Selling to Small Businesses

Jill Konrath runs a website called Selling to Big Companies.  (Consider it the photographic negative of this site, Selling to Small Business) On her blog she suggests using triggering events to keep your pipeline full. What’s a triggering event?  It’s an opportunity that crosses your path that you should leverage to get in the door with big [...]

A large law firm is considered one with over 100 lawyers.  Yet, in the United States (and most other countries) the majority of law firms are equivalent in size to what we all consider a small business, say, 250 employees and under. MarketingSherpa offers a long article about marketing to lawyers.  Having been a lawyer myself [...]

Bob Bly, the copywriting guru, notes seven differences between B-to-B buyers and consumer buyers in an article found at his site.  And of course, when you are talking about a corporate business buyer, he is right.  After all, how can you argue with a guru? However, the small business buyer is actually a hybrid between the corporate buyer [...]

Recently I wrote about using email to cold call.  Of course, it isn’t strictly cold calling.  A purist would take issue and say (a) it isn’t calling because you don’t actually speak with anyone, and (b) it is too passive. Points well taken.  But in today’s world, and especially with today’s Web 2.0 entrepreneurs and [...]

Over at Inc.com I found a great, lo-o-o-ong article about making in-person cold calls.   It’s titled “48 Hours with the King of Cold Calls.” The article almost 15 years old, but some advice on selling is timeless, right?  However, there is one big difference I see between today and that cold call of yesterday:  the effect of email.  [...]

The sheer numbers of the small business market – 25 million strong in the United States alone – are too alluring to resist. Yet, sales individually to each small business customer can be relatively small.  A few thousand dollars in a year’s time, perhaps much less, may be the typical sales volume to a small business customer.  That makes it [...]