsive, and unreliable. Service interruptions are common and their customer service department is working overtime as technical support.
We don’t want to name names and point fingers, but we’ve consulted a number of MLM companies who at a time were using 2 or 3 different applications in order to conduct their day-to-day business. These applications had sophisticated sales metrics but were not capable of displaying a downline and upline in a simple and efficient manner!
Although the above-mentioned applications had many differences and were developed by different companies, all of them had one thing in common: they were not custom developed for any given network marketing company.
Some of them are being advertised as “customizable”, but once you look into their definition of “custom”, it usually involves slapping their client’s logo on the dashboard of the back office and tweaking a few tabs. This is not custom!
So, if you asked us about our typical client, this is it: a rapidly growing network marketing company in a desperate need of a custom solution. By the time they reach us, they’ve already spent tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars on “customizations” , “add-ons”, and “improvements” of the system they don’t own, that hasn’t been developed for their specific niche, and that doesn’t serve their unique needs.
At this point, we usually say “welcome to Winberry!” Then we learn everything we can about their business, including their niche, the number of users, their goals, their habits of utilizing online tools, their design preferences, branding guidelines, etc.
Then we look into our core engine and see which parts can be used ‘as is’ (usually, just very basics, such as our proprietary way of displaying upline/downline and the user tree; our administrator panel, etc.); and then we work with the client in order to create a comprehensive list of features. Finally, we take a deep breath and build it.
The result is a custom network marketing application that feels as a natural extension of the company’s brand identity. We don’t just replace our logo with your logo. This would be comparable to us putting a sign that says ‘house’ on a tent and selling this structure to you as a custom-built property. We actually build a house of an application, from ground up, so your team can live in it comfortably now and in the future, even when your family is ready for addition; and another one; and another one...
So, who needs custom? Every MLM/hybrid/network marketing company that has ambitions to last and grow. There’s a reason why companies such as Facebook write their own programming languages. It helps them prevent costly mistakes and ensures system stability, among other things.
Custom solution for a hybrid marketing company is just as vital. Although MLM companies share basic business premises, they sell different products, attract different team members, use different branding techniques and have different marketing plans and sales goals. No one-size-fits-all solution can foresee all the different features and create an out-of-the-box application. As our experience shows, they’re usually not willing/not capable of offering true customization either.