Articlr

Small business startups and entrepreneurs have something in common. A vision of David and Goliath. Both invest a lot of resources into taking down the Big Bad Corporations that enabled them to start their own business. These small businesses and entrepreneurs possess the skills and right approach. They commit themselves (rightly) to the customer. Ultimately, they have all of the tools and attitudes needed to succeed. But then something happens. Either a few slow months or some kind of "spooky" incident drains these folks of their steam. When we ask what happened, we often hear that they just couldn't compete with the Big Boys (or in some paranoid cases we even get a "they had it out for me" excuse). Come on, who really believes this?

Our view is that entrepreneurs have a tremendous edge over their the Big Bad Corporation. From a financial angle, entrepreneurs typically do not have as many expenses -- just think of the layers and layers of useless management that large corporations have! Not only that, but entrepreneurs can offer better service to their clients because they don't have to worry about the same reels of red tape or bureaucratic time-wasters. Of course, small businesses don't have the same financial resources as their larger competitors, but they often don't need to. Small business owners honestly stand to benefit from the inadequacies produced by big companies. Why haven't they?

Often, small businesses emit a small presence and nobody wants to deal with the small guy when the small guy could be gone tomorrow. More often than not, a lot of customers don't even know that the small business even exists; it becomes easier to remember that jingle on the radio -- Call us at 1-800-BUY-FROM-US or whatever it might be. Consequently, prospects choose the bigger competitor because the small business forces them to! Which brings us to how the small business owner or entrepreneur can compete with the big corporation. While we promote a complete model to Build Presence, the one we find gets overlooked time and again is the toll-free number!

A toll-free number allows the smallest of small businesses to look big. Picture a prospect who needs your services and all this prospect can consult is a phone book. Who would you choose, the small company with the local phone number, or the company with a local number AND a toll-free number? Of course, a toll-free number doesn't differentiate between great service and plain old good service, but you can't blame the customer for picking the business with the toll-free number. This enables the customer, who is always busy, to obtain service while out of town or away. Sure, the customer buys locally, but she will expect service globally! Give that some thought.

One of the nice things with a toll-free number is that it won't balloon your expenses. With technology as it is today, you can arrange a toll-free number within a couple of minutes. Also, the best providers can have your calls routed to any phone number that you provide. That means you can receive calls while golfing, shopping or, more likely, driving from one customer location to another. No more missing calls or having to call into your voicemail only to find that you could have spoken with a prospect during down time. And forget about waiting around a call you just can't miss. A service like this can allow any small business to focus more on business development and relationship management.

The program Quote Stork endorses is priced at $39.99 per month. The no-frills toll-free solution gives you unlimited minutes (other services limit the usage and charge more for extra minutes), it works from anywhere in the US, and you can use your existing add-ons (e.g. voicemail) without special programming or additional costs.

For the very small business owner who is serious about tackling larger competitors, a toll-free number provides a valuable customer service advantage. Suddenly, the story of David and Goliath rings true.