Nearly half of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have adopted cloud-based tools in at least one area of their businesses and many more will over the next 12 to 18 months. As SaaS businesses establish trust with their SMB customers they will expand into adjacent services, including local marketing.

This shift to the cloud may be the most disruptive trend yet facing local media sellers. For that reason, LSA developed a new quantitative tracking study called the Tech Adoption Index (TAI), sponsored by Dex Media and Google. The TAI is designed to measure the SMB market’s shift to cloud-based services through a bi-annual survey of 1,000 SMBs in each wave.

In a recent webinar, LSA’s Charles Laughlin and Advisor Neal Polachek shared top-line results from the first TAI wave. Here are some of the takeaways from the webinar:

• Enterprise technology is increasingly being scaled down to serve small businesses.
• The estimated worldwide SMB SaaS revenue is $10 billion.
• 32% of small biz have adopted tech for customer relationship management (CRM), 25% for payroll and other human resource solutions.
• Small biz only spend 36% of their time actually providing services to customers.
• 57% of SMBs are “comfortable” with existing tech & tools.
• 60% would prefer to work with a single provider of software and technology services vs. many different providers.

The goal of the research is to help SMB providers use the data to make strategic businesses decisions as it relates to product development, competitive differentiation and growth strategies. For the entire discussion, view the video below.