Developing Trust With SMBs

One of the concepts that kept coming up at last week's Xerox small business event was being a "trusted advisor" to entrepreneurs.

Small business owners like buying from people they know and people they trust. Companies who can establish a trusted relationship with their SMB clients have a good chance of retaining them as clients even if the competition has better prices / features.

Rick Spence highlighted this issue in a recent post:

All the more reason, I say, for marketers to develop stronger relationships with business owners before trying to sell to them. You can do that through newsletters, personal calls, blogs, direct mail, invitations to events - anything that sets you up as a trusted partner.

Without that trust, even the best sales proposition will almost always finish second when the business owner has a pre-existing relationship with a competing supplier - whether or not they can do what you do.