How do I get the first businesses to join my website?

Hi everyone,
I've just developed a quote/reverse auction for a niche market with 40-50 established businesses. It is fully developed so I started sending invitations to join to the businesses. It is meant to give them an extra sales channel and since they all claim to be the best and cheapest, a chance to prove it and it is free to join. To my surprise I have received very cold answers like: this is already very competitive, we don't need you to make things harder etc. So no one joined.
I know that if I can get a few of them to join it will be beneficial both for my business and for them so the others will follow!
So my question is: how do I get the first businesses to join?
Thank you!

 

tell them its free for the first 5 and you already have 3 signing up. after that you will be charging so get in now ............................

 

Whenever you're trying to sell something, the customer (or these other businesses in your case) only has one thing on their mind: "What's in it for me?"

Make them an offer that focuses on what they want, not what you want. Even if you have some negative feedback already, see it as helpful advice in understanding what similar businesses may want from you. If they don't like competition and "making things harder" - find ways to tweak that and make it better for them.

Sorry if I do not understand the specifics of your business, but I hope this helps. Good luck!

 

"since they all claim to be the best and cheapest, a chance to prove it"

Maybe they can't prove it. Obviously they can't all be the best and cheapest.


"I have received very cold answers like: this is already very competitive, we don't need you to make things harder etc."

I think you found your problem. They are basically telling you they want you to fail.


As for what you could try and do, try and find the smallest 2-3 companies in the industry that would probably benefit the most from your service. If they come on board and start stealing market share from the bigger companies, then the rest will probably come on board.

 

Now, presumably before you spent money/ time in developing the idea you did your market research and spoke to future potential businesses, given you went ahead with the build you therefore got positive information from them. You really would need to go back to them and ask why they are now not interested.

If you decided to go blind then there was your first issue. The challenge is that it takes time for businesses to load information into sites and time is money. There are probably 10,000+ job sites in the UK and yet 95% of people probably go through 10. It therefore begs the question of if it is worth putting a job advert on the other 9,990+ sites to try and capture that less 5%? To many the ROI just isnt there.

As the site is new there will be minimal buyers and so the companies probably just dont see the benefit. You need to sell the idea to them better, explain how it will be beter than using the other sites etc. Be realistic too, just because your niche rather than generalist doesn't automatically make you better, getting 1% of 100,000 monthly visitors is better than getting 75% of 4 monthly visitors.