Selling to Small Business

Posted On: 2006-01-24
Length: 60:00

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Hello. And welcome to Small Business Trends Radio. I am so glad you could join us today. I'm Anita Campbell, your host. The topic of today's show is "How to be a Service Provider to Small Businesses, and Still Make a Profit." With nearly 25 million small businesses in the United States alone, the small business market is very attractive. Yet, many businesses find it challenging to profitably market and sell their services to other small business customers. Barbara Cagley, partner at Design Firm SCK, will be joining us in just a few minutes to describe the secrets to getting sufficient sales and being profitable when your customer base is small businesses. And believe me, that is no mean feat.

But first, before we invite Barb on the show, we have Today's Trend segment. This is a segment we always do, or nearly always do at the beginning of the show. Today's trend is going to be a little bit different because we're going to have a little humor today. So today's trend is the trend of the numbers thing. And this is the trend toward naming start-up companies, especially technology or web start-ups, by combining a number and a thing in the name. And the number is usually a digit, in other words, numerals along with the name of a noun, or some thing. So lest you think this is my idea, I have to own up, I can not tell a lie. This in fact is the idea of Owen Thomas, who writes at the Business 2.0 blog. And he identified this numbers thing trend, and I'm going to quote him now because he says it better than I can.

He writes, "Let's put an end to this right now. I'm speaking of the new vogue for naming your start-up with a number and a thing. Back in the 1990s, we had a flood of start-ups named with a color and a noun. Red Cart, Red Gorilla, Purple Tie, and so forth. It got so bad that I started referring to them generically as color nouns, as in yep, got another pitch from a color noun today. I give them three months. So let's all join hands together and declare a moratorium on number things. Come on, people, put your thinking caps on and come up with better, more original names for your companies, or risk being lumped together with all the other number things start-ups."

Ok. So that's Owen Thomas. And so, what...