On the other hand, many resellers that specialize in the small business market lack advanced savvy. Like ordering a kid's burger at a fine steakhouse, plenty of system builders land small business accounts and then only sell systems. There's just so much more you could do if only you had the background knowledge and the right vendor partners helping you move forward.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, of 5,657,774 employer firms on record in 2001, 85% were small businesses, meaning businesses with fewer than 100 employees. In fact, 66% of all firms had fewer than 10 employees. Think about it. Two-thirds of all companies out there are likely to need someone just like you to advise, devise, deploy, and manage their IT needs. "This is an audience that is non-tech savvy and generally does not have an IT professional on staff," says Doug Leland, general manager of worldwide small business in the Microsoft Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partner group (SMS&P). "When they look for IT services, they will predominantly go outside, which is where the partner becomes a very significant resource to the small business. This says two things: 1) You need to make things very simple for the small business, both in the product offering and in the packaging. 2) Developing a set of partners who understand those packages and who can take them and implement them within those businesses is the key to success."

Some vendors don't grasp the significance and opportunity in the small business space, but an increasing number do, and of these many are ready and willing to help give you the tools and products you need to better penetrate and maximize the potential within small business clients. Naturally, the number of options here are practically unlimited, but we narrowed the field down and got cozy with some of the most promising prospects to get you going.

Get With the Program

Last year, the two industry heavyweights, Microsoft and Intel, both used channel feedback to reach the conclusion that small business resellers needed more efficient and effective help in reaching clients. Both companies devised programs aimed at putting new knowledge and opportunities in reseller partners' hands, and both involve imposing a classification system on the small business community in order to better identify opportunities and deliver solutions rather than point products.

The cornerstone of Microsoft's new effort is the Small Business Specialist Community (www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/community), a subset of the Microsoft Partner Program aimed at VARs, VAPs (value-added providers), system builders, and ISVs who service the small business segment. There are a series of benefits the member gets, which include the use of a Small Business Specialist designation, much like a Microsoft competency but with easier requirements. The partner need only pass a technical exam, pass a sales and marketing assessment, and buy an Action Pack. That done, he can call himself a Microsoft Small Business Specialist and take the credibility benefits that go along with it. The partner will also get listed in Microsoft's partner directory as a Small Business Specialist. Not least of all, the partner also receives marketing assistance from Microsoft for better selling into small businesses as well as training on Windows, Office, SBS, Small Business Accounting, and technical support covering those products and their services.

Part of the program involves a local touch element that works in coordination with reseller partners. One of these is the Microsoft Across America tour (www.microsoft.com/mscorp/acrossamerica), which involves a fleet of seven theme-painted trucks (more like luxury RVs) barreling across the country in search of reaching one million businesses. When a truck lands at a location, Microsoft typically puts on a half-day seminar at a nearby venue and lets visitors come aboard the rig for a hands-on sampling of Microsoft's latest business offerings.

In Omaha, Nebraska, a five-person reseller outfit named Mobitech (annual sales: $1 million) had attended a few Microsoft Connections seminars—another facet of Microsoft's small business channel efforts—and agreed to work with Microsoft when the Across America truck came to town. The arrival was advertised in the local paper, and about 250 people showed up, resulting in approximately 50 qualified leads. Forty current Mobitech customers showed up, and six new major sales resulted from it, so the company arranged for a second outing with Across America weeks later. All told, Mobitech expects sales resulting from the two events to exceed $800,000.

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"Small businesses are the slowest to realize the benefits of technology," says Doug Leland, general manager of worldwide small business in the Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partner (SMS&P) group at Microsoft. "Our mission is to design software solutions specifically for small businesses to help them start, run, and thrive. We're doing this in three ways. We're doing it by building products specifically designed to meet the needs of small businesses. We're doing it through partner programs and partner offerings that are specifically designed to meet those needs. And we're doing it through reach, touch, and education. The primary vehicle is through a Web portal we built called the Small Business Center [www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness]."

