Most Small Business Owners Don’t Care

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I had a great experience this afternoon – I got out of the office.

It has been a while since I’ve been out of the office. We don’t really do much locally, so I jumped at the chance to help my step-dad do a site evaluation for a local classic car dealer looking to install an IP Surveillance system (actually, I didn’t really add much – pal Cory Andrews came along and well, he knows surveillance better than I). Even though it has been quite some time since my last face-to-face encounter with a small business owner in the seller-customer realm one thing didn’t change…

Small business owners still don’t care.

You see, small business owners (and other business owners) are an interesting bunch. They don’t care about how much one knows about a topic, they don’t care that you’ve done it a million times, they don’t care about your blog or even your latest gizmo. In a nutshell, all of the things you think they care about, they could actually care less about.The owner of the company, Mark, is a great guy, but at the end of the day, nothing we said, other then, “okay, we can do that” even registered. It wasn’t us either – it’s just that Mark is a small business owner and has a million other things to do and worry about. All he needed to hear was that we could solve his problem.

No discussion of revolutionary features, the future or price.

Therein, my VoIP resellers and VoIP service providers, is the lesson.

Small business owners don’t care about your industry award, your patented technology or buzz word laden feature set. They have a problem, a good idea on how to solve it and just need you to get out of the way and deliver it to them. In their world, the only thing they care about is solving problems.  So, if you want small businesses, and their owners, to start caring about your VoIP products and services, start showing them and talking to them about what they care about – a problem solved.