Are You Selling to Small Business Owners? Here’s What You Need to Know

By Rieva Lesonsky

If your target customers are small business owners, you’ll be interested in the results of the latest study from the Enterprise Council on Small Business. Two years ago, in the heart of the recession, ECSB asked small business owners, “What is the single most important problem facing your business today?”

Recently, they asked the same question and got significantly different results. Here’s some of what they discovered:

The number-one concern in 2009, poor sales, is still number one, but dropping in severity. Only 20 percent named it as their top concern, compared to 25 percent in 2009.

Cash flow, the number-two concern in 2009 at 17 percent, was mentioned by 14 percent this year and declined to the number-three concern. Becoming more problematic this year, government requirements were named by 16 percent as their top concern, almost doubling from just 9 percent last year.

Taxes held steady as the fourth-biggest concern, named by 10 percent of entrepreneurs in both 2009 and 2011. But there is growing concern about the quality of labor (7 percent in 2011, up from 3 percent in 2009), cost of labor (4 percent, up from 1 percent in 2009), cost and availability of insurance (4 percent, up from 2 percent in 2009), finance and interest rates (4 percent, up from 2 percent in 2009) and inflation (3 percent, up from 1 percent in 2009).

What does it all mean if you’re marketing to small business? ECSB theorizes that entepreneurs have gotten used to operating in an uncertain economic environment, so they’re less concerned about sales and cash flow. What they are having trouble with is the uncertainty over proposed regulations, such as health care reform. With the lack of action coming out of Congress, it’s hard for small businesses to know what to expect and how to plan.

Finally, while it may seem hard to believe that a lack of qualified labor is a problem with unemployment hovering over 9 percent, ECSB notes it’s important to keep in mind that small business owners have fewer systems in place to weed out unqualified candidates than do big companies. Even if they are getting hundreds of applications, having to dig through all of them to find the needle in the haystack takes time and energy away from other tasks of running the business.

How can you market to small business owners in a way that soothes these pain points?

Offer certainty. Small business owners may not know what to expect next from Washington or their bank, so make sure they know what to expect from your business. Emphasize quality and reliability.

Keep it simple. Eliminate bureaucracy and red tape from your operations. Make it easy for small business owners to place orders, update their information or get the answers they need. Don’t make them jump through a lot of hoops.

Value their time. It’s the one thing entrepreneurs never have enough of. Help them do things faster and more easily and you’ll win—and keep—their business.

Image by Flickr user Horia Varlan (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Business Development, Marketing, Sales Process, sales process, Small Business, small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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