Sales Tips

Selling to Home Based Businesses

As the dust clears, home based businesses are slowly emerging from the Great Recession and are starting to reinvest. Product quality, cost and service are all important considerations – so businesses that sell to home based businesses need to demand excellence from their team.

In recent years, home based businesses have become high value targets in the B2B sector.

Don't be intimidated by the speed of the marketplace. Although speed is important, sales fundamentals and logical strategies will make the biggest difference in the success or failure of your selling efforts.

Marketing, Promotions & PR

Young B2B companies are often tempted to buy their way into the market. Rather than taking the time to develop relationships with home based business owners, these companies blanket the market with high-priced marketing content in hopes of gaining quick momentum with buyers.

Marketing is useful and necessary. But new businesses should funnel their resources toward initiatives that support their value proposition. Although lead lists obtained from third-party vendors like Experian can improve the flow of prospects to your team, the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is limited to your team's ability to connect marketing, promotional and PR messaging with your company's unique product traits.

How to Evaluate Sales Staff

Frequent employee evaluations are a must for companies that sell in this industry. Businesses that achieve significant market share hire top-end producers and routinely evaluate them against performance goals and benchmarks.

Although annual reviews may be enough for other business units, sales units should be evaluated quarterly with monthly or weekly reviews of sales totals. Training, coaching and sales incentives can be useful for improving performance and revenues. In some instances, it may be appropriate to team underperforming sales reps with reps that have more experience selling to home based businesses.

Industry Experience

In home based business sales, industry experience is a huge plus. Although it isn't necessary to have decades of front line experience, it helps to speak the industry language and to understand the pressure points of a typical home based business.

B2B sellers who lack industry experience can compensate for inexperience by subscribing to trade journals, partnering with industry insiders and immersing themselves in the industry culture. Remember, home based businesses may also be more friendly to sellers within their network, so it's important to make new contacts as quickly as possible.

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