Well, do you know what a small business owner wants? Do you? Don’t think I’m trying to provoke you. I’m not. I’m trying to invoke some thought. I want to take a look at just a couple of items that might help you sell more of your products and services.
For years now Web Hosting companies have been pushing, well, just that, Web Hosting. Then someone came along and said lets push Web Hosting with more space, more bandwidth, more email, and more widgets. “Yeah, let’s add more widgets because we have to compete with Joe and Sam’s hosting company.” They have more widgets than we do… And so on… Guess what? I say, “so what.” Who cares about all those features? Do you? I’m sure you do. It’s your job to keep up with Joe and Sam. But tell me, what is your value proposition if you are keeping up with Joe and Sam’s Hosting widgets and driving your pricing down at the same time depleting your profits?
Okay, now let’s stop for a minute and refocus. Let’s take a look at the small business person. Let’s see what’s important to them, and how they plan on getting on-line. I recently spent some time in my home town, Honesdale, PA. When I was growing up, there were (and still are) about 5,000 people who lived in the borough of Honesdale. It’s a small town on the most northeastern end of the Pocono Mountains, and borders New York State, roughly 15 miles from Narrowsburg, NY and about 1.5 hours south of Binghamton, NY. Most of the businesses located in Honesdale are small business owners that run their retail shops right there on the main street or within the immediate vicinity. They are Realtors, insurance brokers, card shops, local pharmacies, diners, restaurants, Medical offices of all types, a historical society, and more. Did you know Honesdale was the site of the very first Steam Engine from England in the United States. It’s true. But that’s for a history lesson later on. My point is that most, if not all of the businesses located in this town are small businesses. They are businesses where the owners get up early, stock their shelves, deliver their wares, provide their services, etc., and where they work late to make ends meet and live that American dream. It’s also a town 1.75 hours from New York City, where many people come to visit to get away from the sirens, hustle and bustle, and concrete of the city to breathe the fresh air, look up at the stars, and take a moment for themselves. This puts Honesdale’s small business owners in the unique position to have customers from hundreds of miles away return to purchase their goods and services on a regular basis.
My point is that the small business owner is in a great position to add value to their businesses that they never saw possible. It is a time for them to take a hard look at what they are doing to sell their products and services, and examine how they can utilize the Internet to “cast a wider net’ and extend their brands either regionally or globally. For example:
- If they are a small resort or hotel, they can book the rooms online, streamlining the reservation process, maximizing cash flow, decreasing human error, etc
- If an antique dealer or auctioneer has unique products they can make them available for sale at a premium to their customers over the Internet either via a home grown Ecommerce store, EBay Prostore, or use a solution like WebSite Creator with a PayPal Ecommerce store built in. (Ecommerce or “Selling Online” will be the subject of a later article).
- A realtor of course could use Move.com or Eneighborhoods.com to showcase their listings for sale to local and non local prospects.
There are a multitude of ways via the Internet that these small shops retailers can reach out to existing customers. And if you are a service provider, the barrier to entry for these services have come down in price so far, there is no reason you shouldn’t be presenting them to your existing client base. Email Marketing for the small business is another article in the near future that we will be examining.
So lets go full circle… What does the small business owner want or need in order to get online with little or no hassle? Well, the first think you need to understand is that the small business owner either wants to give getting online a shot him or herself. I call this the DIY model, (Do It Yourself). Or there is a BFM model (Build it For Me).
DIY is an area most hosting company’s focus on today. There are great tools out there for the SMB to build their own site, etc. The issue really lies in whether the SMB owner wants to give it a shot themselves? Most of the time the business owner will “get around to it” when they find the time to be motivated. Whether that is after dinner, put the kids to bed, finished their chores, next week or month is another story.
The BFM model incorporates the DIY services but building out the content and information on the site for the SMB owner. Because it uses the template solution in the BFM Website Building tool, the build out is simple and requires just a bit of time. The build out can be as few as three hours and only cost a few hundred dollars to get it done right the first time. If you are the service provider, this can be a very valuable low risk service to offer your customers and clients.
Let’s now examine then what the small business owner knows or believes. I’m not going to get into statistics regarding this. I am going to stay high level for you as everyone’s geographies and demographics are slightly different. However, one thing remains a constant, and that is that when the small business owner realizes or is convinced by their service provider they should have a web presence, one thing is for sure, they do not have a clue what it takes. The SMB does not look at their new Internet project in terms of it being an Internet project. They have very little if any technical knowledge of what building a new website entails. In fact, all they know is that it’s a Web Site to showcase their business, brand, products, and services online. Many of them do not know that they require:
- web hosting,
- branded email,
- a domain name,
- their logo (in electronic format),
- images of their products or company performing services, or
- content, with information about their products, services, additional pages, etc.
This is a small checklist with a lot of work involved for a small company that may not have the time or resources to build the site on their own.
So again, what does the small business owner want? “A website.” Plain and simple… Now whether or not you have a BFM or DIY model matters little. What does matter is the level of education you provide for the SMB, regarding what they are going to need, how it will be of an advantage to them, and allow them to judge for themselves. Allowing them to understand and realize an ROI on what it is they are investing in is what is important. So your documentation and your purchase path are very important. If you do not provide the information in the purchase path or on your paperwork clearly for the SMB, you could confuse matters and stop the purchase process dead in its tracks. Thus this may eliminate a new customer to your client portfolio.
Now, it’s not that the folks in my home town are not smart enough, or figure out how to get through the purchase path and get everything done. It’s that they probably do not have the time to properly research the Web Site building tool, where to buy a domain, how to set up email, continue with their day, handle family responsibilities, etc. I would also suspect that most small business owners elsewhere are not too different. Keeping this in mind, you will begin to understand that while the SMB is working on their business they are going to take the best path for them with the least resistance. If you can provide the tools with the best solution with the least resistance, you have earned yourself a sticky customer. And, maybe even a couple of referrals.
In conclusion, for most small business owners, their key measurement of success is how much money they make at the end of the week, month, or year. And many of them look at their online experience as a separate venture all together. They judge this experience the same way they judge their small business; how much money they will make. As their service provider, it is your job to make sure they succeed by helping them to achieve their on – line goals.
