When I look at products being sold to SMBs, I think back to my early days with my company. I looked at tools as adding to either my revenue or my fixed expenses. Any tool that contributed to revenue was an easy sell. For example, we started off keeping track of our product catalog in Excel spreadsheets. We could have offered hundreds of products to customers, but we couldn’t keep track of the product details or inventory levels in Excel. So, we limited the products that we offered to customers, which limited our revenue growth.

The problem became so painful that I sought a solution. The software I found was expensive, but I knew it would increase revenue, so I quickly pulled the trigger. Revenue did increase, and we were a customer for years. We replaced it only when we absolutely had to.

Tools that didn’t increase revenue I scrutinized harder and took more time to decide about. We still added plenty of these tools, but I made sure that each one more than justified increasing the company’s expense structure.

If you’re considering selling into SMBs (or any company for that matter), understand whether your product increases your customers’ revenue or their expenses, and adjust your sales strategy accordingly.