So you’ve set your company’s sights on selling to smaller businesses. Sure, they aren’t the heavy-hitters, the star accounts, but their loyalty could provide a nice budgetary cushion for your bigger sales efforts. And they’ll surely be thrilled to tap into your products or services, right?

Well, hold on a minute.

According to Scott Gillum, writing at the B2B Knowledge Sharing blog, that kind of thinking will place you among the many B2B marketers who, despite their best efforts, keep falling back to their “big company” ways when dealing with small-business owners (SBOs).

To encourage a better approach, Gillum has put together a list of 10 points to keep in mind when selling to SBOs, based on his study of a slew of reports from the Executive Council on Small Business. Here are three:

Don’t call them small! Remove the word “small” from all your communications. These are skilled professionals and full-time business owners.

But understand that small transactions are big deals to them. Don’t underestimate your need to prove value or ROI on what you would consider small transactions, Gillum advises. According to his research, the definition of a “major” purchase begins at $500 for SBOs.

Know they love to search. Face it: They’re not waiting for you to show up. “Rather than narrowing their list of vendors, 60% of owners now report expanding their consideration set through research,” says Gillum. And where do they search? Locally! SBOs search for products or services by name, not a brand, and they include their local area in the search, he notes.

The Point: Focus on the “owner” part. Put aside any concept of size, and approach SBOs as professionals with preferences. That perspective is sure to help get you noticed.

Source: B2B Knowledge Sharing.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2012 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Business Tools, Digital, Marketing 101, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.