Colom Newbie

A survey carried out recently by a leading sales and marketing coach showed some shocking and in some cases rather concerning results about the 2009 marketing plans for small technology businesses in the UK.

Overall, the 2009 technology sales and marketing survey found that for the most part, smaller, owner-managed technology companies in the UK arent helping themselves as much as they could be doing in these adverse economic times.

The survey contained five main questions and was filled out by 176 small UK technology businesses. It was designed to measure the affect of the recession on their businesses to find out how they planned to market themselves in the coming year. Everyone who filled the form out expected a fall in turnover, the vast majority were going to be looking for new customers and most of them were expecting around a quarter of their sales to come from these new customers.

It was discovered that web service providers had cut most staff and were also the ones reducing marketing spend. This suggests those in this sector have felt the pain more than most but by reducing marketing activities demonstrates great short-sightedness, as it is recognised that those who continue to actively market themselves will be the ones who will emerge from the recession in the best shape. These businesses should be doing more marketing " not less.

It was also fairly concerning to learn that these small businesses were far too reliant on the personal approach, quoting referrals as their most frequent method of attracting new business " and shying away from web and electronic forms of marketing.

Ironically, it seems that it is these technology companies that are not making the most of the Internet. Yet this is a simple fix and e-marketing programmes can be initiated very quickly. Im not advocating that personal contacts should be abandoned but companies cannot afford to ignore the other marketing options open to them " especially in these difficult times.

So the main finding from this survey was that a lot of these technology companies are drastically cutting their spend on marketing, even though we can see from past recessions that the companies who carry on marketing themselves will some out on top in the future.