“Disruptive innovation has two sides to it. On one hand, you’re making a whole bunch of people very happy, on the other hand, people who are very invested in the status quo lash out and fight back against you.” – Matt Mickiewicz @ 99 Designs (Graphic Design Marketplace)
99 Designs isn’t alone, it is common for disruptive ideas to get push back from the industry they are hoping to impact.
Tech like Uber and Airbnb have also felt the industry and regulatory wrath from going against the grain. Backlash may be a signal in your space that processes are inherently broken and frustrating for your clients. Focusing your company on solving that problem and you become an irreplaceable solution.
We felt the heat a year ago.
Before our service entered the market businesses with unpaid invoices would have to call multiple collection agencies on their own. Next, they would begin an exhausting and inefficient quoting process called “RFP” or request for proposal.
Manual Collections RFP’s can sometimes lead to lower recovery. Most times the bids are managed without an educational component causing business owners to choose a less experienced agency on fee’s alone.
Enter our solution Recoverity, a single Collections RFP shared digitally with multiple agencies at once and then compiled for the user. Streamlining this decision gave us extra time to showcase industry experience, functionality, and recovery rate that enabled customers to get more money back in the long run. We added improved safeguards with background check information, debtor complaints, and compliance illustrations.
When we pitched some agencies on this idea we got responses like “we have been doing Collections RFP’s in house for 35 years, what makes you think you can change that?”
At the time we were in a panic when we thought this model may not fit this industry. We should have realized immediately that this pushback was a huge clue that we were on the right track. Our solution wasn’t going to be a good fit for every agency, but the firms that placed an importance on sharing their strengths came forward.
What opportunities/problems exist in your industry? What do your users want and how can you deliver? What changes can you make to your business model to solve these problems?
