Is Your Company Easy to Do Business 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 as reality.  To him it was not the customer’s problem if something was difficult or laborious.  Instead, he accepted it as his company’s problem — as the seller — to deal with and solve. 

That’s why he looked at every single one of his processes to see if they were — figuratively — as easy for customers to follow as a puddle of water flowing downhill in a trickle toward a drain.

The question is:  how easy is your company to do business with?  

Ease of doing business matters, partly because it’s a time issue — and partly a frustration issue.  Business people in small organizations wear lots of different hats and have limited time.  More importantly, they may interpret your company as unfriendly or arrogant, or have a vague sense that your company is ”not a good fit,” if you require them to deal with YOUR complicated procedures or lengthy paperwork or processes that they consider overkill. 

Sometimes the smallest things make the biggest differences in whether customers perceive your company as easy to do business with.  Mac McIntosh, a B2B sales and marketing consultant, offers a short checklist of things to consider to see if your company is easy to do business with.

For instance, on a website, do you have direct email links or do you require people to fill out a contact form?  When someone calls, how long does it take before they can talk with a live person?

Check out: Is your company easy enough to do business with?

I would add the following thoughts.  From personal experience I know it is easier to evaluate someone else’s processes and procedures than it is to examine and improve our own company’s. Why? We are too close to the situation to be objective.  Plus, we may have a tendency to look solely at how efficient our company’s internal processes are. This can be at odds with how easy those processes are on our customers. Easy on us — hard on them.  Consider bringing in a business process consultant or customer service consultant to do an audit of your processes and procedures — not to evaluate how efficient your processes are for your company, but to determine how easy or hard they make it for your small business customers. 

Focus groups, website analytic programs, eye tracking studies, customer feedback surveys, call abandonment statistics, reports listing reasons for customer cancellations, and other methods also can be employed, depending on what you are trying to measure and how much time you can devote to gathering and analyzing information.