Selling to a small business is nothing like selling to a large corporation. The interests of your target are often quite different from one context to the next.

When dealing with representatives of large entities, you’re often dealing with an employee whose interests may or may not be aligned with the best interests of the company. When dealing with small businesses, however, you’re often speaking to someone whose entire life is entwined with the success of the company, and who is also consumed with a huge load of responsibilities.

Accordingly, building trust, demonstrating value, and alleviating fears of difficulties are paramount. Below are five tips that will help you focus on what matters and overcome the main challenges of selling to small businesses.

1. Do Presentations In-Person

First, this will enable you to “read” your target more accurately than you would over the phone, which lets you adapt your tone, approach, and points of focus to suit the concerns of your audience. It’s never good to talk at length about points that don’t interest your target, and you’ll be able to tell when you’re losing your audience much more easily in person.

Second, growing the bonds of trust is more easily and effectively done through face-to-face meetings, when compared to a disembodied voice over the phone or email. Small business decision-makers might be harder to convince than the average person, and meeting them in person will give you a bit of an advantage to creating the trust that makes selling easier.

2. Offer Freebies

They get your foot in the door, and give you a chance to leverage your existing relationship into something bigger. This works well for service or service-related companies that want to work with small businesses, but samples can work just as well for tangible goods.

We’ve all been to the supermarket and noticed a brand offering free samples of their product, right? The reason is that people who try a product in this way are 11% more likely to purchase it later on. Give it a shot!

3. Testimonials

Sometimes, this is the most powerful selling technique you could use. “Person X, who’s just like you, loves working with me. Therefore, you will too.”

When you deploy a credible testimonial, the customer no longer has to wonder if your offering will work for them – they can see that it probably will. The more closely your testimonial speaker resembles your target, the better. A good testimonial is essentially a demonstration that your offering is effective for solving your target’s specific problems.

For one company, inclusion of a fairly standard testimonial on a sales page increased sales by 34%!

If your company is new and you haven’t had a customer yet, offer a freebie, do a great job, and make sure to get a fine testimonial from your first satisfied customer. The value can hardly be overstated.

4. Stress Benefits, Not Features

You may be in love with your offering, but your target isn’t. At least not yet. Don’t get carried away rambling on about all the wonderful features you included in it, and stick to your core value proposition. More importantly, describe it in a way that highlights what you will do for the customer. If you’re going to save your customers time, money, make them run more efficiently, improve their product quality, or just keep their lobby clean, you need to focus on the core benefits that matter to them.

Once they understand the main reasons for working with you, you can share information about all the bells and whistles that make your offering so neat. But at the outset, focus on the customer, his/her problems, and a few short ways to describe your solutions.

5. Integrate Smoothly

You need to adapt to the customer, not the other way around.

Got it?

Whatever your offering is, if you deploy it in a rigid way and demand that the customer conform to your needs, the relationship will fail. If you cause significant disruption and headaches, and demand that the customer adjust to accommodate you, the relationship will fail. If you make the customer’s life harder, the relationship will fail.

Make like a fresh-faced intern and do everything in your power to make sure that your customer’s problems are solved as smoothly as possible.

Do that, and they’ll wonder how they ever lived without you, and that’s good business.