It's the People, Not the Product

Guest Contributor: Albert Luk
Albert's Posts - Albert's Site


I primarily read two blogs on selling to small business: Rick Spence's blog and this one. In the last month, both Rick and Evan have posted articles on building trust before successfully selling to an entrepreneur. I agree whole-heartedly. A good first step in building trust is finding some type of affinity with small business owner before you can sell anything.

Affinity is typically built through common experiences. Those with common experiences tend to relate better than those with divergent life experiences. For simplicity's sake, I am going to describe account managers I have met who have a lot of success selling to small business and those that do not based on the life experiences of each.

Let's call the successful account manager Mary (Mary is not a real person but rather an amalgamation of many different successful SME account managers I have met). Mary is typically on her 2^nd or 3^rd career, worked in some type of entrepreneurial setting (or, to put it another way, has not worked in a big corporation all of her life), understands from practical experience the industry she is selling to (or perhaps has worked in it herself) and understands how to create solutions for clients.

Without ever selling a good or service, Mary already has the following unique value propositions:

1. Entrepreneurs tend to experiment so they appreciate Mary's many life experiences;
2. Mary can speak from experience and not the text book; and
3. Having worked in an entrepreneurial environment, she understands the daily life of her clients.

Bob- an amalgamation of many unsuccessful SME account managers I have met- is typically on their first career, spent his entire professional life in an institutional setting, is well educated but never ventured much outside that world.

Bob tends to be a turn-off for many entrepreneurs for some of the following reasons:

1. Bob is perceived to be too institutional; Bob is a "suit" and "not one of us."
2. Bob is perceived to be bureaucratic; he understands corporate policy well but does not tend to know how to make that work for his clients; and
3. Bob speaks "MBA"- big words that do not matter much in the entrepreneurial world.

Mary and Bob are generalizations. Nonetheless, having met both Mary's and Bob's in the course of my practice, my preference is to buy from Mary.

For anyone wanting to selling to the small business market, a good starting point would be to analyze hiring practices and determining whether you have a lot of Mary's or Bob's in your sales staff. After all, sophisticated marketing campaigns only go so far- it's the people selling your good or service that will be the real difference-makers.

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.

3 Tips For Selling To Small Business

Rick Spence is the former editor of PROFIT Magazine and now consults on entrepreneurship. He writes a blog on small businesses and I enjoyed his most recent post. It discussed 5 Tips For Selling to Small Business. I particularly found 3 to be relevant tips to remember when approaching the SMB market with your products / services:

* If you're selling information products, keep in mind that entrepreneurs don't want to be educated. "They want to learn by osmosis," he says. Turn information into stories, case studies and anecdotes to make it easier to digest and remember.

* Don't try and sell features to small-business owners. "Entrepreneurs are driven by pain." Tell them now what your product or service can do, but how it can solve their most pressing problem now.

* Get in the ground floor with a small-business prospect. Sell a low-cost product or service that will get you in the door. Once an entrepreneur trusts you and your ability to create value, you will find that many of their budget restrictions disappear like magic.

Read all 5 tips at Rick's Blog.