Relationship, relationship, relationship

In the retail and real estate businesses it is all about location, location, location. If you are not in the right location for your product, you will not sell.

If you are targeting small business owners, the focus shifts to relationship, relationship, relationship.

Business owners like to work with people they know and trust. They have enough problems to worry about between taking their companies to the next step and managing a work-life balance that if they can find a supplier they have a good relationship with, they will not have a reason to switch.

While it is important that the product or service can meet the needs of the business owner, what will win you the business - and help you keep the business - is forming a solid relationship with the entrepreneurs.

Do you have client appreciation programs? Do you take the time to learn about their businesses and find other ways to help them? Do you know them by name and their families and hobbies? Do you know what keeps them up at night? Have you really given them a reason to stay with you and refer their colleagues to you or will they be more than happy to switch because your competitor gives them a little bit of attention?

Take the time to focus on building the relationship and the business will follow.

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.