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Posts tagged small business sales
Resellers - Get Free Small Business Leads with Bizness CRM
Oct 10th
Every business needs customers. But sadly, they don’t generally come lining up at your door begging to buy from you. Instead, you need to find a way to reach out to your target audience and make the necessary connections. This can take a lot of hard work, but with the right tool, the workload can become a lot lighter.
Enter Bizness CRM, a tool for generating small business leads that we provide free of charge to our app resellers!
With Bizness CRM, the process of tracking down leads becomes a lot simpler. It can be used in conjunction with other marketing efforts, or it can be used as a standalone channel for locating customers. With a helpful tool like Bizness CRM, a lot of the administrative work is done for you, freeing you and your team up to focus on selling.
Getting Started With Bizness CRM from Bizness Apps on Vimeo.
What is Bizness CRM?
Bizness CRM is a customer relationship management app that lets you locate small business leads, and track your sales efforts as you make appointments and attempt to close deals. It’s easy to use, mobile-accessible, and your account can support multiple users, making collaboration seamless.
How do I get leads with Bizness CRM?
The process is simple. First, head to Bizness CRM’s Lead Generator tab and select your desired lead criteria (location, keywords, etc.). A list of small businesses in your chosen area that fit your chosen criteria will appear. Then, chose the leads you want from the results, and each one will be imported into your sales pipeline. This becomes your working list of initial leads.
From there, you can contact leads, make appointments, track progress, and hopefully close some deals! Taking notes is easy, and all the contact info you need is automatically imported when you select leads to bring into your pipeline.
The rest is up to you.
Are you talking about cold calling?
We are, but don’t be scared. It’s how Business Apps was built, after all.
By connecting with leads over the phone, you’ll suffer a lot of rejection, but the conversational practice will allow you to fine tune your pitch and you’ll also learn a great deal about what matters most to customers. Listen well, and you’ll soon have your first sale.
After that, the next one is easy.
Good luck!
For more detailed instructions for getting started with Bizness CRM, click here.
4 Tips for Building a Successful Mobile App Sales Team
Jul 9th
If you want to develop apps for businesses, you may be tempted to sit back and let your advertisements bring in the prospects. But sadly, things don’t work that way – not even with a very strong ad campaign running. It’s important to continue actively pursuing customers to ensure that the time and effort invested in your app development enterprise pays off.
For many developers, this may require that you build your very first sales team. Don’t be scared – it isn’t as hard as it sounds. You don’t have to hire an army of salespeople. You just need to start with a few dedicated reps that are ready to roll up their sleeves and help make your business a success.
You might be tempted to go forward without a sales team due to the cost or headache associated with bringing new team members on board. But make no mistake: a sales team is the engine of your business’s revenue and growth. What you invest now can generate significant returns later on as your company gains momentum.
The following tips will help you build a team that creates sales and also cultivates long-term benefits for your company.
1. You don’t need programmers
Don’t be overly concerned with hiring technically oriented folks for your sales team. As long as your team members are familiar with apps and computers, you can teach them everything they need to know in order to sell app development. Some companies get hung up trying to find people that are extremely tech-savvy for their sales team, but it is more important that your sales team members have interpersonal skills.
Of course, if you can find people with both technical and sales skills – that’s even better!
2. Have them use the products
It isn’t enough to just read about your service as sales training – your team members should download and actually use some of the apps your company has created for clients. This will give them familiarity with your product that will be extremely helpful in selling it.
A big part of the sales process can be answering questions about how apps work and the possibilities for development that your company offers. If responses from your sales team are genuine and specific, it can give sales efforts a real boost. If they’re canned and ambiguous, you’re headed for trouble.
3. Focus on long-term success, not just raw numbers
Only looking at sales and subscriptions is a straightforward way to measure success, but it’s important to also keep an eye on retention and satisfaction. Sales teams can sometimes makes promises just to “Get to yes,” and this can hurt your business down the road. Make sure that your team members are interacting with customers in a way that is good for sales, but also your business as a whole.
4. Back them up with excellent support
This is key to ensuring sales success: support your ongoing customers and deliver on your selling points. If reviews are bad and referrals are non-existent, your sales team will struggle to meet its goals. If, on the other hand, customers are happy, your sales team will have a very strong leg to stand on when it comes time to speak to prospects.
A well-rounded approach like this will make your company a success not just today, but also well into the future.
5 Ways to Land More Small Business Clients
Feb 7th
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.
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.
6 Things to Focus on When Selling to Small Business Owners
Dec 19th
Small business owners are a special breed. If your business is built to serve them, you will need a sales approach that is designed to address their main concerns head-on.
Below are six tips that will help you connect with small business customers, keep them happy, and increase the chance of creating a longstanding relationship (and getting a valuable referral).
1. Demonstrate your value
The number one characteristic of a small business is that money is tight. Owners worry constantly about getting enough business to cover expenses and earn some kind of a profit. Therefore, even though they might have been willing to take a leap of faith and start their own business, they may have little appetite for risk when it comes to handing money over to third parties.
This means that proving your value is critical. Testimonials, trustworthy reviews, guarantees, and even third-party verifications all go a long way toward convincing a small business owner that you will indeed deliver on your promises. If there’s any doubt in their mind, they’ll probably put your brochure on the shelf.
2. Follow through
This ties in to the last point. Your sales promises all have to be kept, or better yet, exceeded. Make sure that your sales enthusiasm carries over into service enthusiasm, or repeat business will drop to zero. Small business owners watch expenses carefully, and if they aren’t getting immediate returns, they’ll be quick to cut you out. That is, the grace period after the sale within which you must perform as advertised will be quite short. Make it count.
3. Help them today
Long-term benefits are nice, and are great for a well-funded organization that can weather ups and downs one quarter after the other. A small business generally can’t do this, however, and investing for long-term gain is difficult if no short-term gains come along as well. Make sure that your value timeline is one that aligns with the resources of your small business customers.
If your offering requires that you convince the owner to invest for the long term, you’ll have to work that much harder to demonstrate that your offering is a lock to bring those benefits. You’ll also have to be ready to work with the owner to find ways to make the proposition work financially in the interim, which may mean delayed payments or other creative solutions.
4. Make referrals easy
Small business owners are a community, and they trust one another. If your solution helps one owner, and he or she is willing to say so, the others will be inclined to give you a shot. Make it easy for your customers to spread the word (electronically or otherwise) and provide referrals so that you can get a foot in the door with new prospects and capitalize on your successes to the largest extent possible.
5. Show how you’ll help them grow
The dream of many small businesses is to become bigger and more stable. If what you’re selling ties into growth, be sure to highlight that fact. Since many of your prospects are constantly worried about having enough business, growth means security. If your service will bring growth and security, you’ll be looked at as a savior to your customers.
6. Build relationships
You’ll usually be dealing with a single person – the owner – when you work with small businesses. It’s very rare in other industries to have access to the person who has power over the entire enterprise, so make the most of this special feature and build a relationship. If you become more than just an expense to the owner; if you’re dependable, understanding, and flexible, you’ll likely be in a position for a long-term relationship.
We hope these tips are helpful.
What tips do you have for others selling to small businesses? Let us know in the comments!
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.
