Shorthand

The other day, I got an e-mail from a friend and former colleague.

“Do you think that companies think of themselves as SMBs?” he asked.

He asked because his company is planning a campaign aimed at SMBs, and they were having an internal debate on whether to use the acronym SMB in their campaign.

My advice was: DON’T.

I have no science to back up my advice, other than a gut sense that companies don’t think of themselves that way. Marketers do. Analysts do. Editors do. And we use this shorthand categorization to communicate with each other. Sure, I might ask the Gartner group analyst I’m briefing for her definition SMB, which may or may not be consistent with the one I have in mind in terms of revenue or number of employees. But when one of “us” says SMB, we at least know that we’re talking about small and mid-size (or medium) business.

But do SMB’s think of themselves that way?

Small business, yes. Mid-size business, yet. But SMB - probably not. And if SMB’s don’t think of themselves as SMB’s, us marketers should take that into consideration, shouldn’t we?

Most marketers apparently do.

I did a quick, unscientific rummage around the ‘net to see how tech companies referred to their SMB customers. For SAP, it’s small and mid-size companies. For Microsoft, it’s small and midsize business. IBM prefers small and medium business, and Cisco ignores the “M’s” entirely, but does speak to small business.

Now, there’s nothing inherently condescending or negative about using the term “SMB”. But if it’s marketing’s responsibility to communicate, then surely we need to communicate to our customers and prospects in a way that they’ll find understandable. Nothing like having a prospect ignore your communication because they don’t recognize who the heck you’re talking about. (’Oh, they’re selling to something called an SMB. Whatever that is. I’m just a small business.’)

My old friend is asking the right question here, that’s for sure. It’s always tempting to assume that just because some of use shorthand to talk about our markets, our prospects themselves may think of themselves in longhand terms.

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