[twblalock]

Dealing with small businesses is a total pain. Dealing with thousands of them is a major challenge for any business.

Many small businesses don't adhere to professional norms of communication, negotiation, payment, etc -- that's not a big surprise, considering that many of them are owned by people without a lot of background in big business. The amount of time put into each deal is very high compared to the money you can get out of it.

This is why enterprise sales are so much easier than small business sales. You can make millions dealing with a small handful of enterprise companies, or you can try to make the same amount of money by dealing with hundreds or thousands of small businesses.

[ThrustVectoring]

>You can make millions dealing with a small handful of enterprise companies, or you can try to make the same amount of money by dealing with hundreds or thousands of small businesses.

This is burying the lede, IMO. Your sales structure should either be set up to catch shrimp or whales. You can have a product that sells itself and provide it cheaply - say, a smartphone app that summons a car to get you where you want to be. Or you can have a product that takes a full-time professional sales force, and get a lot of money out of the few sales you make there.

[GFischer]

Joel Spolsky expanded on some of it on his famous blog post:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

"There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs... So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint"

[joshu]

Dunno. I am finding a ton of it in the CAD/CAM world.

[monochr]

The problem is that small businesses are salmon.

[annnnd]

If only there existed a way to catch those... /s

[test1235]

>Or you can have a product that takes a full-time professional sales force

This is Just-Eat's model - they have an army of sales people in every country they operate, pitching to the local food places in their area.

[toomanybeersies]

I work for a company that primarily has small businesses as customers, and I agree that they're a handful.

We average something like 2 hours per customer onboarding. However, the value of each customer is pretty high. Good customer relations is also fairly important as there's a lot of staff transfer within the industry. Satisfied customers basically do your marketing for you.