Being picked last in gym class; standing by the punch-bowl while everyone else is dancing; or sitting alone at lunch time in the school cafeteria; small business owners are being made to feel unworthy and unimportant.
It's a darn-right shame! While hundreds - make that thousands - of vendors offer envy worthy products, alas, only the good looking have a shot at getting a date with them. Who are these popular kids? Large Businesses.
Since scouting out sales tools is my full-time job, I see first-hand the favoritism being shown to large businesses at the expense of small businesses. Would it be so hard to offer products that are affordable to 99% of companies? Selling to big companies is fiercely competitive. So why don't sales software vendors take the easier route? They continue to angle for the big catch while ignoring the millions of smaller fish which are just as hungry. And I do mean millions.
Consider this; according to the 2004 U.S. Census Bureau statistics, there are just shy of 5.9million employer firms. A whopping 5.78 million of those firms have fewer than 100 employees.
I'm tired of vendors telling me that (although their primary market is large businesses); they are also applicable to smaller companies. No you're not!
For small business owners, shopping for sales tools is like going to a flea market. They have to pick through stinky clothes and musty furnishings to find the one item that has true value.
There's no Googling for tools either. I've yet to see any sales tool that's priced right for a company under 100 turn up on the results pages of a Google Search.
I'm not talking about CRM. Yes, since the first salesforce automation software for personal computers was introduced - (around 25 years ago!) - CRM is now affordable and easy enough to use for almost anyone.
Let's take a look at some other product categories. I'll start with marketing automation. Lead nurturing, lead scoring, lead routing, are all accomplished with marketing automation. Yet the least expensive marketing automation program is $299/month. And I commend Active Conversion for offering a product with such great functionality at such a low price. But after them marketing automation is unobtainable for many companies because it's complicated and prohibitively expensive.
Now take sales enablement. Sales portals that offer shared-knowledge, collateral management, collaboration tools, and sales content are all elements of sales enablement. How much does that cost? Way more than any small company could afford.
Vendors seem to think that they can strip out functionality and limit the number of users or amount of usage, and viola, they now have a product for smaller companies. Wrong! You now have a product suitable for enticing larger companies to give it a try. But you are not offering value for small companies.
Why can't there be a "Quicken" of sales and marketing tools? Or even a McDonalds? Small business owners are hungry for tools to help fuel their sales growth. They've been stiffed for too long.
Nancy Nardin founded Smart Selling Tools in early 2009. Smart Selling Tools is a place where sales professionals can find and recommend tools to help them sell more. As a 25-year top sales veteran, Nancy has set out to help individual sales performers and managers find the best tools based on three key premises 1) there is life beyond CRM 2) the very best sales professionals are on a constant quest to improve their performance and 3) Salespeople benefit when they interact and engage with each other.