Why is SME (Small Business Enterprise)
important?
For one thing, there are 25 Million of
them, with an enormous spending power. To give you an
example of a software company that successfully
penetrated SME, I would point you to Intuit
(Nasdaq: INTU). Intuit has a market cap of
about $10 Billion. Microsoft has unsuccessfully
attempted to buy this company in the past, with the
single objective of entering the SME segment via a
killer app (small business
accounting software).
Few other companies have managed to penetrate SME
through other killer apps / niches, Autodesk
(ADSK) being one that I mentioned earlier. ADP
and Paychex in payroll processing are
very successful companies that cater to SME in form of
killer app “services”, as is Salesforce.com
in Customer Relationship Managent (CRM).
Now, adding SME to our framework brings us to the sales
model question, which is the fourth variable I propose
to add to our formula :
Enterprise 3.0 = (SaaS + EE + SME + TWS)
, EE is "Extended Enterprise" covering
Segments such as Collaboration, CRM and PLM.
Typically, since SME sales have small Average Sale Price
(ASP), the viability of the model depends entirely on
being able to “close” these deals on the phone. The deal
sizes do not support actually going in person to close a
deal. If the solution is simple enough, and the value
proposition obvious enough to convey, such that deals
CAN be closed on the phone, they can scale as
SME-leveraged businesses. Thus, the 25 Million SME
customers can be reached through an efficient Telesales
channel that is both high reach, as well as profitable.
Another point to note is that before the advent of
desktop sharing / web conferencing technologies like
Webex or GoToMeeting from Citrix, it was not easy to
give demos of the products while on the phone. That has
changed. Today, software is readily and rampantly
demo’ed online, while the sales person is on the phone
with the prospect.
So, the combination of TeleSales
and WebDemos, I propose to call TeleWebSales (TWS),
and is the fourth variable that we include in our
Enterprise 3.0 framework.
In fact, experienced sales executives use TWS to sell
even higher priced software, except, they use it earlier
in the lead qualification process. This ensures that
those accounts that get higher touch, in-person sales
visits are truly qualified, and warrant such investment.
