A key strategy was to find someone in the company with decision making power or influence but who also was not really spending their own money/budget directly. You were wasting your time talking to anyone without power to make or influence decisions, but you didn’t want to go too high up the chain because the closer you got to the people who owned the business or the P/L of a division, the more questions they asked to make sure they were getting the best value.
So the optimal sales target was a middle manager who wanted an easy solution that felt like it would help their KPIs but who also didn’t really care if it was a good value as long as the number wasn’t so high that people started asking questions.
If you got pushed up to the business owner level you were going to get grilled on value and efficiency, so they would actually try to push down the chain to someone who didn’t feel like they were spending their own money. Middle managers will spend as much money as the business will let them to build their empires and hit those KPIs for the next raise. There is also a mentality that you need to spend a lot of money every quarter to avoid having your budget cut next quarter, which consultants are happy to help them do.
So it makes sense that any provider looking for the easiest clients wouldn’t want to go up to the business owner level.
Business owners (thinking SMBs) tend to have a holistic view of their entire business, to know what everything costs, how the numbers work out, etc., and to personally feel the risk. They also generally don't have a lot of time to invest in changes, and may not want to delegate too much. And they know that a lot of vendors are full of poo.
(Source: Our anti-counterfeiting slash supply chain integrity startup ended up working with major brands, but we also tried small businesses (e.g., designer who had their own production line of huge CNC machines in their studio). We tried tailoring solutions to some of these upscale small businesses, but in the end we only ended up getting money from large enterprise prestige brands. Enterprise sales, OTOH, is a painful and risky slog of numerous stakeholders, foot-dragging dependencies, opaque politics, changing priorities, etc.)
All the ones I have dealt with have survived precisely because of their ability to get along with people.
If you have no people skills your small business will fail.
An employee doesn’t show up for work a few days in a row, you have to fire them the next day. Every day they’re pushing against the grain.
A vendor isn’t behaving? A business owner isn’t scared of using conflict to resolve the situation.
In my experience contractors are the most likely to be friendly, and small retail the most likely to be unfriendly.
Relationship management is everything in running a small business. You have to get along with clients, employees, suppliers, customers, and do a good job so all of them continue wanting to work with you.
Just like someone in customer service might act differently with coworkers vs customers.
My experience, from knowing quite a few business owners, is that they are always "angling for the edge." They want to squeeze every bit of advantage, out of every relationship/deal they have. Almost every relationship is adversarial and competitive. Lawyers can be the same way. The best ones, consider every interaction to be combat.
I'm not wired that way, so I'm not a particularly effective business owner.
The employee is spending someone else's money - they are more likely to be rational or even blasé about losses when it is not their money.
If a business owner threatens legal recourse, then, probably it's them. If multiple business owners threaten legal recourse, it's definitely something you're doing wrong. And that usually is along the lines of over-promising and under-delivering in an agency context.
In my experience the worst clients you can spot right away. They are the ones who are trying to get a discount. The work is always too much and it is never good enough. I filter clients by letting them know costs in advance. If they complain or suggest that it is cheaper down the road I politely suggest they find someone else. Otherwise...you end up doing 2x the work for half the price.
Also, if someone advises you should "Do the work at a discount and then it will be good advertising for your company". I suggest either walking away immediately or asking exactly what type of "advertising" they are actually going to be doing. From my experience these people give the worst reviews.
Additionally, they are not used to mincing their words because they don’t have bosses and are the most direct (and also egoistic).
I don’t know anything about the author’s agency, but I can imagine that if I were a small business owner and I allocated budget to them, I’d absolutely let them know how I felt if they failed to produce results. This would not be the case if I were a salaried employee at a larger business responsible for outsourcing digital marketing. It just doesn’t matter to an employee in nearly the same way.
I’ve been a founder and I’ve been in sales most of my career, I’ve sold to enterprises as well as to small business owners. This isn’t to say the author isn’t right. I just disagree with a lot of the comments on here about the inherently misanthropic nature of small business owners.
Businesses are usually better than individuals.
But businesses owners themselves are a hit or miss
I'd be interested if the author ever focused their efforts on a broad consumer archetype. Or worked in retail like a grocery store.
Every segment has a type that will spoil the bunch of you let them.
My favourite is to work directly with owners, cofounders, etc. They know what they want, and they have the authority to approve stuff - it's really nice just focusing on the 'real' work instead of the admin and to know that the goals they set are likely valuable and not just someone trying to check a box somewhere.
As a tech guy, I've found that business owners tend to be way more pushy. Normally they fall in the boomer category, or they simply are not in the field.
Both categories seem to assume that "ahhh IT, things are instant and tomorrow I'll have 10'000 daily visitors", while that's very far from the case. They think that spending money today means results tomorrow as in "next sunrise", while digital marketing is basically subject to the whims of Google/Instagram/... and their algorithms, and investing today means seeing results at the very earliest after three months.
You tell them beforehand many times, they sign a contract, they agree with everything... and then after 2 weeks they start asking you daily why things are not improving, with zero respect for work hours or personal boundaries. That's how they choose someone else via "high-friction", and they normally land on bigger agencies because they think bigger agency = faster results.
You seem to have equated “more likely to terminate with critical comments” to “worst.” Seems pretty reductive.
When I’m dealing with small businesses, I tend to explain my frustrations long before I cancel, and offer them a chance to fix them. Whereas with an off-the-shelf product, there’s no point: I say “just cancel my subscription please and thank you.”
I could see that being coded as “confrontational,” but more often than not, I and the vendor fix what’s bothering us and continue with our mutually beneficial relationship.
Oftentimes, I’m not the only customer with that pain, and fixing it with me has the happy side effect of making their product or service more attractive to others too.
By the time I do leave for good, that process has failed, so it doesn’t surprise me that there will be residual reasons for leaving…
Those that survive are often the result of an owner who had their hand on the wheel through some very desperate times, times which would have killed the business had they stopped micromanaging.
Disagreements are normal and leaping to words like “worst” or “sociopath” because one occurs is not going to produce a sustainable business IMO.
Naturally, it is a lot better to work for richer entities with less control and attention over money spent, milk the fat cows.
