Originally published January 18, 2010

Being a Small Business:  Part 1
Part 2 | Part 3

The other day, an Account Executive and I were talking with a prospect about testing their voice systems.  The customer asked an interesting question.  Why should my company do business with a small company like IQ Services?  Of course, we’ve heard this question before and we have a response (which we’ll share in an upcoming blog post) that usually allays any concerns our prospects might have.   But what I find most interesting about this question is that we – IQ Services employees and management alike – don’t think of ourselves as a small company.   Yes, we fit the definition in terms of employee count and in terms of the many hats you get to wear when you work for a small company.  But it doesn’t feel that way.  It got me thinking about why.

Is it because so many of our customers are on the Fortune 500 list?  Is it because we’ve served hundreds and hundreds of customers with communications technology that supports just a handful to hundreds of thousands of transactions per day?  Or is it because we deliver services all over the world including North America, EMEA, CALA and Asia/Pacific?   Is it because we are able to test with 20,000+ concurrent telephone calls or unlimited browsers?  Or that we have distributed facilities for generating millions of monitoring transactions?

When I look at the ability of small (albeit talented and dedicated) group of people to so successfully leverage technology to do so much, I understand why we don’t feel small.  I’m sure there are many other small businesses out there that feel the same way for similar reasons and more.  When you couple this kind of success with the kind of unique responsiveness a small company can offer its customers, it makes you wonder why the prospects aren’t asking the bigger guys “Why should I do business with a big corporation like you?”

Gregg Williams

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423