Small and medium businesses are beefing up their investment in IT to increase productivity and to win new orders. Fresh research from finance provider, GE Capital, shows that SMBs are earmarking an average of £30,000 to spend on IT skills and services in 2011.
But SMBs are notoriously tough to please and will need convincing before hiring or embarking on new projects. Jobseekers and IT professionals, heed the following expert advice, and check how to talk IT with the micro-business owner and the topics that interest.
Tactics for talking IT with SMBs
Make your IT proposal in 60 seconds
Don’t explain every little feature and function, just what it is you do (or are suggesting) and why your employer should care. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking they care about how technology works. He - or she - just wants to know about the problem that technology will fix or the opportunity it will create.
Make presentations acronym-free
Industry acronyms are often indecipherable to many SMBs. If you riddle your presentations with this stuff, it indicates you’re thinking from an industry-centric place, instead of a customer-centric one. There's an easy fix for this one. Put anything you present through a spell-check first, and always spell out any acronym the first time you use it.
Speak in plain English
It can be tough to break down complex or new technology solutions into simple terms and even harder to resist trying to make stuff sound overly exciting. But unless the managing director can understand what you’re suggesting, they’ll be unlikely to listen to what you have to say, let alone approve it.
Laurie McCabe, partner,
SMB Group
Technology trends
The future is mobile
SMB Group’s 2010 Mobile Solutions Study reveals SMB plans for mobile web sites, payments, product and service tracking, document sharing and sales support this year. As SMBs become more dependent on mobile commerce, they will also look for ways to integrate mobile commerce with existing systems.
App stores a key information source
SMBs have relied on search engines, vendor emails and websites to research technology requirements and keep up to date. App stores are the next thing and provide user-generated ratings, single-sign on access to apps and integration capabilities. Google Apps Marketplace, Intuit’s Workplace, GetApp.com, Constant Contact Marketplace and Zoho Marketplace are a few app store destinations for SMBs.
Hybrid computing favoured
Even as SMBs embrace cloud computing, they will continue to use software packages. For the foreseeable future, most SMBs will need to combine on-premise and cloud solutions in a hybrid computing approach. More mid-size businesses will also consider cloud-enabled high availability and disaster recovery solutions, which until now, have been desirable, but largely unaffordable for SMBs.
Source, The SMB Group
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