smb acceleration of technology

Many SMBs say their business survived the pandemic because of digitization

In the fifth edition of Salesforce’s “Small and Medium Business Trends”, it’s clear businesses are embracing the acceleration of technology. More and more small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are convinced their survival depends on it. Responses from more than 2,500 SMB owners and leaders around the world showed:

• Support from local communities desperately helped many SMBs

• SMBs are prioritizing their efforts to deepen trust with customers and employees

• Technology helped many SMBs sustain and even grow their businesses

• Changes over the past year including investments in technology will continue to positively impact SMBs over the long-term

The survey was conducted online by The Harris Poll for Salesforce in June/July 2021. Owners or senior executives at businesses with 200 or less employees and annual revenues less than $1 billion were surveyed. Check out the infographic summarizing the digital technology trends from the report.

Despite ongoing restrictions of in-person patronage, communities rallied in support of SMBs. As a result, SMBs responded by getting their businesses online so that customers can shop from the comfort of home. While most SMBs had at least some of their operations online, many made significant moves online in the past year. The reason? For most it was the safety and convenience of their customers and employees.

It’s clear that technology has made a big difference for SMBs.  Most growing SMBs said their businesses survived the pandemic because of technology. And the investment in technology is not slowing down. Many growing SMBs have accelerated their efforts to realize benefits of increased productivity, enhanced flexibility, and increased data security.

More than 60% of SMB leaders said their businesses would not have survived the pandemic using technology a decade ago. There’s no doubt that tech usage saw an increase. It was further spurred on after a year of remote work and optimizing online customer experiences.

The technologies that SMBs continued to invest in were –

• customer service software
• email marketing software 
• eCommerce software 

Project/collaboration tools saw the biggest increase. Now nearly 60% growing SMBs use each of these tools. Plus, more than half accelerated investments specifically in sales and customer service technology.

With the investments made in the past year, SMBs feel they are stronger and more efficient than ever before. 75% of SMB leaders believe the changes they made will continue to benefit them. In fact, many are intending to make many of them permanent.