Any specific service category has its own unique areas that you can add value to your customers/potential customers. But what every industry is advice, just like you're seeking. Without needing to be an industry expert on a subject.. most sales reps will have a broader knowledge base on many topics than your customers. Being able to get simple questions answered and get a baseline of info on certain areas is hugely valuable to everyone.

In my industry (animal care), being able to offer customers a 90 second-5 minute conversation with some advice on a minor problem takes minimal time out of my day.. but can add a ton of valuable in their life.

While a direct phone number is helpful in terms of getting to talk to who you want to talk to, even more valuable is a 'warm intro' from someone that the person knows. Warm introductions depend on a personal relationship with someone, so that kind of service can't be as easily automated and would be extremely valuable. Because it would inherently be impossible to effectively pull off for the long term at a large scale, you'd have to charge a lot for that service though.

One possible way to make it more scalable is to have a lower priced option which involves a warm intro to a gatekeeper, instead of the final target. Gatekeepers might be easier to befriend, and might even be open to helping occasionally in exchange for a cut of your revenue.

I have several ideas on how you could pull this off in a psuedo-automated way, that would let you quickly implement the idea in a low cost way. If you'd like to discuss it further let me know,

best,

Lee

Is your tool as effective as the other tool? You can always do as the other tool does and add membership costs, or even become a similar tool.

Because the world is so big it's normal to have competition - you only just heard about the linkedin tool, like you only recently, hundreds of businesses still don't still know about it and it just depends on who gets to the customer first.

For a period of time I just experimented selling Amazon products on Facebook using Facebook advertising. If it was selling for $10 on Amazon, I sold it for $20 on Facebook.

You'd think I was crazy - but you know what? I sold over $5,000 worth of product.

A large supermarket is usually about 30-35% cheaper than your local small store. Even knowing this, people still buy from them.

*What's my point?*
- Some people aren't aware of the competition
- Some people pay for convenience

If you plan to up-sell services, really understand why your customer has decided to hire you (or the software) - usually it's to generate more sales or open up partnerships - if you decided to work in a space where you made paid introductions to these companies, you could probably introduce that as your upsell. Run a 3m minimum contract and over time guarantee a minimum of X introductions, again, it depends on your customers needs.

Hope that helps, if you want to discuss this further feel free to drop me a private message.

Thanks,

Nitesh