Kevin Price, Host of the Price of Business on Business Talk 1110 AM KTEK (on Bloomberg’s home in Houston) recently interviewed Frederic Haddad.
About the interviewee
Frederic Haddad is the CEO of Coddict Inc, a digital strategy and IT development company located in Montreal, QC. He holds a degree in business technology management from the John Molson School of Business and followed his passion of being able to deliver better business solutions to businesses using technology. Frederic spends his time meeting with C-level executives from client companies or partner companies, and constantly selling them new technology implementations to deploy on their large infrastructures, whether it be national retail stores, huge service companies or advertising companies.
Tell me about your firm (number of employees, location, type of companies you work with, etc.).
Coddict Inc was founded in 2011 after identifying inefficiencies in the operations of certain businesses that could easily be improved with technology. We are a team of a dozen experts that come from different backgrounds and have expertise in different areas of business and technology, which gives us the ability to serve our clients well. Our clients are into the retail industry as well as the service industry.
What type and size of companies do you have as clients?
Coddict has worked with medium, local companies as well as nationally recognized brands. We approach each client with a service-minded mentality to produce the best results possible for their business. The average Coddict client has at least a $1M annual budget dedicated to improving his business operations.
What comes to mind when you see this topic?
Selling to clients is always a challenge; especially that big clients’ decisions are made by C-level executives. Before you can even get to pitch your product or service, you must seem credible and serious enough for them to consider giving you their time; and usually the time they can allot for you is very restricted. C-level executives’ time is very valuable. So whenever you get a chance to pitch to a C-level executive you have to make sure to higher your chances by following the best practices I will tell you about.
What are the best practices when it comes to this issue?
There are a couple of things you must convey to a C-level executive if he is to be convinced to giving your product/service a shot. Here they are:
Prove that you will give a positive ROI: You must be able to prove that if he chooses to invest in your product or service, his company will pretty surely benefit from it on the bottom line. If there’s a high risk his company won’t, then he has little reason to give your product a chance.
The acquisition cost must not be too impactful: Make it so that the acquisition of your product will not have a significant impact on the company’s cashflow. For instance, charging him 500$/month is a lot better than charging him 6000$ once, since it has less impact on his present cash flows. If you absolutely need to get paid that big amount to be able to provide the service then try to offer to the client, a financing plan using a financing partner that you partner with such as a bank.
It must not discard a lot of their current systems the have invested in: If your product replaces a product they currently have and have already invested in, you can consider that as an additional obstacle, since you don’t just need to convince him your product is good for him, but that getting rid of the old product that they have been investing in for years is worth it and low risk.
Make the acquisition an easy process: Try to add the least burden possible on your client for acquiring the product. Systematize your sales process so that the product can be installed and functional at the clients’ locations very quickly and with minimal requirements from his part.
Contact information:
Company website: http://www.coddict.com
Personal website: http://www.freddyhaddad.com
