ThisdocumentisaresultofamarketingresearchconductedbystudentsofDukeUniversityMEMCin

consultationwithNetSerpentsLLC.NetSerpentsisastartupcomputersoftwareconsultingfirminterestedin
penetratingthemarketinthefieldofcomputersoftwareconsultancyandstaffingservices.
DukeUniversitystudentswerechallengedbyNetSerpentstoresearchthemarketandinterview
industryexpertstofindoutwhatwouldbeaneffectiveapproachtomarketingconsultingservices
forastartupcompanyinthisfield.NetSerpentswasunsureofspecificareasofbusinesstofocus
onandrequiredexpertopinionfromthosewhohadsignificantknowledgeorexperiencethisfield
aswellastodirectlyspeakwithcompaniesthatrequiresoftwareservices.NetSerpentsservicesar
availableforviewingatwww.netserpents.com.
About this document
DUKE UNIVERSITY MEM CONSULTING CLUB
Malvika Gandhi Ninad Mukund Shah
Yichen Li Shengwen Wang
Marketing Strategies
for Net Serpents LLC
Apr 2014
CONTENT
Objective

Marketing Strategies

Survey Table

Interviews

Recommendation

Appendix

Objective
To assess the current marketing practices of businesses
following similar business models as Net Serpents

To recommend the strategies for marketing
Marketing Strategy
Net Serpents should have marketing mix strategies comprising of Traditional and
Digital media marketing.

Traditional Marketing:

1) Primary Research: Assign a team to conduct intensive market research on the
target industry. It will help to understand the changing markets and needs of
customers.

2) Competitive Benchmarking: Assign a team for continuous bench-marking of the
competitors to study different business models of competitors and at the same time
to know the best industry practices to help improve our own companys strategies


Traditional Marketing continues
3)Consulting Clubs: Take help from consulting club teams from different universities.
Young talents definitely come up with unique strategy ideas. Also, company gains
lot of publicity through it..


4) Trade shows: Net Serpents must participate in different Trade shows and
Conferences around the USA. For the College recruitment plan, Net Serpents should
participate in different career fairs to obtain the Resumes of Students. It will help
company grow its student database and help in its publicity.


Digital Marketing
1) Website: Website of the company is very important source of marketing. Website
needs to be updated on regular basis. Net Serpents must put its clients and partners
on the website as the business flourishes. 24-hr chat service window could be
started for people visiting companys website.

2) Social Media Marketing: Net Serpents must focus on social media like Facebook,
twitter, blogs as part of their marketing strategy. Creation of Facebook page can be
good start where Net Serpents can upload pictures, videos, add descriptions etc. It
would build fan following and ultimately help in publicity of company.


Assessing current marketing practices
Methodology: Design Questionnaires to be asked from
executives (as customers of softwares and as software
providers)

Determine the best practices for marketing for Net Serpents
based on the surveys and recommendations of the executives


Survey Table
Interviewee Names & Members Responsible

Name Company Name Surveys Taken Member Responsible
Anil Raj TAI Software/Solution provider Malvika Gandhi
James Mundell Clinical Sensors Inc Both Surveys Malvika Gandhi
Ajay Chopra Ecalix Both Surveys Ninad Shah
Dr. Latondra Murray Ex-IBM Manager Business that purchase
software
Ninad Shah
Gregory S Hopper NetApp Business strategy Yichen Li
Interviewee 1: James Mundell
James Mundell has been involved in starting up five companies
in his career spanning more than 30 years.

He now serves as an Adjunct Professor at Duke University.

He is also serving as Director of DUHatch, which helps
students implement their ideas.
James Mundell- Clinical Sensors Inc
As a company who requires softwares from outside vendors, Clinical
Sensors has relied on hosted solutions and searching on internet for possible
solutions.
However, talking to friends and other contacts play a major role in selecting
a software for a particular solution.
Clinical Sensors also trusts new vendors, as they are more responsive and
offer good services.
The fact was reinforced by Anil Raj, who, as a solution provider believes
that smaller and newer companies are more active in providing solutions.
Being a new company, Clinical Sensors is more flexible in adapting newer
solutions in order to save time, money and effort.
James Mundell- Clinical Sensors Inc
As a solution provider, Clinical Sensors relies on already established
contacts and relationships for marketing. However, having a better product
and having unique features are the greatest assets for the company.

