Looking Like Goliath

Category: User experience of IP Telephony

Posted by: 24-Nov-2008

Giving a Small Business a Big Presence

Small businesses face an overwhelming array of challenges in their fledgling years. Perhaps the biggest hurdle that they have to overcome is the assumptions associated with being small in the eyes of potential clients. These predominantly negative assumptions usually centre on the same areas, a lack of quality and experienced resources, an inability to manage resources effectively and limited clout should anything go wrong.

To mitigate these risks, many customers go with larger established companies, even when they know service levels and standards are less than ideal. Sticking with a big player is especially prevalent in technical and IT focused industries, or where the key decision maker has limited knowledge or experience in the area. This presents an obvious dilemma for small businesses – how do I get big if no one will give me a chance?

There are a number of simple tactics you can implement to help change customers perceptions of your organisation.

Be Honest

Be honest about your capabilities, both to the client and to yourself. If you over promise you are going to waste your limited resources attempting to complete a project that will offer no long-term brand or reputation benefits. Winning a smaller job that you can complete successfully will bring greater benefits in the form of valuable word-of-mouth advertising and referrals.

Build Your Brand

Having an unknown brand offers you a clean slate. Take advantage of the fresh start and think ‘marketing integration’ from the outset. This means ensure that you present a consistent message across every touch point a client has with your company. Make sure that your website, letterheads, business cards, phone messages, email signoffs and sales collateral all have a consistent look and feel. You can get a designer to create templates for these at a very minimal cost and you can update them as required. Your customers will ultimately prefer consistency over size.

Think About Image

You can do a few simple things to make your self look bigger. Spend a bit of money getting your regular sales collateral professionally designed and pay a little bit more for high quality printing. To sound bigger over the phone, use a voice recognition automated receptionist, such as the one provided by Delacon, that will answer and transfer all your calls as well as providing voice messages to email. These hosted systems will make you sound even bigger than your corporate competitors for a small price.

Over Deliver

Go the extra mile when you’re starting out. This is one thing that you can provide at a low cost to your business that will bring big rewards. Don’t waste time worrying about what you can’t offer or getting caught up with irrelevant details, make the customer your key focus and the rest will follow.

Once you’ve won the client it is crucial to understand that being small isn’t a bad thing; inherently small businesses have two competitive advantages over their larger counterparts. Firstly, they can focus quickly; the same sense of purpose can be communicated without delay throughout the organisation, resulting in greater synergy of resources and understanding of required outcome. Large organisations tend to involve a number of stakeholders with different agendas on single projects, often leading to friction around resource allocation and responsibility.

Secondly, small businesses are naturally more dynamic than larger businesses. They can make decisions and react to problems more responsively than a large organisation that requires numerous stakeholders to make decisions. In many small businesses the Director has first hand knowledge of the key projects that are being undertaken so can wade in as required problem solve and determine strategy. In larger organisations the Chief Executive Officer may have no knowledge of a particular project so is not positioned to make an informed decision when required.

Implementing just a few changes and capitalizing on your strategic advantages will see your organisations worrying about the same things that big businesses worry about soon enough. You will be surprised to learn that their problems and concerns are not that dissimilar to yours, only bigger.