Daily Deal Model Tested In BtoB Markets As Ajilitee Offers BI Services on Groupon
- Published in Revenue Strategies
The popularity of the “daily deal” model has skyrocketed among the BtoC audience, as smaller merchants have found an alternative way to allocate marketing spend to bring customers in. For the first time, the trend has been tested with bigger ticket BtoB models. Ajilitee, a business intelligence, analytics and cloud computing consulting firm, announced 50% off strategic business intelligence and cloud computing consulting services on the daily deal web site Groupon.
Through Groupon Stores, Ajilitee offered fast-paced workshops designed to help large and mid-sized organizations improve their current business intelligence (BI) environments or build their business cases for cloud computing. The company offered two options: a BI Best Practices Audit (a five-day workshop that deep-dives in a specific area that warrants help, including Data Architecture, Process Architecture, or BI Architecture) and analyzes findings against critical success factors; as well as a Cloud Opportunity Map, a five-day workshop that brings together key stakeholders to assess opportunities, potential benefits and strategies for cloud computing adoption.
Normally priced at $25,000, the offers were available for $12,500 through Groupon until midnight on Monday, March 7, 2011, but to provide additional decision-making time, Ajilitee honored the deal for another two weeks, until the close of business on Monday, March 21, 2011.
On March 22, 2011, Ajilitee’s CMO, Diann Bilderback, took to the company’s blog with the results of the program. She wrote: “At the end of the day, no one accepted our offer of a discounted one-week BI Best Practices Audit or a Cloud Opportunity Map. We knew this was possible, maybe probable. A big-ticket IT consulting offer had never been offered on a daily deals site before, and our approach was a first…We wanted to know if a popular BtoC model bringing together buyers and sellers in a new way could be adapted in a BtoB enterprise environment…It appears the market isn’t quite ready for enterprise deals, which typically require months of decision-making time, executive buy-in and planning. These organizational constraints are a hindrance — our buyers in many cases aren’t empowered to pull the trigger on a big purchase without conferring with others, expenses need to be built into annual budgets, project resource allocations are already committed. It’s too different and it feels risky to be the first.”
Bilderback noted that the concept did strike a chord with the market, as the company reportedly has heard about (and directly from) many deals sites that are gearing up to provide discounted BtoB deals, mainly targeted to the small business market, including Bizydeal, Bizdeals, BizGrouper, B2Bucks, GroupPrice, BIZcounts and OfficeArrow, according to the blog post.
“As consultants, our job is to keep our heads above the clouds and pay attention to what’s happening in the atmosphere,” Bilderback noted. “We were willing to test this out-of the-box strategy designed to help customers help themselves. In the end, no one did help themselves, but we think prospects will value our bold thinking nonetheless.”