Adventures in Global Strategery

As my research progresses and I dig into the world of small business, I have noticed a rather massive communication divide that would easily eclipse even the polarized world of US politics.

I know, big words. Especially for anyone living in the US and unafraid to switch their TV on.

Let me illustrate my point with two examples, one from the Life Sciences world and another from the corporate & executive training space. Names and urls have been hidden to protect the misguided.

This came in the mail this week, to my neighbor’s workplace. She’s a nurse practitioner specializing in Cancer.

With great respect to what I would say can be fairly described as a marketing challenge, I have to ask, is this editorial tone eliciting the desired result? If, like I did, you are having trouble holding back a couple guilt-ridden giggles, I would say the answer is no. Note, I live in Seattle and note, it’s not hot here.

The second example came to my Lionbridge email inbox. I promptly forwarded it to a half-dozen of my colleagues and we sighed a collective (albeit virtual) sigh and dare I say, exchanged a few smiles too.

Among other things, the training aimed to combat the “self-inflicted pitfalls” that women need to know about, such as an unchecked desire to play fair, being too nice and yes, smiling too much.

Meanwhile, here’s a few things happening in the world of small business. While the definition of small business varies by country and industry, a few trends among all kinds of businesses classified as “small” are:

• a steady increase in home workers (in the US, 52 percent of all small businesses are home-based)
• a growing number of micro-businesses (1-3 employees)
• a massive growth rate in the number of women-owned firms (in the US, nearly twice that of all firms, 17% vs. 9%, between 1997 and 2004).

The imagery that starts to take shape is more similar to a small, tight-knit family than anything we’ve ever seen in cubicle land. These are environments where a considerable amount of time is spent working from home, juggling children, colleagues and clients in the same context. Communication is therefore inherently familial, casual, human. Which is no surprise when you see what entrepreneurs are reading. Think of the editorial tone of Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Robert Scoble; this is accessible material, early signs of an attempt to demystify business and communicate with common sense terms.

As I compare the growing body of content written for and by and entrepreneurs to the two different but equally misguided examples provided above, I can’t help but wonder if the communication strategies that we use in the corporate world serve to distance us from the people we’re selling to. Are we creating a great communication divide?

So I say…go ahead, smile!

Communicating with the small enterprise matters, and not only if you sell services or build products for them. It matters because with small businesses producing 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms (patents that are  twice as likely to be among the one percent most cited), communicating in a way that resonates more broadly is critical for any business that relies on innovation to survive. Which is to say, any businesses, in any domain.

Is it just me or is every one you bump into these days launching (usually bootstrapping) a new business?

Turns out 99% of all businesses in the US are small (500 employees or less), but they represent only slightly more than half of all private sector employees and pay only 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll. Moreover most of these businesses are short lived, with only about half surviving into their 5th year.

Makes you wonder what on earth people are thinking, doesn’t it?

But it wouldn’t be a recession if we didn’t see growth in this space, and in fact looking at the numbers from another perspective, the story they tell is not all that abysmal. Most notably, small enterprise accounted for over 60% (more than 14.5 million) net new jobs between 1993 and 2008 and make up 97% of all identified exporters.

So I think it is no stretch of the imagination to propose that economic recovery, at a global level, relies heavily on our friend, the small business owner.

And the mid to large size businesses of the world know this, here’s a quick and dirty list of some visible moves towards the small business customer:

• MSFT gearing their bread and butter products like Office towards the small enterprise
• HP targetting their online sales to the specific needs of the small business owner
• American express focusing on customer service and making their offering flexible to better align with small business needs
• Some health insurers are even starting to target rather than avoid our smaller, entrepreneurial friends
• We at Lionbridge, long focusing primarily on the large enterprise, are now also playing in this space with Translation Workspace

As a former start-up owner, I like to think I have strong entrepreneurial chops, but the fact is I’m into my second decade of working with large enterprise customers and as my business shifts its focus to include the small and medium business sector, I’m realizing I’ve got some learning to do! In the coming weeks I’ll be documenting my learning process and mainly focusing on how this space is different, and how those of us looking to serve them need to adapt and accommodate for those differences.

What do you think makes a small business buyer unique?