Page 215 - Marketing Management

192 PART 3 CONNECTING WITH CUSTOMERS

Small and midsize businesses present huge opportunities and huge small and midsize businesses and pulls visitors through extensive
challenges. The market is large and fragmented by industry, size, and advertising, direct mail, e-mail campaigns, catalogs, and events.
number of years in operation. Small business owners are notably • Don’t forget about direct contact. Even if a small business
averse to long-range planning and often have an “I’ll buy it when I owner’s first point of contact is via the Internet, you still need to
need it” decision-making style. Here are some guidelines for selling to offer phone or face time.
small businesses:
• Do provide support after the sale. Small businesses want part-
• Don’t lump small and midsize businesses together. There’s a ners, not pitchmen. When the DeWitt Company, a 100-employee
big gap between $1 million in revenue and $50 million, or between landscaping products business, purchased a large piece of machin-
a start-up with 10 employees and a more mature business with ery from Moeller, the company’s president paid DeWitt’s CEO a per-
100 or more employees. IBM distinguishes its offerings to small sonal visit and stayed until the machine was up and running properly.
and medium-sized businesses on its common Web site for the two.
• Do your homework. The realities of small or midsize business man-
• Do keep it simple. Simplicity means having one supplier point of agement are different from those of a large corporation. Microsoft
contact for all service problems, or one bill for all services and created a small, fictional executive research firm, Southridge, and
products. AT&T serves millions of small business customers (fewer baseball-style trading cards of its key decision makers to help
than 100 employees) with services that bundle Internet, local Microsoft employees tie sales strategies to small business realities.
phone, long-distance phone, data management, business net-
working, Web hosting, and teleconferencing.
Sources: Based on Barnaby J. Feder, “When Goliath Comes Knocking on David’s
• Do use the Internet. Hewlett-Packard found that time-strapped Door,” New York Times, May 6, 2003; Jay Greene, “Small Biz: Microsoft’s Next Big
Thing?” BusinessWeek, April 21, 2003, pp. 72–73; Jennifer Gilbert, “Small but
small business decision makers prefer to buy, or at least research,
Mighty,” Sales & Marketing Management (January 2004), pp. 30–35; www.sba.gov;
products and services online. So it designed a site targeted to www.openforum.com; www-304.ibm.com/businesscenter/smb/us/en.

In developing selling efforts, business marketers can also consider their customers’ cus-
tomers, or end users, if these are appropriate. Many business-to-business transactions are to
firms using the products they purchase as components or ingredients in products they sell to
the ultimate end users. A sharper focus on end users helped propel Thomson Reuters to greater
financial heights.

Thomson Reuters Just before it acquired Reuters, global information
Thomson Reuters services giant Thomson Corporation embarked on an extensive research study to better

understand its ultimate customers. Thomson sold to businesses and professionals in the
financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, and health care sectors, but it felt it knew
much more about how a financial services manager made purchases for an entire
department, for example, than about how individual brokers or investment bankers used Thomson
data, research, and other resources to make day-to-day investment decisions for clients.
Segmenting the market by these end users, rather than by purchasers, and studying how they
viewed Thomson versus competitors allowed the firm to identify market segments that offered
growth opportunities. To better understand these segments, Thomson conducted surveys and “day
in the life” ethnographic research on how end users did their jobs. Using an approach called “three
minutes,” researchers combined observation with detailed interviews to understand what end users
were doing three minutes before and after they used one of Thomson’s products. Insights from the
research helped the company develop new products and make acquisitions that led to significantly
higher revenue and profits in the year that followed. 26

TARGETING WITHIN THE BUSINESS CENTER Once it has identified the type of
businesses on which to focus marketing efforts, the firm must then decide how best to sell to them.
To target their efforts properly, business marketers need to figure out: Who are the major decision
participants? What decisions do they influence? What is their level of influence? What evaluation
criteria do they use? Consider the following example:
A company sells nonwoven disposable surgical gowns to hospitals. The hospital staff
who participate in this buying decision include the vice president of purchasing, the
operating-room administrator, and the surgeons. The vice president of purchasing