Smaller Gets the Customer

The next time you are thinking through your brilliant approach for a proposal or presentation, will you remember to emphasize the advantages of being a smaller business?   A lot of customers say they prefer working with a team they will actually see after the sales presentation.  Everyone who stopped by our offices for coffee and a warm handshake last week said they perferred talking with humans rather than "job tickets" and email.

So, here are amazing factoids to sprinkle in your next presentation or conversation about advantages of working with you.  According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses make the major contributions to U.S. economy in these ways:

• Represent more than 99 percent of all employers and employ more than half of all private sector employees.  (We are where the jobs are!)
• Generated between 60 to 80 percent of new new jobs over the past decade.
• Created more than 50 percent of non-farm private gross domestic product (GDP).
• Supplied more than 23 percent of the total value of federal prime contracts.
• Employs half of all workers and 39 percent of high tech workers.

There are more than 23 million small businesses in the U.S.  Two thirds of new small businesses survive at least two years and about half survive four years and beyond.  In a nutshell, you can say your business is a vital part of the economic engine driving all business and money in the U.S.  Put that in your proposal or dialogue with the new customer.

Be sure to ask your customers and prospective customers if the size of your business is an advantage.  Don't assume--ask!  This is part of finding out what customers prefer. 

I wish folks would ask us that question before they unleash their sales presentation.   Take a guess how many calls we get at our company from someone selling CRM "solutions"?   Here's the second part of the question.  Guess how many say in the first two minutes that their customers are Fortune 500 companies?   Now guess how often that carries no meaning or value to the owner of a small business.   

Our response usually sounds like this: "Sir?  Could you stop a moment and take a breath?  Good. Now breath slowly and tell us, calmly, exactly how many small businesses are in your long list of happy customers?  And please, don't just drop a name--tell us a story. Make it a success story with a happy ending.  Tell us how your company generated great results for a small business, directly, because of something you did or provided.

As the statistics show you, there is a lot of money and satisfaction when you do business with smaller businesses. The contracts can be large.  Sometimes they are no different or any larger than your contract with the Fortune 500 company.