Leland notes that you can approach small businesses in one of two ways: a horizontal approach that looks at quantitative factors such as business size, IT infrastructure, and so on, or according to vertical market segment, such as legal or medical. The SMS&P group opts for the former and designs solution packages based around given customer criteria. "Take Small Business Server as an example," says Leland. "We're able to identify within those horizontal market opportunities which types of companies are right for a server. And you could make some very significant analysis calls on that based on a company's size and IT characteristics: number of PCs, whether they're networked, peer-to-peer, etc. We have a segmentation framework that helps us understand this vast market in a more detailed way. We use this framework in terms of what packages we build and how we take them to market."

Interestingly, despite the trend we see with enterprise application providers adapting their platforms into SMB versions, Microsoft feels this is a poor approach to small business. Leland believes that the design tactics and methods used to build an enterprise solution are fundamentally different from those used in small business, and this makes porting one to the other very difficult. The critical point is that in order to get the flexibility and functionality needed for a large organization, enterprise apps bring with them a complexity level well-suited to dedicated IT staff. But small businesses generally lack such in-house resources. Thus it takes a product such as Small Business Accounting or SBS 2003, which were made from the ground up for small businesses, to be truly effective in that space.

Down the coast in Santa Clara, Intel has some common ground with Microsoft. For instance, the two companies jointly run the Build Servers Build Business initiative. BSBB aims to promote Microsoft's Small Business Server 2003 and Intel's Xeon chip family as a complementary solution bundle. Online training guides resellers though building a Xeon configuration and implementing an SBS OEM preinstallation kit (OPK). Sales materials aim to help boost reseller marketing efforts for these products. And special offers through distribution can help increase margin when selling both product groups.

"We've put a number of enabling things out there, primarily centered around training to help those smaller resellers today who aren't really selling server solutions," says Intel's Eric Thompson, North America channel marketing manager. "Those are the guys selling a lot of desktops, some mobile, and not a lot of servers. We're helping them to up-level that by starting with the server because the server brings with it lots of other opportunities that can solve problems. If they're only selling the client, they're not necessarily addressing those things."

Like Microsoft, Intel classifies the small business community in order to better target it. As Thompson puts it, there are four "buckets," or levels of technology sophistication.

"It's important that a reseller who's going in to work with small businesses has a good understanding of where a small business sits on that technology sophistication spectrum, if you will. Once they know that, we give them the tools to identify key technologies and solutions to help address problems that business likely has based on their position within the spectrum. This gets us away from, well, you're going to sell a Xeon because it's this fast, has this much cache, has that feature on the motherboard. It's going in and saying, ‘If you have a simple sophistication level with technology, we can address your productivity, your company's marketing capability, your financial capabilities. It would cover server technology, wireless communications, and clients able to run newer and better applications that can address the trouble areas most small businesses have."

This spectrum approach is at the heart of Intel's The World of Difference campaign. TWoD is a large-scale contest geared toward educating Intel resellers on how to work with small businesses. In 2005, the contest received over 2,500 responses from small businesses answering the question: If you had $100,000 thrown at you, how would you use it to improve your business through technology hardware, software, and services.

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Through different stages, Intel selected a number of them and asked those small businesses to articulate more in detail what they would really do from a business standpoint to take advantage of $100,000 of technology. Intel then selected a small number of the businesses and asked them to partner with an Intel reseller. It all added up to a sort of matchmaking process to prepare a final, detailed technical proposal of how the small business and reseller together would deploy and utilize a $100,000 award of technology, hardware, software, and services. The goal of the program is to create a process through which the small business applicants learn how information technology can benefit them. At the same time, resellers get a sense of how a broad range of what small businesses feel are their chief IT weaknesses and how VARs and system builders can help solve them.

"This is very needed," says Thompson, "because today's resellers are still affected by yesterday's sensibility of just selling and pushing bare-bone hardware into larger corporations where the integration of software occurs internally. Small businesses need a much higher level of hand holding. Resellers need to understand that and move toward creating business requirements and solutions."

On January 26, the five contest finalists will wrap up in a big New York-based showdown to decide the winner. There will be a webcast exclusively reserved for Intel resellers wherein they can log in and watch the live presentation of the five final deployment scenarios and vote on which one should win the $100,000 prize. The contest is being organized and run in large part by the Small Business Technology Institute.

There are actually three legs to The World of Difference effort. The first two are resellers and small businesses. But the third is community partners, the organizations Intel (and resellers) can work through in order to better message and interact with small businesses.

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