"Bartercard is brilliant" Rick Timmis

Dear Gustav

You asked if I would be willing to write a few words about our experience with Bartercard, well I would be delighted to do that for you.

I first came across Bartercard whilst working as the technical director for Super Tramp Ltd, and I have to say that my experience with it was not that positive, I saw how the company managed to generate Sales with little to no effort, and watched as they quickly amassed a significant barter pound balance. 

This seemed to me to be the wrong course of action and I was largely against the idea of Bartercard. I founded Abazander Ltd, and realised about 1 year after its inception that perhaps if handled differently this could be very useful in helping to develop sales for the company. I knew from previous experience that getting sales on barter would not be a problem.

When we first joined we had need of some design work to develop our brand and create the base line business stationary, so we used our barter credit balance of £3000 to get this work done, and that was very useful as we were cash poor at the time, and being able to suddenly transform £750 into £3000 made a lot of sense. Of course just as I anticipated the sales came in, because there is a sales team at  Bartercard working on your behalf, so we quickly built up a positive balance having paid back the initial credit that we had used easily.

Sales continued to develop, and I realised that the barter model was going to work well for us, but to make it really take off we need to work harder at building relationships with suppliers. This is almost counter intuitive as in a traditional sterling model all of your focus is placed on selling to customers, not buying from suppliers.  I quickly discovered the secret to success with bartercard is very very simple. Always work with your trade coordinator and build a strong relationship with them, that means speaking with them regularly and ensuring they know the things your looking to buy and what your sales needs are.

Be specific in identifying what it is you need, and then give that list to your coordinator and ask them to source potential suppliers for you. Don't just grab the directory and start ringing people, because if for some reason they're not taking trade right now they won't be looking for your business and you'll get disheartend in trying to place business.

We ran a massive launch event for the release of version 7 of our iSAM product, we spent £12,000 putting the event on, of which more than £10,000 was Trade. Bartercard is brilliant, and it should be part of every businesses strategy for growth.
Regards and Best Wishes

Rick Timmis
Abazander intelligent sales and marketing tools for small business.
http://www.abazander.com/