I'm researching the market for a web based product whose target market is small, local and public facing businesses, such as restaurants, bars, retail shops, dry cleaners and the like.<p>Does anyone have any experience selling to customers like this? In particular, do you have any advice as far as:<p>* pricing (ie. price points, annual, monthly, etc)<p>* sales tactics and strategies<p>* do promotions like free trials work or backfire?<p>* what sort of gotchas or issues might I run into?
Don't assume any technological knowledge at all, most small business owners I've dealt with know just enough to run their businesses. As such they don't like switching even when their is a solution that could save them a fortune. The key is to automate as much as possible.
It's still B2B sales.<p>To sell to small, local and public facing businesses, it would help if your salesforce can talk intelligently about the business's actual market and the impacts your product will have on the specific services they offer.<p>To treat it like B2C is a mistake. Or to put it another way, small businesses don't go down to the ATT store and order their cell phone plans one at a time.<p>I will add that you don't really have a well defined market segment when it includes both restaurants and dry cleaners.
Low cost - if possible, based on a percentage of the revenue that your product will create. This way, it will not look like an aditional cost.<p>Small business tend to think that they are so small to get any software or product, you should work to change this concept.<p>Be prepared to overdues.
Here's a book I recommend (cheap at $5):<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Outfoxing-Small-Business-Owner-Relationship/dp/B000EHTAJQ/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Outfoxing-Small-Business-Owner-Relatio...</a>
I have experience with this (depending on your product). Drop me a line and I'll see if I can provide you with some help relevant to what you're selling. email is in profile.