IDC European Vertical Markets releases a new report that clusters W. European SMBs by their IT buying approach. This study names four groups of homogeneous SMBs:
- The laggards (16%) have a basic infrastructure and limited willingness to invest in the near term.
- Wait-and-see companies (36%) have a solid deployment of IT but prefer to wait until technology is mature and widely present in the market before engaging in other significant IT investments.
- IT-oriented companies (21%) have a solid IT deployment and a high propensity to invest further.
- The fast followers (16%) cluster despite a lower-than-average adoption of IT is the most keen to close the technology gap with early adopters.
This IDC study is based on the top five W. European countries and among 1193 SMBs with 20–499 employees.
I know you are thinking: "I could've told you that and I didn't need any fancy research..."
But here's the point:
Much of the research is like Sociology. In Sociology, almost all the facts are known to you because you are an active, participating member of society. It is the organization of those facts into a structure that you can act upon that makes Sociology an enabling science.
OK, we know there are these FOUR profiles of SMB customers. But do we train our salesforce to recognize each and act accordingly? Do we code our sales database to retain that profile and sort the database for appropriate marketing activity?
That's where formally recognizing these buyer types can get useful. Give each buyer profile a name and personality to stamp it into the brains of salespeople. Larry the Laggard, Fast Freddy, Wanda Wait-and-See, and Busy Bill as the IT guy(named after our favorite Windows cleaner.)
By personalizing the profile, you move this info from Sociology to Psychology (and hopefully move it from a theory to a practice).