It’s one thing to sign up businesses that belong to other exchanges, and another to attack other barter exchanges by obtaining a member’s login information, going on to the other exchange’s website, and dialing their list.
This week I received a copy of an email, allegedly sent from one of the many barter company franchises. In this email, one of the primaries gives login information for a competitor, Tradia (who by the way is not my favorite exchange in the world), encouraging the sales team copied in the email to get in and dial Tradia’s members.
Tradia may well deserve this kind of treatment by their behavior in the past, but let’s talk straight here. Even if the email I received is false, if the barter industry is going to gain any kind of ground in the real world, then this kind of predatory behavior has to stop.
According to the numbers published by IRTA, we’re doing business with less than 1% of eligible businesses in the United States. That leaves 99% of the businesses in your area untouched. Which to me says that the best way to get a pump of new members is to call some businesses.
When I ran an exchange here in Utah, I had a number of opportunities to get my competitor’s lists and dial their members, but I never did. I had referrals come from members quite regularly, and some of them were cross-overs from my competition that I signed up, but I never dialed in to their lists, because I never wanted someone to do that to me. At one point I about 10% of my list was cross-overs from other exchanges, and in conversations with my competitors I found out an interesting fact.
Just because they belonged to two exchanges didn’t mean they traded less with one and more with the other. It just meant they traded more with both.
It’s time for the industry to get this concept. And for the alleged predatory practices being encouraged by any company to stop. Let’s all stand on our own feet and make our own sales. Holy cow.
The Trade Banc is the leading software provider to the barter industry and we agree totally with what you say about predatory practices. We in fact have a tracking system that tells us any time an exchanges signs up a new member and they are already a member of another exchange in the network. We understand that members often choose to be a member of more than one exchange but at the same time our tracking of members allows us to see if an exchange is using predatory practices. If they are they are warned one time to stop. Should the practice continue they are banned from our network. This has happened only 1 time in 7 years where we expelled a software user for predatory practices as the many exchanges using our software, if new are told they cannot do this, if an existing exchange they are made aware of our policies against predatory practices or, in some cases we have refused an exchange that applied to use our software because we already know that they use predatory practices. Fortunately those that do are still a small percentage of exchanges but they are one of the blights on the barter industry.
I find everyone to be skirting around the issue. Being the largest Exchange in our area, start up exchanges have coerced and befriended our members only to access our site. The solicitation is rampant. so we have decided to address this issue head on. We have therefore elected to let everyone be aware of our members who we are proud of and confident if they are not securing the services needed thru our system to interview other exchanges. We post all our members on Facebook and Twitter. We believe if we are not servicing our members with their needs, at real values and stimulating additional business for them in both trade and cash, then we invite them to look at alternative sources to meet their needs. Serving our market for 20 years has enabled us to sustain healthy growth with many of our area’s finest, largest and quality providers of products and services. IBE takes a proactive position in this challenge not a reactive one.
Ron,
I find that approach to be bold and something very akin to my heart. Nice work. I agree with you. I did the same thing here for years, before FB and Twitter, via our blog. I’d post everyone new and current to the blog with contact info. Customer service wins in the long term every time.
Tyler
It is my personal belief that this is pretty common act based on my personal experiences and the feedback that I have received from other barter members. So, as a barter exchange member I am going to provide my personal experience and give a members perspective.
I signed up on a new exchange recently and started to check things out. Naturally I started to see how I could make it work for my business and completed the registration process.
As soon as I completed all of my contact details a local sales guy (I will not mention any names) immediately called me. What was amazing was that he contacted me even before any of the other members on that particular exchange even had a chance to contact me. An even funnier thing was that when I told him I was not interested and would contact them if anything changed he just kept calling and leaving messages.
I thought that it was kind of strange that this occurred so quickly out of the clear blue sky until I started to talk with many of the other new barter members and they verified that they had the exact same experience with the same company calling on them as well. Many of them mentioned that they were aggressively pursued for some time and made comments that were not at all positive. One thing that I detected with everyone that I spoke to was that when it happened they felt very uncomfortable about it.
I am not sure why a company would do this when there are so many companies out there that have never even heard of bartering before but they do and they are very aggressive about it…
I would definitely recommend that this practice be stopped in its tracks because it is giving a few of the barter exchanges a bad reputation.
If they are a savvy barterer and bartering is working well for their business then they will likely seek out other exchanges (many barterers belong to multiple exchanges) and when they do they will be more likely to be a better member long term.