Mobile marketing tips for small businesses
Posts tagged sales management tool
Which Small Businesses Are Most Likely To Purchase a Mobile App?
Jan 21st
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.
How “Full-Box” and Mobile approaches are Disrupting CRM
Jan 10th
In the past, many CRM offerings featured robust relationship management tools, but it was up to the user to supply the leads themselves. That is, the programs offered up the “RM,” but the user had to supply their own “Cs.”
Not anymore!
Now, many CRM solutions are “full-box,” meaning that they either come with a database of leads or, and this is much more likely, they allow users to search publicly available databases such as Google Places in order to locate leads that can then be imported into the CRM tool.
This feature enables users to avoid wasting hours scouring for leads and then manually entering contact information into their own house databases. The time lost across industries due to searching for leads and the related data entry is a huge number of hours in the aggregate, and full-box CRM lets companies avoid the expense entirely, freeing up employees and resources to perform other functions.
Essentially, with a full-box CRM, a sales team can spend more time selling and less time preparing to sell.
Our highly streamlined, simple CRM solution, Bizness CRM, does exactly that. Local leads are organized by small business industry via Google Places, and then users can narrow them down based on numerous optional criteria to help surface qualified leads. Think of it this way: other CRMs are like BYOB parties, where you’re supposed to bring all of your own stuff. Bizness CRM, on the other hand, offers a fully stocked open bar, with millions of small business leads built in.
Instead of having to do all your own legwork, it’s all done for you, automatically. When you fire up Bizness CRM, everything you need to start selling is already there.
(We know which party we’d rather go to).
We’re also aiming to disrupt larger, traditional CRMs with our mobile first approach. Some companies (which shall remain nameless) offer a mobile CRM user experience that makes it obvious that their full product was essentially thrown into a garbage compactor and compressed, and then painfully shoved into a mobile device. This doesn’t lead to a very good tool.
In contrast, our native app (iPhone available; Android and iPad in the works) is designed from the ground-up to work beautifully on your mobile device. Sales don’t always happen in the office, so we’ve taken an approach that lets users handle sales activity anytime, anywhere.
If that doesn’t increase sales, we don’t know what will!
To learn more about Bizness CRM and our free trials, click here.
Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself mobile app & mobile website platform for small businesses and Bizness CRM, a CRM designed to make selling to small businesses easy.
