Treat little customers the same

Sales is a very funny business. Often times results are not seen until way after all of the work has been done to earn business. It even sometimes goes unnoticed for awhile and results just show up. The reason for this is our customers all buy and decide at different paces and using different methods / policies. For example. You could go on 20 appointments with varying different size customers and not one of them close business when you think it should close or even in the average timeframe. I remember when I was first starting out in technology sales I had a small mom and pop shop business in the real estate market. They didn't sell real estate like homes or buildings but they sold data. The most important data of a real estate sale such as the lot number,size, permits received, lien information and tax information etc. The company I was at was not doing business with them yet and they often were overlooked because they were a smaller company doing average sales. I met with them several times on different projects but never got awarded any business. I stayed in touch with them and one day they needed help with something that their current vendor refused to help them with. My engineering team fixed their issues and from then on the rest is history. This company over the course of 4 years became my biggest customer and their growth exploded with the real estate market making them one of the top repositories of data in the east coast of the US. The lesson here is two fold. Pay attention to the small guys too. Dell was a small company one day and grew to a major fortune 100 company. And be patient with customers. If you have a great solution, build relationships and your professionally persistent they will buy.