While business technology solutions are important, some are an industry-wide focus. A recent survey by Techaisle, a market research, and industry analysis organization, evaluated the top concerns of small-to-medium-sized businesses for the coming year. Here are a few telling trends regarding the current priorities that SMBs.
Techaisle collected and consolidated data to identify where SMBs specifically saw their biggest business issues, technology challenges, and priorities. Let’s see if your internal priorities and concerns match up to theirs.
SMB Issues
According to the survey, a small business’ largest concerns are:
1. Attracting and retaining new customers
2. Increasing profitability
3. Increasing business growth
The areas of least concern were identified as:
1. Improving workplace productivity
2. Improving the effectiveness of sales and marketing
3. Focusing on new markets
Priorities and Challenges
The trends in priorities that the surveyed small businesses presented were clear. It’s interesting how directly these priorities line up with the IT challenges that these businesses face.
Here are the top four priorities/challenges:
1. Cloud / Cloud security
2. Mobility solutions / Customer experience
3. Collaboration / Maintaining current IT infrastructure
4. Managed services / Budget constraints
What This Means to Small Business
It looks like businesses largely see how they can use information technology to help address their biggest concerns. By leveraging innovative IT services like cloud solutions and managed services, businesses can increase their profitability, productivity, and growth.
The IT challenges that the surveyed businesses specified can be resolved by implementing the solutions they prioritized. Obviously, since the cloud ranks as the number-one priority, cloud security is the most challenging problem. Similarly, with customer service standards to uphold, mobile solutions that help the team to collaborate efficiently become a priority.
Finally, budgetary limitations and maintenance requirements play even more deeply into the adoption of managed IT services.
Managed service providers like Quikteks can provide a wide range of services to a business at a very manageable price, and we’d be happy to discuss it with you further. Got questions? Give the professionals at Quikteks a call today at (973) 882-4644. We can help.