Selling to Small Businesses

When it comes to small businesses having a website, size really does matter. The larger the size of a small business, the more likely it is to have a website. The smaller the business, the less likely it is to have a website. According to a survey conducted in September 2008 by Barlow Research of [...]

Entrepreneurship keeps attracting younger and younger people — including “millennials,” i.e., those twenty-somethings and teens born since 1980. Since entrepreneurs are consumers first and business owners second, you have to understand their thinking as consumers. A recent article in Advertising Age offers a fascinating glimpse into millennials’ thinking and debunks certain assumptions we may make [...]

You have two companies on the Fortune 1000 list.  Company A delights in serving small businesses  — and counts 7 million of them in its customer base.  Company B won’t touch the small business market with the proverbial 10-foot pole.  Why not? In the words of Company B’s Chairman, “We just haven’t figured out a way to make a substantial [...]

Have you ever noticed that companies tend to have certain things they are really good at, just like people? Call it core competency or shared organizational memory — whatever the term, it makes all the difference. A case in point is American Express OPEN. American Express OPEN is a company that does big events well.  I’ve been to four [...]

According to this article by TechTarget, SMBs find voice over IP (VOIP) too complex: “SMBs definitely haven’t been adopting the technology like enterprises, mainly because the technology is complex. Anything that’s complex is going to be difficult for these small companies,” said Gary Chen, an analyst at Boston-based The Yankee Group. “There are so many [...]

Most large tech companies that have decided to target the SMB market space will tell you how committed they are to small businesses.  But the reality can seem much different. In truth, what you find is that some executives and even some entire departments within large tech vendors  are indeed committed.  It’s just that it takes more than corporate edict [...]