This week marks the 50th annual celebration of National Small Business Week, officially recognized by the President of the United States to highlight the important contributions made by the entrepreneurs, startup founders and small business owners of America. There are more than 28 million small businesses in the country, and more than half of all American workers either own or work for a small business. Small businesses are also on the forefront of the recent employment positive momentum, as they create about two out of every three new jobs in the U.S. each year. Clearly, small businesses represent a critical element of the American company, and InsightSquared couldn’t be prouder to support these companies.
“Small businesses are the backbone of the economy,” our CEO Frederick Shilmover said in a recent interview. “We are not a ‘big data’ company. All our customers have small – but challenging – data to work with.”
One of our most important company goals is to disrupt the pre-existing Business Intelligence and sales analytics market – one that primarily relies on expensive legacy solutions – and level the playing field for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Many small businesses can’t afford expensive and complicated BI platforms, putting them at a competitive disadvantage behind larger companies who leverage the actionable insights extracted from using the costly BI software.
The pre-existing market for BI specifically targeted larger enterprises with massive sales forces, blithely ignoring the small business that has only 2 sales reps. The prevailing thought was that with so few sales reps running such a small sales operation, there were very few actionable insights that could even be derived from conducting substantial in-depth analysis and reporting. Eventually, small businesses tired of this archaic form of thinking and sought out a solution that could give them a fighting chance against big enterprises.
That’s where InsightSquared comes in. Our product is an affordable, out-of-the-box solution designed precisely with small business owners in mind. These entrepreneurs might not have the resources or economies of scale to justify expensive legacy BI platforms, nor the time and expertise to devote to in-depth sales reporting and analysis. By using InsightSquared, they can gain access to the same reporting and sales analytics capabilities for Salesforce.com, without having to make costly investments of valuable company resources or a sales manager’s time. They can even take advantage of our growing number of free applications – including a Sales Funnel Report and a Sales Grader – to see where they need to devote the most effort and resources to improve their sales operations.
“InsightSquared is an innovator who brings the power of traditional enterprise-class business intelligence platforms to the small and mid-market businesses,” said Court Cunningham, the CEO of Yodle and a member of InsightSquared’s Board of Directors. “They are fundamentally levelling the playing field by offering a business analytics product that is truly simple and affordable.”
Don’t get left behind the competition just because you are currently competing on a playing field that is not level. Celebrate National Small Business Week by taking YOUR small business to the cutting-edge of sales analytics and reporting, and start bridging the gap between small and large businesses.
