???? Episode 107 of Yes, and Marketing
EverCommerce is the tech platform of choice for over 600,000 SMBs around the world. When it comes to marketing to SMBs, they know what works—and what works at scale.
Their CEO Eric Remer broke it down for us on this episode of Yes, and Marketing.
The takeaway? If your audience is SMBs and you’re running the typical B2B marketing plays, you’re doing it wrong.
3 things to keep in mind for SMB marketing:
- Treat them like consumers, not a big business.
- Be where they are. (That means digital.)
- Create a solution that is really, really easy to use. The entire process from acquisition through onboarding needs to be seamless.
Listen to the full interview above or read on for more highlights from the conversation. You can also view excerpts from all our episodes on our show page.
???? Who is Eric Remer?
Name: Eric Remer
What he does: Founder and CEO of EverCommerce.
Find Eric on the web: EverCommerce | LinkedIn
Get smart: “You have to market to SMBs more as a consumer than as a business.”
???? Episode Highlights
Read verbatim excerpts from our interview with Eric Remer.
His top two lessons before hitting $1 million in revenue
“One: it’s really hard to bring on those first customers, whether that’s 25, 50, 100 customers. You don’t have anything. You have no references. You have nothing to tell people that you’re going to be around the next week, the next month, the next year.
…The other mistake I made in my earlier career, in the world of overvaluation, I way undervalued my businesses and gave up too much of the equity early on.”
His top lesson from $1 to 10 million in revenue
“The mistake we made was depending on third parties more than ourselves.
We did partnerships with a lot of larger organizations to resell PaySimple, and the biggest one we did was with American Express. And we bet so heavily on them to basically make our business successful that we gave up control of our own company to the point where 80% of our new customer acquisition at one point was coming from American Express distribution, which was great until they decided they no longer wanted to be in the program.
On a Friday they told me they weren’t gonna be in the program. And on Monday, this spigot was turned off and we had to go back to rebuilding our business from almost scratch because we had bet so heavily on them to grow our business.”
His top lesson for $10 million in revenue, to infinity
“You have to be comfortable not only with constant change, but you have to be comfortable that your team that is with you at $10 million in revenue will not be with you at $50 million revenue.
You have seven or eight executives. Two, maybe three of them may scale with you post $50 million, but if you think all eight are, you’re not the right person to run your company. Because all eight of them, if they were successful building your company to $10 million—which you needed them, and they had that skillset—very few of them will be able to either A) scale to 50, 100 million or 200 million, or B) want to scale to 50, 100 million, 200 million.
And so you have to be okay as a leader letting them go because it’s not only right for the company, it’s actually right for them.”
The story behind EverCommerce
“I looked at the overall market. What I saw was a bunch of point solutions. I saw a bunch of fragmentation, and nobody was really bringing it together, connecting the dots and creating an end-to-end solution and allowing these vertical—and more importantly, these micro-vertical—businesses to be successful.
That’s why we launched EverCommerce. We launched EverCommerce to go into core verticals that we understood… and create end-to-end solutions focused on helping these businesses grow their business, run their businesses more effectively, and retain and better engage with their customers.”
Success at scale = systems + talent
“You can’t achieve anything at this scale without the systems in place to manage correctly, but more importantly, without the talent at each of these levels to execute at the levels that they’re executing at.
And you manage it and you find it and you retain it, and you create great environments so people want to be there, but ultimately it’s a collective effort with a lot of collaboration to make things successful.”
How to approach an SMB audience
“When you’re going to the lower side of the SMB marketplace, you really have to focus on these potential opportunities and potential customers almost as if you’re marketing to consumers, not a B2B sale. Because it’s really not a B2B sale. You’re helping a small business owner make their lives better.”
SMBs churn more than enterprise customers
“Enterprise customers don’t go out of business like small businesses do, so you can’t get away from the fact that no matter what you do, your gross churn in the SMB world is going to be higher.”
????️ Eric Remer Quotes
“Nobody’s going to make your company successful except for you.”
“All of a sudden it’s become sexy to both be profitable and growing a company, versus just growing at all costs.”
“You have to market to SMBs more as a consumer than as a business.”
“There is no bad media. There’s just too expensive media.”
???? Learn More
Learn more about Howard Schultz, one business leader Eric admires.
