Big Business Strategies For Small Business

If you've been reading this blog for a while you will know that I am a big fan of big businesses teaching small companies operational best practices to develop a trusted advisor relationship.

Small businesses are always looking up to big businesses to get ideas for how to structure their growing company and implement policies and procedures.

Well now there is a book. I came across a PR for a new book called: Marketing Works: Unlocking Big Company Strategies for Small Business. It professes to employ a "step-by-step process of how a small business owner can effectively leverage marketing techniques to maximize the potential of their own business, regardless of the market they operate in."

I have not read the book and cannot endorse it but it reflects a growing trend of providing big company best practices to small businesses.

Fortune 500 companies have thousands of best practices that they take for granted but entrepreneurs are yearning for. The first company to share these ideas in an easy to understand format for small business owners will generate a lot of buzz in the SMB community and build trusted relationships with their prospective clients.

Selling Small Business vs. Fortune 500

Greg Sommerville, a computer consultant who advises software companies on selling tactics wrote in a recent article a few tips on the differences between selling to small and large companies.

If you are selling software to businesses, the first question to answer is, how big are the businesses? Selling to small business owners is a completely different thing than selling to Fortune 500 companies. Here are a few differences and things to think about:

• Big and small businesses have different tolerance levels for high prices.
  
  
• Big businesses in some cases consider a higher price to be a sign of quality. Small businesses may also believe this, but may go elsewhere if the price is too high.
  
  
• Big and small businesses have different expectations of follow-up service and support.
  
  
• There are a lot more small businesses in the world than large corporations, but large companies are well known and easier to directly target.
  
  
• Often, large corporations have formalized rules for purchasing software that must be followed, or they require legal contracts to be signed. Small businesses are usually much more casual about these things.
  
  
• Finally, selling business to business (B2B) is often easier than selling to consumers because there is less competition.

Think about the ramifications to selling to another business. Prepare before you promote. Keep your target in mind when creating promotional materials.