As a SMB Solution Provider, I try to live by a simple motto for promoting my business:

“Focusing on helping our local citizens do more with less when it comes to Informational Technology (IT) needs in the workplace and/or at home.”

However, when it comes to selling services and products to businesses in rural areas, this motto seems to just go right out the door. Most of the people I run into are using home PCs to do business-like activities like accounting, payroll, and inventory on a simple peer to peer network. Some even have taken the liberty to use something like Microsoft Home XP and use it as a graphics workstation running CPU hogs like AutoCAD and FlexiPRO.

As a network infrastructure solution specialist, I try to make it easier on the business owner where they don’t have the risk of a hard drive failing on their workstation, thus loosing all of their accounting or day-to-day business data files. When they ask me to come in an give them a technical assessment (which I do for free), most business owners go into ‘sticker shock’ when they find out the cost of a simple server, upgrades to their existing PCs and an improved network layout to supply what they need.

Anyone have any ideas on how to actually help customers like these in these types of assessments?

-- M

We’ve been in the sticks since the beginning in 1993. We have found that most small businesses like you describe just aren’t educated enough about their systems, how they work, and why they should expense more into their computer systems. Notice I didn’t say invest..... most of these people see a computer and associated items as investments. It is their first big mistake. I advise clients to think of it more in terms of a consumable they already use, rather than something they do once and then don’t have to deal with ever again.

Most of the time we simply just don’t bother. They see it as a sales pitch and that we are only out to take their money. We try to make the argument in so many different ways, but since they know all about their own business, they seem to not want to admit that they aren’t as in control of the computers they use.

Over time, many of these people have made the big error that results in an emergency call to bail them out. We help and advise and remind them that if they had followed our advice they wouldn’t be in the crisis situation. When they loose enough revenue from these crisis situations, they finally start to come around, or they don’t and frankly, we don’t need some of them as customers. If they can’t manage their own business operations, they often times are late payers and bad customers overall.

One tactic I use, that sometimes works, is to compare what they spend on some crucial component of their business to the computer expenditure. We have fishermen that spend 10’s of thousands of all kinds of marine gear, but go to the electronics superstore to buy the cheapest computer they can find. We try to compare the computer as a tool, to some other tool they use.

However there is always the eye surgeon who up until two years ago had his office staff using Windows 98 computers. Even the argument that he was spending $60k a year on these people and only getting $30k of work because their computers were so damn slow, not to mention the constant down time due to the systems being so darn old.... it took 3 years to get them to dump the 98 systems. He just could not let go of the $6k for new systems in order to gain 30k in productivity.

Good luck in your efforts..... me, I DESPISE selling something to someone, when they don’t want it and don’t want to hear about it....  this is precisely why all the sales crap form MS and other large corps fail in the SMB market ... we can not sell these people. We can help them buy and make good decisions, but all the sales pitches in the world are NOT going to help. Somehow MS and other large corps are incapable of this realization.

cheers!

If you don’t mind me asking, how does your business advertise to pick up (advertise) to businesses in rural areas? Just trying to come up with other ideas on getting my business out there.

I have been trying out Microsoft’s Marketing Services for Partners (http://www.mspartnerdirect.com), creating fliers and the sales lead generator. I have had limited success with it—a few callbacks, e-mails, etc.

-- M

I write a weekly column in the local paper, focused on business computing. It s one of the best ways to get peoples attention. Print advertising is only effective if used over a long period of time, so keep the ads small… use two small ones as opposed to one larger....

Most small business, ourselves included, don’t have time for sales calls. So, we try not to do that to our client base.

Attending local business group meetings…

Make yourself available to the rotary etc to speak on computing topics…

Word of mouth… ask your satisfied customers to go to bat and mention you when they hear of others with computing issues.

We build out own computers but let Dell etc have the poeple that want to spend less the $800 on a system. There is so little profit in any hardware or parts/pieces.  We no longer stock much of anything… it costs too much to have $20k of ink on the shelf for too little markup....

In many rural communities, time is the best ally.... it is a slow porcess, but in Maine if you haven’t been in business for 3-5 years, you aren’t in business.... somehow we see & know more people going in and out of business in our rural areas…

On the downside, small towns means most people know most other people in the community, be seen, but don;t be too outspoken, even on computing issues.... it can affect your business.

Nothing Intel or Microsoft has ever done has really helped us sell more service or hardware.

Have you ever seen an Intel ad suggesting that your local Intel guy can fix you right up?
Have you ever seen a Microsoft ad promoting the same?  Both of these megoliths spend hundreds of millions on TV advertisements, yet no effort at all seems to be made to push business our way. In Intels case ther eis simply no excuse as they admitted at one time that 50-60% of their computer dollars come from the thousands of small folks like ourselves....

Good Luck!

I’m surprised this thread hasn’t picked up more traction because it’s an issue we get asked about quite regularly.

Selling I.T. products and services to rural-based businesses is really a fundamental business plan-issue that many overlook when first starting up.

You need to know how many small businesses of various sizes there are in your service-able geographic radius.

So the first thing you need to determine is what geographic criteria defines your marketplace:

zip code/postal code blocks
certain area code(s)
certain county/counties
etc.

Next you need to do some basic searches by size to determine how many buying units there are at different size levels.

So for example, let’s say you can efficiently service 2 counties. The next step is to find out within those 2 counties

a) how many businesses there are with 2-9 employees
b) how many businesses there are with 10-24 employees
c) how many businesses there are with 25+ employees

You can typically find this information VERY quickly and easily, at least in the US, through the big mailing list compilers like Dun & Bradstreet (ZapData.com) and InfoUSA.com

Once you have this information, you’ll be in a much better position to determine your marketplace’s true size.

We typically advise most in suburban/metro areas to primarily focus on SMBs with 10-100 employees… because those business are usually large enough to need regularly-scheduled outsourced IT services if there’s no in-house IT function.

However in a rural area, many times you’ll have to lower the bar and take on clients that may not yet have a dedicated server and may be limping along with a peer-to-peer setup (i.e. 2-9 employees).

In a rural area, you’ll typically charge much lower hourly billing rates as well.

But ALL of these are business-planning issues that should be addressed BEFORE getting stuck in the weeds.

At the end of the day, regardless of whether you have 10,000 prospects or 100 prospects, you still need
a) an effective marketing plan
b) an efficient sales process
c) an efficient way to sell services to the same customers/clients on a regular basis

There are a lot of related tips, excerpts, and best practices on our Web site that can help you more easily get much better clients for your IT services business. We also hold Webinars on these topics from time to time. So be sure to get registered as well.

And Jason makes a good point about what many are too-brainwashed to say:

“Nothing Intel or Microsoft has ever done has really helped us sell more service or hardware.”

We’ve been telling companies and individuals like yourself for YEARS to look out for YOUR interests first and foremost.
Being a certified/authorized reseller/partner MUST be a distant 2nd priority. Don’t ever forget that. This isn’t 1985 anymore.

Best wishes,

Joshua Feinberg