The German analyst firm techconsult sent me an English-language version of a lead chart from their latest survey of SME businesses in Germany. “The prospects for the coming three months have deteriorated drastically” says Verena Bunk, a techconsult analyst. It’s fascinating for two more reasons: first, SMEs seem to be great at forecasting; second, they expect IT spending to rise even though their turnover (that’s revenue, to you Americans) falls. That might be naïve.
With both series, the dotted-line forecasts are excellent at describing the direction of trends (of course exactly depth and extent of trends is almost impossible to forecast). As always, this shows the power of traditional market research approaches as a supplement to qualitative analysis.
But the surprise for me is that while revenue is trending up, SMEs are still increasing their investment in IT even though they expect revenues to fall. That says to me that providers selling into the German SME market have a narrow window of opportunity to close deals in the region before falling revenue makes people reconsider. If the German market matters to you, give Sven Litke or Samyr Jriri a call to find out how to accelerate your sales.
