Access enquiries - what is their worth?

[Jon]

We get enquiries for:

1. Programming projects

2. Training

3. Support

To turn this into revenue, we are thinking about selling these leads for a fixed price.

What do you think is a fair market rate for selling the lead?

 

[chenn]

I'd be interested in any leads. I don't know if I would be willing to pay for "Maybe" leads. What I mean is that if there was a definite project I would be willing to pay a percentage of the final price as a "finders Fee".

 

[pat_nospam]

I would also be very interested in this - I've just put together a database that we want to resell, but don't know what a ballpark figure would be (it's a specialized database with specific forms for a small field of people).

What would you charge for a mid-size database complete with forms, VB scripting, etc.. $100? $1000? $10,000?

Also, how would you best distribute it, if its current form is MDE front end/MDB backend with workgroup security (distribute as MDB unsecured unsplit one file?)

Excellent thread! Eager to hear some other people chime in.

 

[chenn]

As far as distributing your application, there are some conciderations you need to make. Keep in mind, If you distribute an mdb, your clients will have access to the source code. If you distribute an mde, with a front end and backend, you will have to create a linking tables utility. Also, you will need a good installation package - I recommend Wise. There are many items involved in distributing an app than just building it. Depending on the time you spent developing and any competition in the market, you should be looking at the $1000 range. It basically comes down to what people are willing to pay for it.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I don't think you can ask much for leads. If the leads turned into sales, they would be worth much more. However, being paid on the basis of sales would require a great deal of trust since you would never know how many leads of your leads actually turned into sales.

You might contact a few firms and see what it would be worth to them to have your site redirect certain types of inqueries to them. Or put links to their sites on your web pages.

 

[GumbyD]

I agree with Chenn - a percentage of the what is paid for your work. If you had a contract and you hopefully had a decent relationship with the people you were sending the work to I would think there would not be too much trouble in getting paid for the lead after the fact. I guess the other consideration you would have to deal with is would you be entitled to a percentage of all the work that someone did for a lead you provided? So you send me a lead, I do the project, then I send you say 10% or 15% of the money. A year later the person I did the work for comes back with another project - do you get a percentage of that as well - I guess if someone did not tell you about it, then it would be hard for you to even know the new work was done. I guess what I am saying is only send work to people you feel comfortable with and feel you can trust (which may be very hard to know ahead of time!).

One other thing you may want to consider for your contracts: You will need to remove yourself from liability if the developer does faulty work on a database. Since you are the refering agent you may get in legal hot water if thy create a lousy database.

GumbyD

 

[stormin_norm]

10% of the project.

I received a lead from someone and gladly gave him $1000 for the lead. It was a verbal agreement. I said I would pay a referral fee if the project completed.
There is an extra incentive to be 'honorable' -- Since we are both in the same programming group, I would like to ensure my name is not dragged through the mud and hope for more referrals. Now to apply the same idea via global internet:
....for referrals it would be good to have a "star" ranking. Where members who play fair get higher ratings than those who do not.


Also- It may be a good idea to formalize the percentage and agreement. An official contract. You must however check back with the client to ensure the project is starting and check back 9mos-1year later to see if they paid the consultant. For a five star member, you obviously would not have to monitor so closely.
Use outlook to track leads & trigger emails. or build an access db

 

[jon_sg]

I agree with Pat Hartman, leeds are not worth very much but sales are.

You could set up a forum which people pay per lead or pay a fixed monthly fee to access the leads. I don't really like this idea as this the great thing about this site is the free information exchange, having the same peolple competing commercially may affect this.

I think that your best bet is to deal with the people who have been posting here for a long time, pass them the leads for free and agree a % scheme with them if paid work was obtained, obviously this would have to be a trust based relationship. I use the same deal in my industry , when I come across work for other disciplines I refer associates that I know and they price a fee or % into the job for me and vice versa.

My real job is as a mechanical engineer in Oil, gas and power generation. I get heaps of requests from service contractors, for such things as risk management db's, inspection management db's, fabrication management db's etc. I do not have the programing skills to do much about this. I do however have the engineering skills and knowledge of codes and standards to develop the mathematical models required.

The members of this site are pretty much split into two groups. Those who know how access works and those who know what they want access to do for a real world situation. A pretty good combination probably.

I would be interested in following up some of the requests I get and working with expert programmers on a mutually beneficial basis. An exchange type forum of this nature on this site may be worth exploring.

 

[stormin_norm]

...You might contact a few firms and see what it would be worth to them to have your site redirect certain types of inqueries to them. Or put links to their sites on your web pages.

Good idea to have a 'partners' page or 'solutions' page where each participant is listed. And short BIO. Like any other corporate partners page. Gotcha is how the leads would get distributed. By region, by industry, round robin, or random ???

I would prefer by region to best serve the local client. This would be the benefit of this site vs. an elance or other bid-for-project site.

 

[Paula_NZ]

Setting up a partners page for leads woould be great and running an honesty system for secured works rather than paying for leads. I regularly pay finders fees to around 10% to people who put work our way. You would need to publish the leads so that you can track who accesses each lead and have all parties who do so to provide feedback.

Currently I am looking for someone to runtime an application for me on a paid basis if anyone is interested. I cant find anyone in New Zealand who does this as Access is not widely used here.

 

[Thecherub]

By location

I think that if you are going to assign leads it should be by location but ability and background should be a factors as well.

You would not want somone who has never worked with payroll designing a Payroll DB just as an example.

TheCherub

 

[MikeAngelastro]

Hi,

I would be interested in leads also but would be happy to pay a finders fee if I got the job based on the value received.

I believe that there is a way to police the process. If the potential client were logged into a table in addition to the recipient of the lead, a follow-up would be possible.

In fact, other users of the forum may want to defer a job that may be beyond their skill level to another forum user, and consequently receive part of the finders. We all would gain as we help one another.

Mike

 

[Storm3]

Jon,

I would think the best plan of action would be to create a listing of members with skill level and location and charge both the Access developer and the end-user a fixed rate for the connection service. That way you won't have to worry about how much a job is worth and also line your pockets.

Initially, I would allow members to join for free and after you have an established client base you can charge for the service connection.

David

 

[stormin_norm]

David-

I like the idea of the client paying a "finders fee" upfront or perhaps an annual fee/lifetime fee/subscription fee.

I disagree with the flat fee concept because projects vary by scope & length. One project could be simple maintenance of an access db, another $5000 small db and yet another $15-25K. So the flat fee hinders the maintenance and small db projects.
UNLESS there is a classification of project and associated fee.
Something like Maint $100, Small DB $500, Mid DB $1500, Large DB $4000
So what constraints are determine size? Length of Project, Number of records,...

-Norm.

 

[Storm3]

Clarification on Finders fee

Jon,

I was seeing it as more of a fee just to give a client a list of candidates. I wasn't sure how dirty you wanted to get your hands. Since everyone is loosely connected I would personally not want to have any culpability regarding the service that a forum member provides.

 

[theprez]

If you somehow qualified the leads (talked to the potential customer and see how serious they were, if they were realistic about the price, etc...) you have something. We sell an off the shelf package where my sales person was willing to pay $1500 for about 10,000 qualified leads. We got a sale within the first month.

 

[stormin_norm]

Jon-
Any upate on your thoughts of sharing equiries?
Any target date on when this may happen?
Thanks
-Norm.

 

[AccessKurzo]

I like the idea of an annual fee the developers would pay and a potential client could either contact the developer directly or the potential client could post themselves as 'open' and any one of us could contact them.

I like this idea, but where are your leads coming from? Me being in Canada, wouldnt find much value if all the leads are in London.