Selling Technology to Small and Midsize Business....AGAIN?

This time, make it stick.

If you are like most enterprise companies, this return to the small business market looks more like a perpetual rerun of the same episode of The American Idol; and what... is this the fifth, sixth or eleventh time you’ve taken a turn on the small business dance floor? Your company has captured about all of the enterprise market it can, and now you turn again to the next big market opportunity out there – small business.

At one time I worked for an enterprise company who I used to joke tried at least 14 times to build growth through the small business market -- and failed at it, miserably, 15 times. Teams started out with great enthusiasm, until they realized that this was a very fragmented market. One about which the enterprise market knew very little (and what they did know came via highly paid consultants who were often just as far away from the small business as the enterprise. Results were neither easily nor quickly met; management lost interest and budgets were pulled. It just became too complicated for marketers and sales people to move from their comfort zone of working with their mirror image.

I’m not going to say there is an easy way to succeed in the small business market – there isn’t. But I can share with you some guidelines that will help you increase the ROI of your programs. I collected these bits during my 20-odd years in the small business market, and used them to help my OEMs reach double-digit growth, consecutively, worldwide.

Here are a few small things you can to help make your small business marketing experience more manageable, effective and profitable.

ONE WAY: Segmenting the small business market by employee and revenue. This over- simplification does not work when marketing technology – and many other products for that matter.

So – it’s a great model when selling desks and chairs, or insurance, but it doesn’t work for technology. Why?

Pop quiz:

If by definition a small business is classified as “any business with under 150 employees, and revenue between $5 and $10 million,” which of the following companies would be a better target for hardware?

a. Commercial cleaning service with 145 cleaning people and 5 people managing the outsourcing of payroll, insurance and HR

b. Small design firm with 12 employees working on video production, or graphics

c. Florist shop with 4 employees

Did you pick “b”? The design firm will need several servers, and will dedicate a larger percentage of their revenue to the maintenance and expansions of their technology. A good choice.

Did you pass over the florist? Why, because of the 4 employees? If you did you would be wrong. The majority of orders to florists come via web. Which means they collect customer data and therefore they must be in compliance with the Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act (ITPEA)? Their POS must also be secure and backed up. And what about PCI?

Most people make the mistake of going with only the larger numbers. In this case it would be a mistake. Chances are the cleaning service may not even do any file sharing.

BETTER WAY: Segment small business by resolution conduits – I’m not talking about the traditional verticals: finance, manufacturing, legal, education etc…

Although commonalities exist, look to define segments by HOW technology is being used. For example, a small design firm will have a lot in common with a small manufacturing company: both are file sharing, managing time and materials, and running programs that impact their system bandwidth. Of course both have critical timelines.

Once you’ve bucketed what problems your product solves for the small business, you can move to develop a more compelling targeted messages – and don’t think you can just get away with doing one or two different messages, but we’ll have this discussion at another time. Taking the resolution conduits may take a little long at first but once you move into this mind set, you’ll pick up speed, and have much better ROI.

BOTTOM LINE: Remember Marketing 101 – it’s all about the benefits baby, tie the benefits into the customer’s problems (NOT product features) and you have a winner (although easier said than done). And remember, it’s not all about you – it’s really about the product user.