- Was on a call recently with a guy
that sells Facebook ads
and he was selling almost exclusively to local businesses,
so dentists, doctor's offices, restaurants,
that sort of thing,
and I had to tell him,
I told him these three stories
that I'm about to tell you today.
Three stories that demonstrate
why I'll never work for small businesses again,
and why enterprise is the place to be.
So, let's jump into it, I'm Alex Berman.
When I first moved to New York,
I was doing cold calling for a company called Vimbly,
and we would go out, it was an event booking site,
so we had to go and cold call a lot
of different local businesses to try
to get them on the platform,
and it was a slog.
And mainly that was because of the unpredictability,
so here are three scenarios.
Number one, it's super competitive.
So, I was in an Indian restaurant a couple days ago
and I had order my meal and everything,
I walked over to the checkout
and I looked over at the wall,
and they had six different iPads.
Well, two of them were iPads,
I think the other four were Android,
but they each were running a different app.
One had Amazon's delivery service,
one had Yelp's delivery service,
Seamless, Grubhub, they all had their own app.
And I asked the woman who was running this,
do the apps provide these iPads for you
or do you have to buy them?
And she said she had to buy six different iPads
to support the different apps,
which paints a bigger picture
which is, since restaurants and other local businesses
are frequented by basically everybody,
everyone eats at restaurants,
they're the first to pop into our minds
when it comes to business ideas,
which means everybody's trying to sell to them.
Having some competition in a market's good
but you never wanna be competing
with thousands of other people,
and I can only imagine,
if they have six iPads ready at their restaurant,
how many people were pitching them
that didn't get their SaaS
or get their order platforming bought?
It's an extreme example
but in B2B it's a lot more accepted.
For instance, you might only have one CRM at your company,
we use Base,
and there are dozens, if not hundreds of other CRMs
to choose from,
Pipedrive, Salesforce, there's hundreds of them,
and you can only pick one as a business.
But if you are in the CRM space,
at least you know the biggest player, Salesforce,
has a terrible quality CRM.
So, there's a weakness there, right?
Selling to local businesses
and trying to do an order taking platform,
you're gonna be competing
with some very entrenched competitors.
Seamless has an amazing platform,
Amazon has an amazing platform,
Uber is now building this delivery platform that's great,
so there's just too much competition there.
Point number two is,
local businesses don't check their email.
I was talking to a client recently
that sells to medical doctors and he was saying,
hey, cold email's not working,
what can we do to fix it?
So, we took a couple steps back,
did some market research,
and we figured out that cold emails aren't working
for doctors because one,
if you do get a doctor's exact email address,
let's say he has two chances throughout the day,
at maximum, to check his email,
so he's probably gonna mouse right by it,
or not even open the email.
Or two, if you are selling in a doctor's offices,
it's most likely gonna go to the receptionist,
and that receptionist is also super busy.
So, for local businesses a lot of the times,
and we were doing this at Vimbly as well,
we tried a cold email campaign, did not work at all,
a lot of the times you just have to cold call them
because local businesses,
they have to answer in case it's a customer.
They don't have to answer the email,
and for us on this channel,
I'm a big proponent of cold emails for booking meetings.
Cold emails will never work in a system
where people don't check their emails.
That's not saying that sales
to local businesses don't work at all,
there's other channels.
So, for instance, for this guy,
his solution was drop-ins.
Literally walking into the doctor's offices
and trying to get an appointment that way.
Another client we were talking to,
I went through all of the lead-gen channels
that were working for local businesses,
and the winner for him was going to live events.
He was selling to chiropractors
and if a chiropractor's going to an event,
usually they're trying to grow their business,
so that was a good fit for him.
Cold email might not be the marketing channel
that you wanna use for these local businesses,
but you can find another marketing channel
where they hang out.
And then the third reason I don't sell
to local businesses anymore is weird drama.
My cousin runs a medical supply business
that he's slowly taking over from his father.
The father still works in this business
four hours a day doing back office work.
The son is completely stretched thin,
and the wife's still in there,
they're employing a lot of family,
and the reason why I bring up that dynamic is,
when you're targeting a business
that's maybe five, six employees
and a lot of them are family,
like a lot of these local businesses are,
you'll run into these weird dynamics.
So, for instance, one time at Vimbly
we were trying to list a cooking class on our platform
and I had gotten the marketing guy completely bought in
on why it's worth listing on our platform,
why it was worth selling through,
and then the deal just never closed.
And I was able to follow up with him a couple of weeks later
and figure out why it didn't close,
and it was just, he couldn't get his dad on board,
and he didn't think we should have a meeting
with the father.
So, there's a lot of weird dynamics like that
that you never would run into with larger companies.
So, what's the solution, right?
Solution is to go after enterprise companies,
if you can target companies over $10 million in revenue,
but at least target two, three million in revenue
where they're an established business,
they're real, you're not gonna run into any of these issues.
If you find this video valuable, be sure to like it
to encourage this type of content on YouTube.
Subscribe for more B2B sales training,
and if you need marketing support
for your digital agency, check out Experiment27.com.
Thanks.