How to pitch to suppliers via email?
I’ve identified some people who may be a good fit for my marketplace as suppliers. However, I’m not sure how to pitch my platform to them.
Does anyone have any tips or advice for cold outreach for new marketplaces?
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I totally missed this thread. I think pitching suppliers is actually quite easy if you have the market fit. Generally, your marketplace is supposed to be a net positive, that means you can offer them one of the following:
As a result of that, you're taking a little percentage, but if you're doing it right, that should lead to a net positive.
When you pitch, be upfront about that. Tell the supplier that they could make an additional $x on your marketplace, which is y times as much as they would do without you... you don't need to sell here, since it's supposed to be a win-win.
This is so obvious, and I can't believe I couldn't see it.
I think I've been caught up in the mentality of 'I need to learn to pitch and sell', instead of working with potential suppliers and demonstrating the value of the platform. So your points have given me more confidence there.
Right now, I would say my platform checks 4 of those benefits. The missing one being the exposure, but that's due to the fact that the platform is new. In this case, I expect most of the suppliers on the platform to have their own audience anyway.
How do you deal with people who don't want to be the first on the platform? Is it worth trying to convince them to use it?
Thanks again!
Glad to see that I was able to help :)
Best is if they don't know :) If you can convince 5 or 10 suppliers to join a waitlist and then onboard them all at the same time, nobody is really first.
Another option is to fill your marketplace with scraped or manually added offers, and replace it bit by bit with your suppliers.
If the first one is all alone and knows it, it can be a bit odd, yeah.
I like the waitlist idea and on-boarding several people at once.
I'm not keen on the idea of scraping other people's listings from elsewhere and presenting them as an offering on my platform. Dummy listings seem like they would have a similar social proof. What do you think?
Once again, you've been incredibly helpful! :)
I suppose the difference between the scraped ones and dummy ones from a customer perspective is that you could forward bookings/purchases of the scraped ones, while dummy offerings can't be booked. Maybe thinking about customers is too early for you, but it's something to keep in mind.
If you manage to give a supplier outside of your platform purchases, it's also a pretty good selling point for them to list on your own.
It depends a lot on the market. In some that's considered more ethical (diy shops, fashion, services) than in others (real estate)
Absolutely, scraped products / services would work well if you're forwarding them to the supplier, but I think it becomes more tricky when it's a digital product like in this case.
As you said, the ethics fluctuate based on the market. Forwarding a camera lens seems fine, but redistributing someone's software on a different marketplace definitely doesn't. It's probably best to be cautious here.
As for customers, the suppliers will (in most cases) tap into their own audience. So I don't think it will be a huge issue to have dummy products that are unavailable. Chances are no-one wants to actually purchase them anyway. They're just there to provide some 'social proof' for earlier suppliers.
Cheers!