SMALL BIZ ADVICE
What would you ask Michael?
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730

Let Home customers know it's OK to buy from the Business section and vice versa.

730 points posted to Advertising and Marketing, Sales Strategies, Small Business by jmxz May 7

From a conversation with Dell's robert_p, under a different Idea it seems that "Home" customers are welcome to buy from Dell's "Small & Medium Business" section, and Dell's "small and/or medium business" customers are welcome to buy from Dell's "Home & Home Office" section.

This is very useful since often computers in the "Small Business" section may be more appropriate for home use (the Latitude's light weight and reliability make it a great college computer); and often computers in the "Home" section may be more appropriate for office use (where the better graphics options in Home are valuable for graphical visualization). It's also useful because an identically-spec'd system may be cheaper the Home Section one week, and then be cheaper in the Small Business section the next.

I think many Dell Business and Home customers are missing out on the best deals and failing to find machines that meet their needs because the home user's are afraid of falsely claiming to be a business and because the business customers are afraid of falsely claiming to by buying systems for personal use.

So a few ideas:

1. Assuming robert_p's right in saying Home Customers are welcome to buy from Small Business - add links to the Home product pages saying "If you don't see what you need here, check out Dell's Small Business section. You're welcome to buy those for Home use too".
2. Assuming robert_p's right in saying Small Business are welcome to buy from the Home section - add links to the Small Business product pages saying "If you don't see what you need here, check out Dell's Home section. You're welcome to buy those for Business Use too".
3. Extrapolating - if it's also OK for Home an Small Biz customers to buy from Dell's "Large Business" and "Government, Education, Healthcare & Life Sciences" section, add those links too.
4. Make a price comparison engine that compares the prices of an identically spec'd system from each of Dell's sections so I don't have to manually dig through all of your painful to navigate website sections to compare Home vs Small Business myself.

jeffbx
May 29		 Agreed - this seems to be a point of contention only within Dell. I've had my medium/large account manager flat out tell me that he couldn't match the prices on the small biz site because they were below his cost. I suppose it's Dell's business if they want to separate the P&Ls of each business unit internally, but just so you guys know, it does NOT look good to the customers when stuff like that comes up.
jaws4096
Jun 7		 The real problem seems to be that Dell is trying to classify users in ways that they would never classify themselves. Ask me what I'm going to actually use my PC for (in terms of actual applications, not general ideas like "research") or let me build it option-by-option - stop trying to get users to fit your ideas about what they need.
 
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