As a start-up, Clinical Sensors Inc spends less than 10% of its annual budget
on marketing.

Interviewee 2: Anil Raj
Anil Raj founded Technology Associates Inc in 1993. He has been involved in
Offshore Management and Shipbuilding Management for more than 37 years.
Anil Raj - Technology Associates Inc (TAI)
For TAI, word-of-mouth publicity, building and maintaining good relations
with the customers is of highest importance. The biggest challenge for TAI
is to market their products and solutions through conventional channels.
Hence, it relies on its customers to spread the word across.

However, as a small company, it offers better products, unique and quicker
solutions to its customers, which set them apart from its competitors.

TAI spends its budget on proposals for acquiring new projects. It doesnt
have an allotted budget for marketing.
INTERVIEWEE 3: AJAY CHOPRA
Ajay Chopra has chain of restaurants in California(50 restaurants). He is also partner
in software consulting firm. Companys name: Ecalix. He has also created and sold
several software consulting business
Ajay Chopra- Restaurant Chain
Personal Relations: As a new business, company must focus on their personal
contacts or relationships with managers from different companies to obtain new
clients and business proposals. This strategy would be lot easier and efficient as the
point of contact knows you well and can help company in different aspects. So
heavy focus to be given on personal relations.

Trade Shows: Company must participate in Trade Shows, Career Fairs and
Conferences. It will help company build professional networks within the specified
industries. They are different than personal relation and will be useful for future
business clients acquisitions. He mentioned trade shows are less costly and company
can definitely participate in it.
Ajay Chopra- Restaurant Chain
Multiple Business: Company can start multiple business if they are inter-related to
each other. It is lot easier to run them as compared to businesses which are
completely different. He gave positive response for Net Serpents starting software
consulting and college recruitment process simultaneously or near future.

Advertising: As a start-up company must spend very less amount of their budget on
advertising. At this point the return on investment with advertising would be very
less and company should focus on personal relations and trade shows at this point.
But dont completely neglect this channel of marketing but spend very less through
advertisements.
INTERVIEWEE 4: Dr. Latondra Murray
Dr. Latondra Murray is adjunct professor at Duke University. Dr. Murray has 15+
years of management experience and previously held technical leadership positions
at a variety of organizations including NASA, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Lucent
Technologies, and IBM.
Insights from Dr. Murray
Dr. Murray took a survey: small business that purchase software (based on her
background)

Price: Software that meet the needs of clients at reasonable price. Small business
will prefer to purchase these softwares.

User Friendly: Vendor must show potential clients the flexibility and easiness of
upgradation/downgradation, configurations, terms and conditions of their offerings.

Trial Periods: Free trials periods (even if they are short) are also a means of
providing potential clients with hands-on access to tools so they can get a feel of
how they might perform in their environments and/or meet their needs.


Insights from Dr. Murray
Vendors: Solutions identified through the web via sources that I trust are generally
good; it is easy to find information on the Web to assess companies and their
software products in terms of price, performance, support, and scalability.

Shopping Methods: New Softwares can be found out using direct references and
contacts. Also prefers searching on internet- Google, Facebook, Twitter and other
social media

Quality: Good quality software at reasonable price is one of the important factors
while purchasing new software. Google reviews, facebook comments, likes on our
product will be influential and important.
Interviewee 5: Prof. Gregory S Hopper
Greg Hopper is a Strategy and Product Marketing Executive and an Entrepreneur
with over 30 years experience in corporate strategy, and marketing of technology-
based solutions, and is currently a Senior Product Manager in the Office of the CTO
at NetApp.
Thinking methodology
Before the analysis of a company or a commercial concept, three basic
questions need to be answered:
Who is the target customer?
Why should customer buy this product?
Why should customers buy only from you?

The seeking of an answer to these questions offers a plausible and insightful
reflection of the company itself: its uniqueness, its competitive advantage
(Which together constitute the core competitiveness of a company), its
targeting market and the customer relationship.

