Selling Services to Small Business

Consumer dialup is where many ISPs start out, but marketing to businesses takes a whole different approach.

[January 25, 2000]

On the ISP-Marketing list in December 1999, BC posted this question:

"I've noticed that most of the conversation on this list has been geared towards the consumer/home market. What about the small business market?"

 

It turned out that there was no shortage of list members who had given quite a bit of thought to reaching small business customers:

[DJ wrote] "We created an online local community information source. Each of our clients that hosts a domain receives a free banner ad for two months."

[GS shared this technique] "Cheap (not free) seminars can generate a whole room full of prospects and can be effectively sold with direct mail and telemarketing." [Related article: Marketing With Seminars]

[RL pointed out the power of peer pressure] "Giving prospects hard proof—success stories of other business customers they can contact—can help. I handled a fairly large law firm that resisted getting online until some of their bigger clients gave them grief about not being able to e-mail the firm. First they got two dial-up accounts, then they registered a domain name and got their own mail server. Then they realized they had inter-company e-mail as well as Internet e-mail. Today they can't get along without it"

[BS advocated "small scale branding"] "I'm marketing to small businesses right now, targeting small 'mom and pop' operations and smaller home-based businesses. We do web development and hosting and we've been approaching this from a 'stake your claim in the global market' perspective.

"We're running an ad in a local business journal to support our small scale branding. The ad hasn't yet produced any orders, but I listed our parked online domain in the ad and am tracking the results. It's generating more than enough traffic to make me believe the ad is worth continuing. We're also about to launch a coupon campaign through the Val-Pack system."

A number of respondents emphasized the need to educate potential customers:

[BS wrote] "I'm convinced this market is composed of people who believe they should be on the Net but just don't know why. We found that the best prospects don't know a bit from a byte, and most of them are not even online. So we hired a very successful sales person who also didn't know a bit from a byte to write the verbiage on the supporting web site."

[GS concurred, adding] " A significant portion of this market thinks they have missed the boat. However, most of them understand that while they probably won't get rich off of the Internet, they can improve their customer service. At this stage of the game almost every customer is an education problem, not a sales problem."

—End