I am posting here to see if someone can provide a little insight to help market/sell the SBS platform to rural area businesses.
For rural, I mean small population towns (approximately 3 to 8k people) that have several accountants, doctors and lawyers and other small businesses that could actually profit more with the SBS platform but all of them 'ride their money' (projects that could take a weekend take more than 4 months at times to even get started). These are also businesses that run Windows 2000 or even worse (I actually found one business running Win 98 like a server for 4 PCs). I have tried using the Win XP and SBS case studies and brochures to show these businesses the 'light' to upgrading, but it just seems that alot of these businesses are content on what they have and only upgrade when their programs break and they cannot get support for them -- thus putting a business like myself in a tough spot trying to get them up and going and they do not understand disaster recovery or things like backups.
Even though I have not become a small business specialist (yet -- got the primer, just need more actual experience in the field), I have been successful with a couple of SBS deployments (1 standard, 1 premium), primarly finding businesses that are looking for expansion or ways to bring e-mail or host their own websites rather than have someone else do it. I run a one-man solutions provider business from my home, skilled in both SMB and enterprise environments. With that said, did I mention that I am strictly 'technical' in knowledge and have nearly no marketing or sales skills.
So can anyone shed some light on how I can cater and market to these types of businesses and their owners?
-- Michael