Long, long ago, at a time when small shops were opening in garages across the country, and larger yards were being covered for the needs of newly established wholesalers, bingo for every such wholesaler was to obtain distribution rights for some attractive imported product. I knew one such entrepreneur who was fortunate enough to obtain distribution rights for a German food industry product, and for overnight success, he just needed a good commercial director. He hired an economist who enchanted him with his proposal for a sales strategy ‘a thousand times a thousand’. In translation, if you want to turn a million in sales, it is easier to win a thousand small customers to whom you can sell goods worth one thousand than one large customer who will take goods worth a million.
The entrepreneur went bankrupt in less than a year. The commercialist, however, threw himself into the work, but his sales strategy failed miserably because small retailers not only did not want to pay for the goods in advance, as the distributor had to do with his German supplier, but in most cases, they did not pay at all.
What are micro-enterprises like as buyers
In the next two decades, however, things in the market have settled, the problem of non-payment for received goods is today more of an exception than a rule, and the sales strategy ‘a thousand times a thousand’ in wholesale generally has equal status with reliance on key customers.
What are micro-enterprises like as buyers today? We asked our interlocutors to try to sketch a characteristic profile of a small business buyer from the perspective of their company’s wholesale. We were interested in whether the micro-enterprises whose suppliers are their regular or occasional customers, whether they have an annual procurement contract with the company, what their average amounts per procurement are, whether they are in the VAT system or not, whether they always pay by invoice or come with cash, and similar.
– M SAN Group, as the largest ICT distributor in the Adriatic region, strongly focuses on doing business with small and medium-sized enterprises. Moreover, a few years ago, we developed a specialized business vertical within sales in Croatia and the region focused on cooperation with small companies and their business development as our partners. Thanks to this strategy, we now actively cooperate with more than 7,700 small and medium-sized enterprises, thus becoming the largest distributor in the region. We are aware that every small company carries growth potential and that some of them can become a new unicorn as early as tomorrow – explains the CEO of M SAN Group, Irena Langer-Breznik.
– When we talk exclusively about small customers, we can conclude that they are price-oriented and regularly take advantage of our catalog and promotional benefits. The average amount of one procurement is five hundred euros and is mostly paid by invoice, while cash payments are mainly used by customers from the HoReCa segment. When procuring goods, our delivery is most often combined, on average twice a week, with independent visits to the wholesale center once or twice a week. Small customers are mostly in the VAT system – they replied to us from Velpro.
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