6 reasons startups should consider selling to small businesses, not big enterprises

Original post by Andrew Gazdecki via VB

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself mobile app & mobile website platform for small businesses, and Bizness CRM, a CRM platform designed to make selling to small businesses easy.

With all the buzz these days about how sexy and cool the enterprise has become, there is a segment of business customers that startups are overlooking: small businesses. Small businesses tend to have far less capital than large enterprises, but as customers, they offer startups a number of advantages that make them ideal customers to focus on.

However, selling to a small business is nothing like selling to a large corporation. The interests of your target are often quite different from one context to the next. If your business is built to serve them, you will need a sales approach that is designed to address their main concerns head-on.

Below are some of the advantages that make small businesses such desirable customers to have:

Table of Contents

1. The market is massive

In the U.S. alone, there are over 5 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. For startups looking for a global reach, the worldwide number of small businesses is far greater than the number of big companies.
The number of big companies in the U.S. with over 1,000 employees is around 10,000, and the worldwide number is correspondingly small. Accordingly, chasing the small business market enables a startup to address an audience that is orders of magnitude larger than the enterprise audience.