A lot of big companies will ignore you, and basically pretend you dont exist if you are a small company wanting to deal with them. Big publishers often don’t even dignify my emails with a response (you know who you are!). Some advertisers won’t deal with me “unless your budget is at least $10k a month”. I imagine some very testosterone fuelled executives get very aroused at the thought of being so l33t they don’t deal with small fry nobodies spending less than that.
But I know some companies who have built very efficient systems that let them deal with very small fry, and make a fortune from it:
Google adwords
Amazon
Ebay
Paypal
Granted, this isn’t so much business to business (b2b) but consumer facing stuff, but if it can be done for the consumer why not the small business? Adwords deals with mega-corps, and the little guy like me. I know some people who spend a dollar a month there, I spend many hundreds of dollars a month. Its’s all money, and those dollars add up. Plus, when the small fry start getting big, they remember who their friends are, and who helped them up the ladder.
Some company who won’t deal with positech because we are too small is like me not selling you a game unless you will spend $200. When you buy a game from me, it’s automated, I don’t do anything on a per-order basis. Welcome to 2008, where automated scripts and computers make the cost per transaction close to zero. Has everyone re-engineered their company philosophy to deal with that? because google have. Maybe I have better processes in place than some of those big mega corps that won’t do business with me?