Selling in a Small Town

If you’re ever assigned a small town for a territory, here are some tips:

• Visit as many businesses as possible. When you visit a business, don’t solicit as much as mine information; act like you’re a detective solving a crime. What you’re trying to determine is the state of the market place: who are the key players, how your company and its competition are performing and what issues the business community is facing.

• Identify all the key vendors servicing the community. Small businesses rely on vendors and it’s important to work through them. Typically, you need a way to compensate the vendors for referred business. At the same time, you want to reach out directly to the businesses in the community. Word will get back to the vendors that you’ve been proactively looking for new business and that should provide you with more leverage in your dealings with them.

• Use the phone as little as possible. Small town people are wary of outsiders. Outsiders pester them with phone calls. Showing up in person means a lot.

• Attend Chamber and other networking events. Normally, I think Chamber events are a waste of time, but not in a small town.(1) In small towns, business leaders actually attend events and will talk to you.

• Make regular visits and keep in touch with existing customers. This shows that you care and will lead to referred business. Small town business people know each other and if you perform and prove to be trustworthy, they will recommend you to their friends.

• Find something, anything, to connect you to the town. If your wife is from the town, if a relative of yours lived there or is married to someone that grew up there…mention that information when you are talking to the business people. Know the area; throw out names of local businesses and business people. Use their terminology. I sold in Yuma, AZ and there was a part of town called the “big curve”; they had an “old mall” and a “new mall”.(2) If I was asking where a business was, for instance, and it was near the “big curve”, I would say, “big curve”. It helped make the people there feel more comfortable around me.

(1) I went to a Chamber breakfast in Yuma, AZ that started at 6:30 am and when I showed up at 6:35 it was already packed and I had to scramble to find an empty seat.

(2) The “new mall” was over five years old and will probably be called the “new mall" until an even newer mall is constructed, sometime in 2020.