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MARKET SNAPSHOT
- There are 27.9M small businesses in the U.S.
- There are over 13M wage and salary sales workers in the U.S. as of 2010.
- The largest four industries utilizing CRM software are: Education, Manufacturing, Retail & Wholesale and Utilities.
- North America currently is the largest CRM market, reaching $10B in sales so far for 2012.
Addressable Market
Symbiosis’ addressable market consists of small businesses – and the wage and salary sales workers of these businesses – that need a CRM system that organizes their customers’ information easily and effectively while increasing sales volume and revenue.

Small Businesses – Market Size
The Small Business Association (SBA) defines a small business as having fewer than 500 employees, though there is some slight variance in this definition depending on the industry. According to the SBA’s most recent published data, there were 27.9M million businesses in the U.S in 2010 and only 18.5K businesses with 500 employees or more. Small businesses with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.9% of total firms and 99.7% of all employer firms. Small businesses employ half of all private sector employees and pay 44% of total U.S. private payroll.
Wage and Salary Sales Workers – Market Size
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor of Statistics, there were over 13M wage and salary sales workers in the U.S. in 2010. The following table provides information about select U.S. sales occupations in 2010:
Sales representatives (wholesale and manufacturing, except technical and scientific products) |
1,367,210 |
$52,440 |
Sales representatives (services, all other) |
531,410 |
$50,620 |
Sales representatives (wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products) |
381,080 |
$73,710 |
Insurance sales agents |
318,800 |
$46,770 |
Securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents |
276,290 |
$70,190 |
Real estate sales agents |
153,740 |
$40,030 |
Advertising sales agents |
145,160 |
$45,350 |
Sales engineers |
66,060 |
$87,390 |
Real estate brokers |
41,210 |
$54,910 |
While there are numerous occupations within the sales industry, most occupations fall into the education, manufacturing, retail & wholesale or utilities categories. Manufacturing and retail sales occupations have the highest number of employees, with 1.3M spread across the nation. Service sales representatives generally fall under the utility or education category, as such sales representatives generally sell consulting services, telecommunication services or other service based solutions such as insurance or finance advice.
B2B Market Segmentation
Symbiosis will specifically target the education, manufacturing, retail & wholesale and utilities industries as these are the largest markets that utilize CRM systems. The following table provides information on these industries:*
Industry Need for CRM |
Allow institutions to build stronger relationships with students and other constituents. Institutions are targeting admissions and enrolment, student services and financial aid as the areas driving CRM investment. |
Provides the basis to respond to a new customer-centric, customer driven business model and integrate multiple partner channels for a holistic customer view. |
Provide complex pricing and promotions, sophisticated discounting permutations, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and bar code scanning, real-time integration with Point of Sales (POS), terminals and extended integration with Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems. |
Provides increased workflow automation, electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP), self-service, mobile field service and CRM analytics in order to respond to external pressures. |
Types of CRM Utilized |
Oracle’s PeopleSoft, SunGard, SAP, Oracle, Talisma, Onyx and RightNow. |
Siebel Systems, SAP, Oracle, Avaya, Dendrite, Genesys, SSA, QAD, Fair Issac, Pivotal, Infor and Microsoft. |
Reynolds and Reynolds, SAP, Avaya, Lawson, Fair Issac, Oracle, Genesys, Omniture and Siebel Systems. |
Siebel Systems, SAP Aspect Software, SPL WorldGroup, Avaya, Genesys and Oracle (without Siebel). |
Company Examples |
Colleges and Universities in both North America and Europe. |
Kawasaki Motors, Brandrud Furniture and Milacron. |
IBM, Alta Resources, Three Rivers Pharmaceuticals, BlueCross BlueShield and American Airlines. |
America Online, Gaz Metropolitan Plus and AGL Resources. |
*All information was taken from CRM Forecast Industry Solutions 2012.
Ideal Customer Profile
The Ideal Customer for Symbiosis is a small business owner with a company of 1-100 employees, or an employee within such a company that makes purchasing decisions. These are small businesses that consistently build and maintain positive relationships with leads, clients and partners in order to be successful.

These businesses have a major challenge managing the dozens or hundreds of relationships they form, and mismanaging or losing these connections often leads directly to lost sales and revenue. In order to fix this problem, these businesses use a variety of systems, including email, calendars, to do lists, and more, but would prefer an easy to use system that has all of this included, and is more intuitive to use. Many of these business owners are also looking for more functionality than a simple contact manager, calendar or to do list. They want to add information about their contacts that will be used to effectively measure the efficiency of their sales and marketing efforts, and better understand the financial impact of their relationships. Many of these small businesses have also attempted to use Customer Relationship Management services such as Batchbook or Sugar CRM, but have found that they are too cumbersome and time consuming to be effective for their needs. These business owners would also like tools and features that will improve their employees success rates such as gaming mechanics and lead generation tools.
These small businesses are also very budget conscious, and they are unable to hire another employee or purchase expensive customized software to handle these needs. Although online CRM systems are inexpensive compared to these alternatives, these small businesses are price sensitive when comparing their choices.
When they use Symbiosis, these ideal clients are impressed with by the small amount of time that it takes to perform functions, like entering a contact or creating a report. The innovative gaming, tagging and report building systems allows users to analyze information quickly and intuitively, which is a huge value to the small business owner, who knows this information is critical but doesn’t have much time to spend finding it. The small business owner also appreciates the pricing of Symbiosis, which is designed to accommodate even very small businesses, and continue to be affordable as they grow.
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