For a few days now, I’ve been receiving special offers by email with 50% discounts related to the so-called Black Friday, i.e. the Friday that comes after Thanksgiving Day in the USA.
Personally, I will take advantage of it to purchase a beautiful specialized $297 eBook that interests me, a purchase that I had so far postponed.
But yesterday morning I was struck by an episode that led me to some considerations that I want to share.
I was at the tram stop with a sad look on my face, back from the interview with the English teacher of my daughter Serena, adorable teenager quite good in Greek and Latin, but just does not want to study English…
The tram will arrive in 28 minutes due to an accident along the way, so, given the beautiful day, I walk Via Torino, towards the Duomo.
And it’s here that I discover that many shops display Black Friday signs, with 30-40-50% discounts.
Do you want to see that now, after having cleared Halloween customs, the shopkeepers, in order to sell, start to do Black Friday too?
Then I started to think about it.
And I came up with two different scenarios:
- in my professional life, I observed that in B2B no company buys something just because it’s obvious. I remember, for example, that when I sold software, none of our customers bought a license, albeit very discounted, if they didn’t already have a customer to sell it to. Instead of spending 50 and keeping the product in stock a month until the next sale, they preferred to spend 100 but buy when they had the order in hand.
- In B2C, on the contrary, promotions work well. In a small business that is part of the group, for example, every time we launch a promotion, we get a volume of purchases that leaves us happily surprised every time. And although that business also has some companies as customers, those who are voracious about the promotion are always private individuals or some SMEs owners.
I concluded that promotions and discounts work well if your interlocutor, the one you sell to, buys with his own money. Otherwise, promotions are of little use.
If it is NOT his money, there is no impulse purchase stimulated by a promotion.
If instead it’s his money (because he is a private individual or because he is the owner of a SME that buys something that interests him), the promotion certainly helps to motivate some undecided.
Let’s do the counter-evidence
For my part, as a SME owner, today I will buy that product on which I have been looking for a long time.
And since in our professional practice we always preach the importance of continuously doing new tests, we decided to do a test on the side of the seller.
This blog is read by an audience of marketing and sales managers and owners of SMEs.
Only for a few hours, then, you can have the standard version of our TheSystem product, the sales & marketing automation system, discounted by 50% compared to the usual price, in a sort of Italian Black Friday promotion.
Click on the link below to watch the video presentation. The prices mentioned in the video are the standard, but the button refers to the special prices that are valid from now until midnight on Sunday 29, and that provide a 50% discount:
https://www.b2binternationalgroup.com/thesystem-vsl-full-black-friday
On Monday morning 30, product prices will return as before.
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