Five Tips For Successful Selling To Small Business
With a growing number of vendors such as Microsoft and IBM taking aim at the space with dedicated products, the small-business market represents a potentially lucrative oasis for solution providers grappling with the IT spending crunch. Here are five tips to remember when you're selling to small businesses.
1. Know The Customer's Business
A no-brainer, but a point that sometimes eludes the best of minds. Knowing your small-business customer means having knowledge of more than just the infrastructure and IT assets. It means going as far as knowing every employee on a first-name basis. So if a VAR is serving a local auto-parts store then it should know the peak months for the store, its best-selling parts, most loyal customers and closest competitors. Such knowledge will likely impress prospective customers.
A VAR can never go too deep when it comes to familiarizing itself with small-business customers, says Dino Palladino, owner of Dinotech Computer Services in Lacey, Wash. "When you deal with small businesses, you have to know everything about their businesses from start to finish," Palladino says.
So, when targeting small business leave the PowerPoint slides at home and instead get face-to-face with prospective customers. Paul Thompson, president of IPT Northwest, a solution provider based in Portland, Ore., says the slick marketing efforts of the big vendors have little effect on small businesses. "This goes straight over the heads of the small-business guys," Thompson says. "They want real answers to real business problems."
2. Don't Oversell
When it comes to small business, a VAR must be tightly focused on the main technology problem, perhaps more so than if a reseller were engaging a midmarket or enterprise customer. The revenue and IT budgets are smaller, and so is the margin for error. The key is to not push for big investments or long-term projects but instead deliver targeted solutions, consulting services and the occasional free advice.
"The total cost of ownership argument...has not held up real well," Thompson says. "Whatever measure of success we have had is because we've been there for them when they needed us, provided honest evaluations, answers and advice, did good work while there and didn't try to sell them something they didn't need."
3. Go Where The Money Is
Jeff Pennett, president of F.I.T. Communications, a network-security VAR in Land O'Lakes, Fla., recently relocated from Massachusetts to Central Florida. Why? "We've been going after the SMB market in the South because there seems to be more small businesses popping up in Florida than up North," Pennett says. "There's more than 1,000 people moving to this state every day."
For example, F.I.T. is readying a program that offers free network consulting to new homeowners who are considering building home offices. Pennett's firm works with real-estate developers to pitch Wi-Fi networks and high-speed Net access to prospective homeowners.
4. New Tech
Remember, small businesses aren't always the technology-handicapped customers they're made out to be. In fact, some VARs say a number of their small-business customers are on the cutting edge of IT, deploying more than just basic accounting applications.
F.I.T., for example, is promoting security solutions and services for small businesses. The VAR offers security audits, vulnerability assessments, "ethical hacking" and 24-hour-a-day intrusion monitoring.
5. Repeatable Solutions
One of the issues that plague solution providers is the stigma that the channel can't make a lot of money in the small-business market. But a number of VARs have proven that belief to be false with repeatable solutions tailor-made for small businesses that can make up in volume what they lack in individual size. Solution providers, such as Digital River, sometimes prefer small-business customers because the market offers VARs quicker and less taxing deployments and lets integrators bring more solutions to market in a year than if they were selling to larger corporations.
Of course, more than a few small-business customers may outgrow their "small" status. And then, the solution provider that helped those small businesses make it to the next level may very well be next to them moving forward.