5 Helpful Insights From One Small Business Leader to Another
By Erin Sherbert, Content Marketing Manager, Salesforce
Starting a business is no easy feat — and keeping one growing is even harder. We’re always curious how small business leaders bring their big ideas to the table — and turn them into reality.
After talking to plenty of these entrepreneurs, we realized it’s not a science; it’s definitely an art. So we’ve rounded up some best practices and advice from a few small business leaders who have done it right.
1. How to expand your pipeline with prospects of all shapes and sizes
“We’ve found that even though we’re a SaaS platform, our customers are still relying on us for consulting. By being willing to lean in on relationships and provide marketing and implementation guidance, we’ve been able to build really solid customer relationships. Because of those relationships, when our customers find a bug, they reach out and work with us to fix it versus simply uninstalling the product.”
— Jason Ruebel, vice president of operations at LISNR
2. How to delight your customers with awesome apps
“Keep in mind that the mobile space is still in its infancy. If you have a great idea for a mobile app, then realize your primary source of competition will likely be small custom development shops. Herein lies a tremendous opportunity for startups to build an app and a business model that can be repeatedly sold to thousands of potential customers without the need to build custom apps for each customer.
“So, focus on finding a market where the use cases are similar enough where you can deploy a minimally configurable product to a large number of potential customers without the need for custom development.
“The other thing to be aware of now that we’re in the custom development stage, is that having the best app doesn’t guarantee success. It certainly helps your cause, but you must have superior access to distribution in order to emerge as a market leader in a space where there may be 100 competitor apps that spring up over a relatively short period of time. Startups offering a product in a highly competitive market with low barriers to entry would be well served to build a distribution engine that leverages technologies such as Salesforce, InsideSales.com, and Datanyze to efficiently capture and take action on leads faster than their competitors. In the end, your primary differentiator may not be your software; it might be how quickly you move to seize the opportunity in the marketplace (i.e. how fast you hire and scale sales and marketing).”
— Russ Hearl, vice president of sales, mid-market for DoubleDutch
3. How to provide a more personalized sales process
“Experiment with different approaches to help you accomplish your aims. Try a number of methods and identify the one with the best success rate. You can then drop the others and back the best horse.
“Don’t follow the norm. First Mile has disrupted the industry with our custom-built green IT system that caters to all businesses with different requirements. By doing this, we have changed people’s perceptions of the industry by dismantling traditional business models and have improved them with creative and innovative thinking.”
— Luke Perera, marketing and communications executive at First Mile.
4. How CRM helps small businesses run smoothly
“The biggest thing for me is, I don’t have to ask anyone to help me see things. I don’t have to go to a developer and say, ‘Can you run this report? Or can you tweak things this way?’ I’m an independent person who can monitor the company and its performance across the entire organization — credit, sales, tech, marketing, finance, accounting — in one place, and I don’t need anyone’s help to do it. It’s huge.”
— Ethan Senturia, CEO of Dealstruck
5. How to be realistic about what your customers want
“Businesses tend to self-rationalize that most good customers actually do complain when they’re unhappy. That’s just not true. If you think otherwise, you could be losing out of millions of dollars — regardless of what kind of business you’re running.”
— John Goodman, Vice Chairman of CCMC
