Walking Through Fire Into a Community

Quick story from my daily life at AptConnect. One of the weak spots of AptConnect is that so many companies simply don't know about us yet, no matter how incredibly jaw-droppingly cool our product is. ;) So we end up doing a lot of "outreach" marketing to communities in our local market (even though we are a national company). We haven't quite gotten the hang of individual community marketing yet since it is so much different than selling to the corporate side, which means we're not sure if doing a walk-in approach is better or worse than setting up an appointment. Either way seems about 10 times more difficult than getting an appointment with a corporate executive, which is surprisingly easy. So if you have any suggestions on this front, please let me know!

Anyway, I called up a community today and before I even could explain what we do, she said, "we're already doing that." I could have just invented Cold Fusion or a way to end world hunger, and I guarantee that I would have gotten the same, "we're already doing that." We are extremely unique and I can guarantee that they are NOT working on anything close to what we have to offer, and it got me thinking: I wonder how many opportunities they are losing out on because of the knee-jerk reaction of trying to get the salesperson off the phone. There are TONS of great cross marketing opportunities, unique differentiating products and services, and a host of other interesting tidbits out there that they will miss out on because they decided to close the door to anyone new in their property. And that doesn't include all the higher costs they undoubtedly incur because they aren't letting competing bids in the door.

In the end, it doesn't much bother me personally, because our company doesn't fit in well with a community like that who isn't interested in engaging their residents in new and exciting ways, but its too bad to see everything they are missing out on!