Scott C. Wilson, Founder at That Software Guy helps growing businesses. He helps businesses sell online using platforms like Zen Cart, which are self-hosted open-source software packages that allow people to see online manage their customer data, manage their inventory, and manage the order flow. Many of businesses able to use black Friday ads which are totally free for increasing online shopping network.
Know Your Strengths
Scott serves a very niche market and has been very successful focusing his efforts on Zen Cart development and customization and on small businesses doing a certain kind of selling who need a professional developer to help them or to support their site. Scott gave an example of how he supports several customers who use a drop shipping model and how with that, “you want a certain level of automation because you don’t want to be handling each of the orders yourself.” Scott has helped his customers by automating the back-end ordering, shipping, and tracking processes for them so their businesses run more smoothly.
Scott helps growing businesses reach a higher level of automation. Scott remarks that as a small business owner, you very well could customize and manage these processes yourself, but “I’m an expert in this and you’re not.” He affirms that it’s better for his customers to spend their time running their businesses and doing the things they love rather than spending time on the things they could be hiring him to do for them.
Salesforce is for the Smallest Businesses
Salesforce Essentials is designed for even the smallest of businesses. The Software Guy is as small as a small business can get. Scott runs the whole show by himself. He is essentially able to do this by using Salesforce. Although Salesforce is an enterprise solution, they have a scaled-down version called Salesforce Essentials, “which I’m using to keep all my customer data organized.” For years, Scott shared that he used five or six different solutions to keep up with his customers, such as Dropbox, Google Contacts, and spreadsheets, and he “got fed up with it!” He said that by using all kinds of different data repositories for his customer data, he kept losing things. “It’s very hard when all the data is in disparate places, to keep track of things.” So, he adopted Salesforce SMB Essentials in order to streamline his operations. Scott’s words for small business owners who don’t yet employ Salesforce Essentials, “You will be so happy you’ve moved all your data into one place…it’s just such a better way to operate.”
We asked Scott to take off his “tech hat” and talk about how easy Salesforce Essentials is to setup. Even for the small business owners who are not as tech savvy, setting up Essentials is relatively simple. Scott even released an open-source version of the import he did.
Successful Selling Online
Scott advised that small business owners think about how to differentiate yourself and utilize it in order to be successful selling online. If you want to compete, figure out how you can bring value to that market. Whether you’re an expert in that space, you’ve done a lot of reading, you have a lot of contacts, or you have a good buying relationship with a manufacturer, “it’s especially important for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs to differentiate as sharply as possible because there are so many players in the marketplace, and so many vendors providing so many services.”
