Serving Small Business

If you've been training your eye on big enterprise customers for your business, you may be looking in the wrong place. Why? Small and medium-sized businesses of 500 employees and below make up 98% of all businesses. Simply put, they're a constituency. And if you can find a way to serve them well, you'll create a thriving business for yourself.

Small businesses have their own personalities - and their own needs. This week we've asked Office.com general manager Jeffrey Cutler to share his advice on servicing the small business market. His site, Office.com has an audience of millions that come for productivity tools, relevant news and advice. Cutler offers great advice on communicating with small businesses.

Small Businesses Need Relevance

Small businesses don't have employees with a lot of time - generally everyone from the proprietor on down has work to do and lots of it. They don't have time to hear about any service or product that doesn't directly affect their bottomlines.

"This is a market that really has not come online en masse. Those that have come online are just kind of dabbling with their toes in the water. Small businesses need to see something that truly benefits their businesses and makes them better at what they do before they embrace it and make it a part of their businesses," says Cutler. If you have a product or service that can benefit a small business, bring that to the forefront in your communications with them. If you can save them money, tell them how much. Ditto with time.

Case Study: Pruning Purchasing

Jeffrey offered us a good example of an Office.com feature. Purchasing costs eat away at profit quite alarmingly, and purchasing is generally labor - and time - intensive, and requires a lot of paperwork approval. A popular Office.com application allows companies to streamline that process and save both time and money.

"We offer a procurement application on Office.com where our users can set up workflow approval processes and establish guidelines to manage their internal purchasing. For example, if you and I were a part of the same company, we could set it up so that I have approval to buy up to $500 worth of goods and services at which point it has to be kicked up to you for approval," says Cutler.

Eventually, the feature will be integrated with internal company servers.

"A small business will be able to have someone buy something on their website and when that happens, our system will seamlessly update their accounting system so they don't have to do it separately. It will also seamlessly update their sales system so the sales rep is notified that this customer bought something. I think when we achieve that full level of integration from purchasing to settlement, this is the kind of thing that small businesses need to see to understand the value that these services can provide," says Cutler.

Small Businesses May Want to Stay Small

Those looking to appeal to small businesses often focus on how much they can make a small business grow. Realize that many small businesses are happy being small.

"A lot of these people have tried larger businesses and decided it's not a home for them," says Cutler. They don't like being a little cog in a big wheel or even the head cog on the wheel. What they want instead is stability. And again, products and services that help them save time, money or hassle.

One of the mistakes that some companies that market to small business make is assuming that small businesses want to become large. They say things like, 'We'll help level the playing field and allow you to grow exponentially.' But what small businesses are mainly interested in is being able to provide a comfortable existence for their employees, a stable environment and basically enable themselves to stay in business. That's the most important thing to them, not growing exponentially," says Cutler.