If you’re going to sell to small businesses, there are two things you need to remember: 1) don’t lump them all together, and 2) don’t lump them all together. The “average” small business simply doesn’t exist, and there’s a lot of diversity in a market that covers businesses with $1 of revenue all the way up to those with millions of dollars in revenue.

For example, if you’re a developer, and you want to sell small businesses on the idea of apps and mobile websites, what percentage qualify for your offer? Let’s put it another way: if a small business doesn’t even have a website, period, they probably aren’t ready to hear about apps and mobile enterprise, right? So, what percentage of “small businesses” have websites?

Are you ready for this? In general? Less than half. Less than half! And in some states, far fewer!

Therefore, before you go off pounding on every door and calling every number on your small business lead list, you need to think about which industries and company sizes you should be targeting.

As a basic matter, the larger a business is, the more likely it is to have a website. Research done by Barlow several years ago, which is repeated in many places but for which we sadly could not find an original source, shows that for businesses from $100-500K in revenue, less than half had sites. But for those with between $5 and $10M of revenue, however, 73% had sites. Thus, developers would be well-served to keep this in mind when targeting leads.

The general advice for the rest of us is to have diverse offerings and prices that match up well with different slices of the small business market.

Focusing on small businesses with websites will greatly improve your success rates when selling mobile apps and mobile websites.

Also read our previous post about the top industries to create mobile apps here.