Challenge

We are a technology start up that deals with the sale and installation of motor vehicle trackers. We have  been marketing our products using traditional methods of selling our products which include cold  calling, word of mouth, referrals and nesting and door to door selling. This way we have been employing  sales agents who we pay a retainer and commissions per sale and installation technicians who take  home a salary. However after covid 19 hit, it has become increasingly difficult to continue selling the  traditional way. For example cold calling organizations and nesting as our method of marketing have  become difficult to achieve as people are now working from home. Physical meetings with potential  clients have become tricky as everyone is trying to observe social distance. Business has gone really  down and affecting revenues for the company making it unsustainable to continue paying salaries.  As a  company we are looking to venture into digital advertising especially on social media something we  have not done before and are not sure if it will work. We are also looking into outsourcing installation  technicians paying them per piece meal rather than employing them on a salary and completely  eliminating the sales agents.

Selection

We decided to take the learning approach which we felt is the best approach to find out if digital  marketing will work in the sale and distribution of our trackers. We appreciate that people are at home  now and our assumption is that they will spend more time online and especially on social media. We  therefore believe sponsored ads of face book twitter and Instagram will help us reach many people.

Application

To help us find out in the first learning launch tool we interviewed our friends in other industries doing  the same and it was clear that social media marketing had worked and significantly improved their  revenues especially people in retail selling clothes, shoes and home décor.   We interviewed around 15  of them face to face. The only dilemma we had is whether this would work for car trackers which is a  more technical field.

With this in mind we were ready for the second launch. For our second learning launch we planned  to  interview stake holders using questionnaires. We would ask questions to our potential clients on the  likelihood that they will procure motor vehicle trackers online. We will sample digital taxi vehicle  owners, commercial vehicle owners and private vehicle owners.

On the issue of outsourcing technicians we planned to visit garages in different towns including the  capital city where we are based to interview wiring technicians to ask them about their willingness to be  outsourced whenever there is an installation in their town. We appreciate that with social media  marketing we will reach clients all over the country and we want to eliminate the transport and  accommodation costs we incur sending technicians to do installations outside the capital by outsourcing  technicians domiciled in the respective towns

Insight

With these assumptions in mind we were ready to tests our assumptions. We were ready for an  approval and disapproval of our assumptions. We were also ready for feedback on improvement and  value addition to the process in case of approval. From these experiments we learnt that truly more  people were spending time online and doing purchases. There was positive feedback from potential  clients on their willingness to procure online. Technicians were also willing to be outsourced whenever  there was a client as most were not employed by the garages they worked from hence their flexibility.  This also as meant more revenue for them.  For us this meant laying off our staff from permanent  employment reducing our salary burden

We went ahead and started paying for the sponsored ads on social media. We also figured that with  reduced costs of operations we lower our prices for the tracker offering a very competitive price (in fact  the lowest in the market) to attract more people as generally incomes for most people had been  negatively affected by Covid 19. We would them leverage our profits on the large number of people  buying.

With this type of marketing we were able to increase our sales and revenues and reduce costs of  operation as the advertisements are not as expensive as hiring people. The lowered price of trackers  which was the lowest in the market saw us realize high number of sales as we were able to meet the  clients need for trackers even with reduced incomes due to Covid 19.

We encountered some challenges on the pricing though because the market hadn’t seen such a low  prices for motor vehicle trackers before. There were doubts here and there on the effectiveness of the  gadgets.

Approach

We could not have done it any other way apart from using the learning launch tool. We will now focus  on value addition in order to make this model more reliable and sustainable.

