As part of the ritual of examining local commerce and SMB Saas strategies, Localogy goes right to the source: SMBs themselves. How do they feel about marketing and operational software? What features do they want? And how has their hunger changed in a pandemic? This is all a moving target.
But as part of that exercise, we sometimes broaden the subject matter beyond traditional SMBs. In the latest Localogy study, done in collaboration with Mono Solutions, we looked specifically at freelancers. Why is this important? The Covid-driven “great resignation” has boosted the freelancer economy.
With that backdrop, who are freelancers, and what makes them tick? The report, The Freelance Channel – A Growing Reseller Resource dives in. After examining how freelancers influence their clients’ tech adoption last week, we switch gears to examine the areas where they act as resellers.
In other words, the traditional role of freelancers – everything from copywriting to graphic design – has evolved into a reseller channel for tech vendors. In other words, freelancers have been discovered as an influential and organic inroad to enterprises, thus a back door for software sales.
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Data Dive
So what did the survey uncover about freelancers’ role as resellers for tech vendors?
– The top functional area in which they’re reselling tech to their enterprise clients is accounting, HR, and payment software (40 percent)
– That’s followed by marketing software (38 percent), CRM (38 percent), communications software (32 percent), point-of-sale software (31 percent), graphic design (23 percent), and websites (23 percent).
– Stepping back, one thing that jumps out from these figures is their deviation from last week’s data, which examined the types of technology they recommend to their clients (in a non-reseller context).
– There, the top software products they recommend is marketing, CRM, and websites. This is similar to the above rankings in that marketing and CRM score high… but websites deviate.
– While websites were one of the most influential areas that freelancers recommend, it’s lowest on the list of functions that they’re selling as formal resellers. That gap could signal an opportunity.
– Other opportunities lie in areas that are tied to the type of work that freelancers do (e.g. graphic design software). Their sales effectiveness could be powerful, given their perceived credibility in these areas.
Time to Shine
Stepping back, SMB online marketing – website-based or otherwise – continues to grow rapidly. SMB SaaS startups and online services providers are correspondingly thriving as it continues to grow as a leading subsector of the broader SaaS universe. There’s a long-tail opportunity at play.
Meanwhile, new SMB SaaS users could represent permanent adopters – a concept that’s accelerated in the Covid era as SMBs are forced to boost their digital transformation. This sends them into the arms of SaaS providers to accomplish a range of marketing and operational functions.
We’ll return in the next installment to go deeper into Localogy original survey research. That will include SMB goals and success factors. Let us know what additional insights jump out at you from the above data, and stay tuned for more breakdowns in our Benchmark Bytes series.
