As part of the ritual of examining local commerce and SMB Saas strategies, Localogy goes right to the source: SMBs themselves. How do they feel about marketing and operational software? What features do they want? And how has their hunger changed in a pandemic? This is all a moving target.
Localogy’s Modern Commerce Monitor (MCM) answers these and other questions across the SMB SaaS product set, which we preview in this Benchmark Bytes series. And we recently entered a new chapter of this series, with highlights from the latest wave (8.0) of Modern Commerce Monitor.
After examining the degree to which SMBs plan to buy or increase spending on SaaS products last week, we switch gears this week to examine the specific functions they plan to adopt. This includes key SaaS categories such as CRM, finance, operations, human resources, supply-chain services, and marketing.
Data Dive
– Diving right in, the leading categories are a three-way tie between human resource solutions (including payroll), CRM, and supply-chain services.
– Taking those one at a time, human resources and payroll are mission critical functions for business operations.
– On to CRM, it’s become a valued feature for sales & marketing, elevated in the past decade by Salesforce.
– As for supply chain services, these gained importance over the past few years given supply-chain shortages and challenges for SMBs.
– Trailing closely behind the above categories is marketing & advertising solutions at 39 percent of SMB responses.
– Finance and operations trails behind at 32 percent.
– This is surprising due to the importance and SMB dependence of finance and operations software.
–The relatively low rating for this category could be due to its already-saturated state among SMBs.
– As we examined in a previous installment of this series, finance and operations software ramped up during the “covid boom.” So one possibility is that adoption inflection fullfilled SMB demand so now they’re all set and less driven to fill this functional need.
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Long-Tail Opportunity
Stepping back, SMB online marketing – as well as operational and fintech tools – continues to grow rapidly. SMB SaaS startups and online services providers are correspondingly thriving as it continues to grow as a leading subsector of the broader SaaS universe. There’s a long-tail opportunity at play.
Meanwhile, new SMB SaaS users could represent permanent adopters – a concept that accelerated in the Covid era as SMBs were forced into digital transformation. This sent them into the arms of SaaS providers (where many have stayed) to accomplish a range of marketing and operational functions.
We’ll return in the next installment to go deeper into Localogy original survey research. That will include SMB goals and success factors. Let us know what additional insights jump out at you from the above data, and stay tuned for more breakdowns in our Benchmark Bytes series.
