Many of us think that it is the big companies like Cisco, IBM, WalMart, Apple, Disney and others that drive our economy. The reality, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), is that small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) make up 99.7 percent of all employers, employ nearly 50 percent of all private-sector workers and create 63 percent of the net new private-sector jobs in the country.
Like the rest of the world, SMBs have changed in the last five to seven years. Driving much of the change is the mature arrival of cloud, the full arrival of digitization, the need for sophisticated cyber security, as well as the need for all businesses to compete with artificial intelligence and prescriptive and predictive analytics. Today’s SMBs have the same big needs as the enterprise.
And, those SMB owners and employees wear a lot of hats. Consider that, according to the SBA, 66% of SMB owners and leaders are personally responsible for three or more of the following areas of their business:
• operations
• finance
• sales
• marketing
• human resources
• customer service
• product development
• IT
To get all that done, the SVA found that SMB teams spend – on average – 23% of their workdays manually inputting data. So, while many SMBs want – and, truly, must – adopt new technologies to become more efficient and effective (not to mention to meet regulatory requirements, secure their information and grow their business), they often find that the folks who sell the technology they want aren’t equipped to sell to an SMB.
Yes, both ironically and paradoxically, the SMB market, despite its size and needs, continues and remains to be underserved or unserved by most large technology companies. It’s not that they don’t want to get to the SMB space in a meaningful and relevant way, but that they aren’t equipped to make that size of a sale. SYNNEX and Comstor are, on the other hand.
For the past decade, Comstor has created SMB-sized value offerings that meet the big needs facing today’s SMBs. We have very mature, customized, scalable and codified programs, and resources and assets that are specifically designed for the SMB, from the small, medium and large “S,” all the way up to the small, medium and large “M” in the space.
We also have a series of events, such as Red, White and You, the Varnex Summit and the CloudSolv Road Show, and this new section of EDGE360 dedicated to educating and communicating with SMBs. And the major vendors know this is where we play, because we have organically been designing and codifying, reiterating and refining our SMB offers for years. Vendors, such as Cisco, work with us because they know we can meet the needs of the SMB space in a way they cannot.
I am looking forward to sharing more about SMBs and all that Comstor SYNNEX offers to those who want to sell into the space in the coming months.
