Why Time is on Your Side When Marketing to Small Business

Welcome, small business owners! Hard to believe it’s Small Business Week again! Come in, sit down, enjoy your eggs. We’ve got a great morning planned for you! We’ll start off with an address about how important you are from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of State for Bingo Halls, Hosiery and Small Business. Then we’ll hear from a life-long bank employee about the importance of cash flow for small business before someone from the phone company teaches you how to read your wireless bill. After that, we’ll all jump on a barge and float down the River Thames while Sir Elton sings us a song and the populace waves flags and thanks you for being, well, small.

Many of us are going to spend at least one morning this week slurping down under-cooked hotel eggs and listening to patronizing speeches to small business while we network with other big business marketers and mid-level politicians. Guess who won’t be in the room? Guess who won’t be looking splendid in a yellow suit on a barge? Small business owners, that’s who. They aren’t at the small business events. They’re where they ought to be in their businesses, running things and trying to stay out of our gun sights as yet another Small Business Week declares open season on them in the form of endless phone solicitations, stuffed mailboxes and nasty junk in their email.

Those of us whose bonus depends on moving some products to this market will be anxious to count the revenue from this season. And most of us will be disappointed. Sure, we’ll spike some sales because we’ve conditioned the market to expect a discount in October. And sure, we’ll add some good leads to the funnel from our phone harassment campaigns and maybe from our events. But mostly we’ll be wondering why the small business shows were full of big business people and consultants and why these bloody people won’t obey the call to action on the postcard we spent most of July getting approved.

The reason why, and also the secret to selling to small business is that they don’t have time. Study after study reveals that the biggest challenge facing small business owners is having enough time to get everything done properly. In fact, most will pay more for a product if it gives them back a little bit of time. So the idea that a small business owner would blow off a valuable morning at a Small Business Week event is ludicrous, as is attending almost all trade shows, particularly the ones for small businesses. Equally ludicrous, is spending time with your annoying telemarketers, your unannounced door-to-door guy, your spam or your elaborate junk mail package.

The marketers who will miss their numbers this fall are the ones who continue to work under the dangerous assumptions that small business owners are stingy, uninformed, naïve and waiting patiently for a trusted advisor to burst through the door and sort it all out for them.

The smart marketers will be the ones who stop offering runny eggs and start offering a ROTI. They’ll be the ones who can position their products and services with a succinct Return On Time Invested (ROTI) discussion. Here are some ways to do that:

• Quantify how your product/service saves time over whatever they use now (use real numbers, you can actually prove and stop hiding behind percentages – if you can save them 30 minutes a day, that’s a very compelling thing)
• Show how your installation or delivery is faster than the competition’s
• Demonstrate that your Customer Abuse Department will keep them on the phone for less time than the competition’s – consider extending the service hours – many small business owners tackle their paperwork at night and on weekends
• Make sure you have a live chat support service so the customer can multi-task while you help them
• Create instructions, statements and invoices that small business owners can read and understand quickly
• Offer to train their staff for free on your solution or even on related issues like compliance or best practices
• Have your sales people make appointments, show up on time and get out of the customer’s face quickly
• Demonstrate a respect for their time by sending simple junk mail
• Build a website that’s easily navigated from a smart phone or a tablet
• Get short testimonials from other customers that speak to ROTI
• Stop talking TCO (total cost of ownership) and start talking ROTI
• Send brief, tightly written updates instead of ponderous, boring newsletters and white papers
• Try marketing to small businesses the other 11 months of the year

So if you’re going to participate in the cruel hunt that is Small Business Week, remember to take an entrepreneur out for a little ROTI.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
Follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
or email escwilliams@gmail.com