Why does their appear to be so few people interest...

Having posted a number of topics on forums I'm coming to the conclusion 4N members either don't want to save money, don't want to help save some "risk free" via me or perhaps don't have sufficient overheads or employees to see the potential.

Any opinions ?

Mark

People have responded to your other threads Mark.

Also, the 4N forum is less about just broadcasting what you do. Allow people to get to know you and who you are. Use it to join up your activity at the breakfast meetings. Get involved in other conversations on here, not just the ones about saving money on utilities.

Anything free always sounds alarm bells for me. there again I've always been a suspicious git,

Other than on the pages specifically for promotion I try not to advertise what I do on here, I always try to build relationships, offer useful helps where necessary and promote good photography in generally.  Good business comes from good relationships.

You will find that Mark. People wont ask for your help and continue to pay high bills.

Meet, Know, Like and  Trust  -  somewhere down the line from them is post, create awareness, convince and sell.

That aside price saving is way down the list of what motivates people to buy if it wasn't we would all be driving around in Reliant Robins or the 2011 equivalent.

Mark, as a business owner, of course I am interested in saving money, but you need to consider that you are still relatively new on here, and many of us have relatiionships in place

Personally, I have saved a hell of a lot of money by switching providers to that of 4N members I have met. However, very very few of these got the business by selling, or asking. They interacted, they helped, chatted, etc, and when I thought of a switch, bang, I thought of them.

Treat the forum less 'business' and more 'personal' and you may find that things happen quicker. The very fact that you are saying why dont people want to save money risk free via you shows that you are focusing too much on this I think.

What a stupid response

Mark, you're not the only person doing what you do.  

Yep. All 4n numbers love spaffing money left right and centre.

good grief.

is this utility warehouse again?

Simply put, people don't like being sold to.  That's as true on the internet as it is in real life.  You can't wade into a forum and post right left and centre about your business because that's just not how things are done.  The forum is for discussion, not advertising.  It's about building relationships, as others have said.  

I only directly promote things if I have a specific event on, e.g. a webinar, and I don't post much about them because I don't want to spam the place.

Hi Mark

We do actually know each other and our utility businesses have similar goals although different companies.  My other traditional job is Change Management which is also about reducing waste and improving ways of working and thus reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction but there are many companies out there that cannot see the wood for the trees or suffer from the ostrich syndrome.  In the case of businesses, many do not see that they need to spend a bit of money to save potentially a lot of money.  This applies even more to individuals and if a review is free, no obligation, its even more suspicious.

The first thing I notice about your posting is that you do not have a forum 'signature' that will instantly say what you do without you having to do the 'hard sell' and no requirement to click through to your profile.  The comment above by Adam proves this point in my mind. People take an instant view without reading or looking deeper (not meant personally Adam).

It took me almost 3 months to get my first UW customer from 4N and that was for several reasons:

• I personally started off wrong, ie was trying to sell my proposition to everyone I spoke to, cos of course everyone wants to save money!.
• Although people unconsiously do want to save money, they consciously need to actually set aside time to do that, which is sometimes hard to do in reality and confusing in practice of looking at current expenditure!
• I found out the hard way that the stage you do the 'selling' is in your 40 second intro not in the 1-1's
• People didn't know me personally so didn't trust me
• Other less scrupulous distributors and traditional business people have left some people feeling vulnerable, that's why they need to trust you first. 
• I wasn't giving a lot of free advice
• Then of course there are the suspicious people like Kevin above who don't believe certain things in life come free or cheaper without loss of quality!

Since I changed my approach, I rarely leave a 4N meeting without either a request to review peoples expenses or a referral.

Therefore I can only conclude as 75% of my customer base is now from 4N, that business networking does work.

We'll have to have a 1-1 soon where we can discuss more.

Claire 

And I can recommend Claire as I am one of UW customer's 

I think that a lot of cost saving enterprises don't consider the value element of business purchasing. Not everything is price orientated.

I have a number of suppliers that probably aren't the cheapest, but they are reliable and provide good quality services. 

Take Gareth Mailer for example - he provides SEO to me for my site. He's probably not the cheapest SEO provider around, BUT, the quality of his offering far outweights the benefit of small potential saving.

Sure I could get some company in India to do it for me who only have a gmail account and spam my mailbox - they may be a cheaper alternative but are they really going to do a better job? No.

Alternatively Gareth Coxon from Dot Design is currently knocking some graphics together for me. I could have gone and bought some off the shelf vector art for $5 on stockphoto or graphicriver, but what he's building me is bespoke and packed with value, experience and expertise.

In summation, I'd rather spend more to get a quality product than pay cheap for a bad one that ends up costing me money because it risks either a client relationship or impacts my sales.