Selling to Small Businesses

Joe Wilcox, a Jupiter Research analyst, offers an interesting piece on his weblog about segmenting the small business market – it’s well worth reading.  He says: “In talking to vendors trying to sell goods or services to small businesses, I see two common tactical mistakes: Segmentation, if any, is by number of employees, or sales approaches are similar, [...]

One of the challenges any corporation has when selling to small and midsize business is how to segment the market in a meaningful way. The research firm IDC segments the small business market in the United States for IT-related products and services, like this: There are other ways to slice and dice the small and midsize [...]

If you are serious about going after the SMB market, take a page out of Microsoft’s book. Microsoft “owns” the small business market at the desktop level, in part because the Redmond giant takes good care of its channel.  Despite market power that would enable it to keep raising prices, Microsoft instead offers reseller and [...]

Once upon a time, being an entrepreneur was the exclusive domain of the young.  If you were older than 20-something, everyone assumed that you had no interest in starting a business.  By your 30s you’d already own your own business, they thought.  Or you’d be safely cocooned in a corporate career. Of course, that WAS [...]