Which of the following is the biggest priority for your business?
Together with the B2B application discovery GetApp, Loc8 decided to conduct a survey to better understand small business’s needs.
We’ve asked over 500 Small/Medium Business Owners and Managers across different age categories and salary caps to tell us about the biggest priorities for their businesses. We were interested in having information regarding their concerns about retaining customers, reducing costs, improving IT infrastructure, tracking workflow, spending time on admin and invoicing process.
The survey gives us some interesting data which help to identify the undeniable need for business to be helped and supported by a third party such as software.
The Audience
A wide range of people have been interviewed for this study; 47% of females and 53% of males across various ages and with inferred incomes going from $0-24K to $150K+.
Despite the high diversity of the target audience, we will see that they have one main priority for their businesses!
The Results
More than half of businesses are most concerned about attracting and retaining clients, followed by reducing costs and Improving software and IT infrastructure.
This result is no surprise as customers are a key asset to any business and obtaining new ones and keeping the current ones is essential; without customers, a product has no purpose and a service can’t exist.
Acquiring customers is one thing but retaining them is another challenge entirely. Indeed, customer loyalty is one of the most difficult objectives to achieve and yet a key priority for business; the Harvard Business Review explains that the acquisition of a new customer is 25 times costlier than retaining an existing one. According to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits from 25% to 95%.
Retaining customers requires a solid short and long term strategy. There are different ways to be successful in achieving this task however, the main one is to design a solution that responds to customers’ needs and make this solution adaptable and scalable if these needs evolve.
The Striking Point
It is interesting to note that improving software and IT infrastructure is more of a priority than getting paid faster!
How can we interpret this figure?
More and more companies have understood that a lot of their operations and daily tasks can be improved by using the right software. The acquisition of software is a strategic investment that allows businesses to fully focus on their core activity and increase productivity.
If getting paid faster comes after IT improvement, it’s in large part because these business owners know that the use of software can enable a faster end to end billing cycle. The same thing applies with tracking the workflow and reducing the time spent on admin; that same software can help them to improve these aspects of their businesses.
GetApp summary: “Attracting and retaining clients” tops list of small business priorities for 2017.
