Today Small and Medium Enterprises or The Midmarket are the Holy Grail for everyone in the IT and telecoms industry.  Almost everyone feels that there is a huge raft of potential, though unknown, customers, just below the size of their normal customer base.

So, in practice, what is meant by SME/Midmarket varies wildy. SMB to SAP may be a company with 1,000 employees.  For Microsoft it could be a company employing ten people.

"The SME sales manager could be rechristened "Manager in charge of chasing a huge raft of potential, but unknown customers."

This means big differences in approach and success rates.

Tony Mulligan at Oracle knows that in Europe there are 195,371 mid-market companies with sales of between £50m and £250m.  Those who define SMBs as companies with under ten employees face a much more daunting prospect.  The smaller the company, the less the potential, the lower the budget per company and the harder it is to target punters.
 
But forget size - there is a common thread.  In almost all companies and industries the SMB sales manager could be rechristened "Manager in charge of chasing a huge raft of potential, but unknown customers."  

Here we look at the perils and pitfalls of reaching this group.  How should you market to them?  Over the page, we look at how suppliers can best work with intermediaries to reach SMBs.

Marketing to "a huge raft of potential, but unknown customers" poses many problems and questions.  Who are they?  What are they looking for?  What sort of lifetime value can you assume they will have?

Julian Dent, head of consultants VIA International, says: "In my experience, suppliers want to short cut these questions, but you really have to do the intellectual heavy weight-lifting if you want to crack SME markets."

Response rates are typically extremely low in SMB marketing, partly because it is so hard to define exactly who you are selling to. At Cranfield School of Management, academic Colin Barrow pays £1,000 in direct marketing costs for every seat he sells.

Even Mulligan at Oracle, who is selling to a much more clearly defined market, says the best response rate he can hope for is around 1pc from online seminars. Note that Vodafone has stopped doing mass direct mailings altogether.