Super Selling: U.S. Small Businesses In Every Part of the Country Use Multiple Sales Methods
February 2022
Several decades of public discourse have reduced common thinking about small business retail into simple and often binary axioms, e.g., suburban malls vs. downtowns and online vs. brick-and-mortar. We challenged those assumptions in a previous report titled “Super Selling,” which demonstrated that small business sellers (“SMB Sellers”) in fact have many methods of reaching consumers to choose from: online and offline, wholesale and retail, direct-to-consumer and selling through marketplaces. We found that the typical SMB Seller uses five (5) different selling methods, and that within sales methods, SMB sellers also frequently use more than one competitive vendor. In this new report, we extend the original report’s findings with a regional analysis of the United States finding that while the main conclusions of the initial report are quite consistent across diverse parts of the country, there are subtle regional differences that may merit further study.
Super Selling: U.S. Small Businesses In Every Part of the Country Use Multiple Sales Methods
Mark Drapeau and Jason Boxt
February 2022