It’s been nearly a year and a half since the pandemic first pushed us into lockdown and changed the trajectory of 2020. Fortunately, we are now well on our way towards some semblance of normalcy, and businesses are starting to recover. As we make progress towards exiting from the pandemic, we thought it would be insightful to see how SMB technology usage has changed from the start of the pandemic to now, as we transition out.
To that end, we are going to release in a few months a new report, refreshing some of the data we gathered at the start of the pandemic. But in the meantime, we want to reflect on some of our findings from the last report, so we could see the differences between now and then. So we’re beginning a blog series where we review what happened a year ago, and each week, we’ll look at a couple of different categories at a time.
If you think about what two categories probably had massive changes as the world moved to a work-from-home environment, it was video conferencing and team messaging. When we release our updated report, it will be interesting to see how these adoption characteristics have changed in the past year, and how much SMBs plan to have them stick.
If you recall, we conducted a survey of small business owners a couple of months into the pandemic. We had 339 US small business owners complete the survey between April 2-16, 2020. The respondents were decision-makers at their businesses, aged 22-69. To qualify, the firms had to have revenues of at least $30k and have no more than 99 employees. The survey was accurate to within +/- 5.3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
Here were some of the findings:
Less than 40% of SMBs were in the market for a video conferencing solution.
This was true across most revenue bands.
Businesses that generate a higher proportion of their revenue from online sales were more likely to be in the market for video conferencing solutions.
Interestingly, SMBs that tend to sell more often to other businesses (e.g., manufacturing, wholesale, construction) indexed higher on likely shopping for video conferencing software, while retail SMBs indexed lower.
Approximately one in five SMBs expressed interest in shopping for team messaging solutions, such as Slack. There were interesting differences by employee size, whether a firm is more online-sales focused, and by the type of industry in which they operate.
As expected, team messaging solutions were more to be shopped by businesses with more employees.
Interest in shopping for messaging solutions was significantly higher among online-focused SMBs.
Firms in the financial industry or in retail were twice as likely as SMBs in other industries to indicate they were going to shop for team messaging solutions.
Here is a screenshot of some of the data. Percentages reflect the portion who answered “yes” to the question, “Please indicate whether you are likely to shop during the next 3 to 6 months for any of the following types of business software solutions.”
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