Building the SMB Technology Purchasing Profile

It's obvious enough that you'll maximize your sales if you know what your customers need to buy. But the average small business owner has trouble keeping up with technology and knowing what he or she truly needs, versus what's simply the newest thing on the market. To maximize your sales and your customers' productivity, you need to begin by gaining their confidence.

"The small to medium-size business decision-maker relies hugely on trusted friends and advisors," says Scott Daugherty, executive director of the Small Business and Technology Development Center at North Carolina State University. "The advisory relationship is not driven by the quality of the hardware or the software. It's driven by the value of the relationship."

Developing a technology purchasing profile for each customer can help you establish and maintain those relationships, which in turn can strengthen your sales. A basic profile will cover such questions as the customer's existing hardware, software and peripherals; its needs in those areas; annual technology budget; and upgrade patterns.

Gathering that baseline information allows you to get a full inventory of what the customer has in place and begin to develop suggestions that play to the company's objectives. But it's when you dig deeper that you get the best clues to improved service and sales.

For example, a business that has reduced its staff is faced with the challenge of how to do more with less. For that customer, your recommendations can focus on software and hardware that increase operating efficiency and productivity.

An often overlooked purchasing profile indicator is the company's age. Daugherty says research has shown that "high growth companies most typically don't begin to experience their real high growth until the seven-to-10-year mark." So knowing how old the company is in addition to where it is now in its growth cycle can help you gauge its coming potential and the increased technology needs its expansion may create.

Learn what you can about each customer's revenue trends and projections. They probably won't share financials, but you can ask questions that allow you to make a ballpark estimate. One useful tactic is to ask for a range rather than specific hard numbers.

Remember to position your question in terms of how you can support the company's goals. "It's a customer relationship tool from the outset," Daugherty says. "The pitch is, 'help me to better understand your business and what you see as your needs.' It gets back to an approach that demonstrates to the customer an interest in where they are and where they want to go, and being a resource for them to equip them with the right IT infrastructure."