Solving old questions by bring up new ones
Identifying the right service
1. How to know potential customers needs
Professor Hoppers believes that Net Serpents business model is not a brand new
idea, actually large numbers of similar business has already existed for long.
Whichthough a challenging situationcould also bring potential opportunity for
the company.
By competitor analysis: To know the customers needs Net Serpent can research
competitors websites to know what they are doing for customers, the competitors
services may represent customers needs. Combined with the companys own
marketing expectations, a realistic customers needs anticipation can be successfully
made.

Why net serpent, but not anyone else
2. What differentiates Net Serpents from others?
Mr. Hoppers had referred a concept niche, which means a specific field small
companies rely on to survive by developing highly customized services. Huge
company, in most cases, would focus on balancing the needs of varies majority, thus
have neither will nor resources to develop such kinds of unique services. And for
Net Serpents, the economic efficiency, the low cost due to off-shore sub contraction
will grant Net Serpent to deliver service for those who are financially limited yet
seeking for high quality software services.

The myth of subcontract
3. Why companies hire another company to do the work?
The analysis of this question brings Net Serpents core competitiveness:
Both Hoppers and the team had concerns about Net Serpents vague commercial
orientationmostly because of its too versatile business focus, among which some
functions have little inter-relationship and can hardly help promote each other, so in order
to survive, Net Serpent must be an expert of one thing than a entering level for everything.
They mush spot and focus on a niche and try to develop best service for it. Only by this
way can they obtain the best chance to develop in the future.
So far Hoppers believes Net Serpents business plan is a little bit hasty (it is not quite
realistic to achieve the goal according to the schedule, considering the current resources
and strategy Net serpent occupies) and strongly recommends the company to give up
educational and placement service and focus more on software issues.

Get access to business opportunity
4. If a niche has already been selected, What market channel to use? How customers find companies?
Large companies have approved vendors and have a long-term relationship with them. This is not how
start-up reach out for business opportunity.
Net Serpents can get contracts from large companies by hiring accomplished experts who have relationships
with large companies.
The way small companies shop software developers and web designers has no difference with shopping
anything else. Search engine is a key way for small companies to search web design or software
development contractors. But Net Serpents should improve its own web site first to attract customers (Prof.
Hoppers personally believes that the official web page still needs some designing customer experience
optimization in order to bring visitor a positive enough first impression.)
Advertising is a very inefficient way to market products for start-ups. Google AdWords, compared with
traditional ads, can bring start-ups like Net Serpent ideal customers, but it is very expensive. And the
selection of the key words is the most difficult part of the advertising activity that must be paid enough
attention to.
The details that determines success or failure
The professor have also offered suggestions on other issues based on his 30 years
consulting experience and business instinct
He pointed out that an ideal marketing cost should be zero. If not plausible, it
should be at least No more than 5% to 10% of budget.
Also about marketing team size, he believes that Net Serpent should start with one
but experienced one. Marketing is different than sales. The task of sales-people is to
sell products. Marketing people are responsible for attracting future customers, how
to best provide their products.

In summary, Prof Hoppers has helped us finding methods to refine Net Serpents
business model, introduced us the methodology to figure out the core
competitiveness of Net Serpents and had offered a series of business practices
exactly customized for start-ups like Net Serpents. A careful weighing of these
points and suggestions would definitely shed lights on the current situation of our
business and would help Net Serpents to perform a more economical and healthy
development as a cooperation.

Conclusions & Recommendations
Based on the interviews we had, we reach to following conclusions:
1. High quality service and product is one of the most important marketing
strategy. Word-of-mouth publicity can help Net Serpents build its
reputation.
2. Building and maintaining good relations with the customers is another
most important marketing strategy.
3. Personal network is the key to develop customers. Therefore, hire
experienced IT consulting professionals would help.



Conclusions & Recommendations
4. Trade Shows, Career Fairs and Conferences will help company build
professional networks within the specified industries. These are the
potential ways to do marketing and advertisement.
5. Net Serpents can start with software consulting for multiple inter-related
business.
6. Net Serpents should focus on personal relations and trade shows at this
point, instead of spending large amount of money on advertisement.
7. Targeting Small business and offering reasonable price.
8. Providing free trial periods to new customers.