Small Small Business
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Hello Business Entrepreneurs/Owners:
Business owners and entrepreneurs NEED a circle of colleagues/friends/family that constantly refer business; provide virtual teams and motivate each other. In these times of recession, people buy from trusted sources. This means business networks within a certain group, possibly a vertical industry or even neighborhood business groups. Think of it this way, a new business owner needs a consultant to “help assess the local market”; develop a target website/strategy; consult on a local P.R. strategy and most importantly develop a WOM (word-of-mouth) marketing plan to spread the news in the community. In turn, the new owner can “by design” spread the word about her/his great team.
How can small businesses compete against the huge-to-huge partnerships, advertising and marketing being done by the likes of McDonads/Matell/Pixar? Think kids toys, Happy Meal and new movie? We, as small business owners, need to think about cross industry/services marketing partnerships. What are they and how can we set them up to minimize our time and money investments. Can we each create a new product/service that markets TWO other company’s products/services? Can we do this via our selected trusted colleagues? Rather then let this happen by chance, let’s get together and create these partnerships by design; that’s what the big guys are doing; we can do it even better as the trend is often for people to buy local (not always).
Looking forward to comments/ideas/suggestions.
Dr. Mary Jean Koontz
Pacific Creations International
San Francisco, CA
maryjeankoontz@cs.com
I agree. Big businesses can afford the manpower, resources, and advanced technology to “sell” to their customers and build relationships (ERP and CRM software, CISCO Telepresence, budgets to travel, attorneys and lobbyists). Small business need to be more savvy to compete. And we need to build partnerships and relationships with other small businesses to leverage our experiences, competencies and connections in order to compete. That’s what the Small Small Business network is all about.
The biggest hurdle that small business networks have against big business marketing teams is that large company marketer is a salaried position while most small business networks are voluntary. The reality is that people flake, and that is deadly when you are involved in a campaign that requires diligence and close coordination.
People will tend to drop out after an initial good-faith effort, unless their participation has some clearly tangible result. Results in order of desirability: new business; increased business; increased marketing exposure such as website traffic; increased potential customer inquiries; increased Google ranking.
To succeed: You need to start with a large enough group, something like 6 people. That way, if 2 drop out, you will have 3 or 4, which is the bare minimum, but very efficient; there must be clearly tangible results after the first 3-4 rounds of activity, work-of-mouth referral of business being the most likely to happen; some formal collaboration, be it homework or follow-through meetings, with some clear idea of what to do next.