The Wall Street Journal recently published an interesting article on how banks are reducing the number of branches. They explained how Bank of America, using Indiana as the example, is overall reducing the number of branches but the steep cuts are in small towns as they add branches in Indianapolis, especially the more affluent areas of the city.
If we look at car dealers, we see the (ever shrinking) auto section in the paper doesn’t have ads for Lexus, BMW, Acura, Audi, etc. The ads, shouting out low prices, are for Ford, Chevy, Hyundai, Dodge, and similar.
In both cases it’s using data to reach the target customer. The same techniques should be applied to small business, even though most don’t have anywhere near the money or data to fine-tune it as much as big business can. It comes down to knowing where your customers are so you can reach them most effectively.
The same holds true in business buy-sell. Sellers need to know who their best buyers are (the logical buyer) as a quality buyer is worth more than a higher price (a buyer recently lost a deal when someone offered more money and now the seller wants to reopen communication because the higher price came with baggage, that being a not very good buyer).
Buyers need to know what they want, not, “I’ll know it when I see it.” This means a lot more than business type but understanding how they will fit into the operations. For example, a manufacturing engineer is probably not going to be good with a pure sales organization, and a sales guru won’t do well running a process oriented manufacturing business.
Know what you want, who your customers are, and go after them in the best ways possible.
