Selling to Small Businesses

MarketingSherpa offers an excellent free dowload that you will not want to miss, called:  Top 10 B-to-B Lead Generation Marketing Mistakes.
MarketingSherpa reports are excellent and tend to go into more depth than many free downloadable reports — definitely worth the small effort to download.
Among the up-to-the-minute tips you will find:

Treat new email subscribers a little special (compared with [...]

A business owner whose company serves other small businesses (RV and recreational equipment dealers) once said to me that his small business customers, “… are like water.  They follow the easiest path.”  
What he meant was that small businesses go with whatever offering makes it easiest on them. Now, he did not mean this in a condescending way.  He simply accepted it [...]

If you don’t already exhibit at trade shows, at some point you may get the itch to do so. 
Today there are more opportunities than ever for trade shows to reach business owners. For instance, small business conferences designed to attract small business owners are getting more popular.  Also, you can find an endless number of industry-specific shows [...]

Technology products and services are famous (or infamous) for all the barely decipherable technical terminology.
Technical, legal, scientific and financial terminology — all can be confusing to the very people you are trying to communicate with:  business owners. 
The thing is, most small business owners are not subject-matter experts in your industry.   When you use insider lingo it makes your company harder to [...]

If you send out B2B email blasts, newsletters and other marketing communications, the traditional wisdom is not to waste them by mailing near holidays when your prospects are likely to be out of the office and not reading emails.  However, for emails to small business owners and staff, different considerations may apply. 
Prospects to Go has created a helpful calendar showing bad [...]

Content-based strategies are extremely important for reaching B2B prospects and marketing to existing customers. But do you know what B2B prospects really want? Or are you guessing?
I suspect most us do a lot of guessing. And a recent study suggests we may be guessing wrong.
Marketingsherpa and Knowledgestorm conducted a study that compared content preferences among [...]