Comments on: Small Businesses Shouldn’t Be Afraid To Say ‘No’

By: john williams

john williams — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:42:05 +0000

It is very difficult to turn any business away for a small company, particularly in the early years and also in times of economic downturn.
But I have to agree that it is also often bery time consuming and ultimately not worth the effort. However it can open different opportunities and in my experience led to a move away from my companies core products into a new more profitable area. I have to agree that this is an unusual case however and on the whole agree with everything that you have said in this post.

By: Chris Pangburn

Chris Pangburn — Thu, 10 May 2007 07:48:52 +0000

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the story about your experience. That’s an interesting one, especially that they are operating on a bit of a different theme, aiming to sell the core products by offering ‘fringe’ ones. Like you say, this strategy sounds good at ‘testing the water’ to investigate which product lines would be most effective. If they strike gold, so to speak, then they could incorporate a product line into their mainstream offerings.

As the article mentions, small businesses shouldn’t be afraid to say no to customers every now and then – perhaps a small business with a reasonable-sized workforce could limit these non-core sales to a few dedicated members of the sales team. That way the culture of offering non-core products would be limited to those specific salespeople, and whilst they would be able to test the success of non-core product lines, the culture of saying ‘yes’ to everything wouldn’t have diffused throughout the rest of the organisation.

Anyway, just an idea, thanks for your detailed comment.

Thanks, Chris.

By: Chris Denny (Lead Optimize)

Chris Denny (Lead Optimize) — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:40:31 +0000

Great article. I worked for a small business where the philosophy was to sell something to everyone who called (even if it was fairly far outside of their core product lines) because they might return to buy a core product later. The salespeople wasted hours sourcing and delivering small items to non-core customers.

On one hand, they developed profitable lines of business they would not have found without this philosophy.

On the other hand, when the company got larger it was exceptionally difficult to drive this culture out of salespeople – and they spent hundreds/thousands of hours selling products to customers outside of their target market.

The owners of that company might feel differently but I still maintain they would be more successful today (larger in their specific market) if the salespeople said, “No.” to the random orders and went back to finding great buyers for their core products.