Selling to Small Businesses

In place of offshoring work, large companies are turning to home based workers, according to a recent study by research firm IDC: Today, there are an estimated 112,000 home-based phone representatives in the United States. By 2010, IDC predicts that number could reach over 300,000 as companies increasingly develop and invest in home-based agents, either [...]

Back in mid-November 2005, Google announced that its Urchin website analytic product would be free to AdWords advertisers and smaller websites, re-branded as Google Analytics.  The tool that once had been $495 per month, now cost nothing.  It sounded like a pretty big deal for the small business market.  I wanted to test my assumption, and so I promised [...]

Any vendor that sells computer equipment – even software – to small businesses, or wants to increase sales to this group, must read Walt Mossberg’s column today in the Wall Street Journal.  Entitled “Computer Makers Cater to Big Business, Slight the Rest of Us,” it is available as a free access article. He points out how most of the computer industry is missing [...]

I’ll make just one more post about Microsoft this week because the topic is important to the SMB market.    Microsoft is reaching out to accountants:  “…Microsoft announces that Accounting Professionals can officially sign up for the Microsoft Professional Accountants Network (MPAN).A big incentive for Microsoft to create MPAN is because of the release of Microsoft’s Small [...]

Three companies “own” the SMB market in the U.S. for accounting software packages. Intuit’s Quicken (and QuickBooks and Quicken Online) products dominate overall, especially at the smaller end (under 20 employees).  Best Software’s Peachtree has a foothold at the larger end of small business.  And Microsoft dominates the midsize business market (500 – 1000 employees). That’s according to [...]