By Chris Bucholtz

I’ve opined in the past that it’s hard for big businesses to scale up that small-business feel for customers, which I think is one of small businesses’ secret weapons. Similarly, it’s hard for small businesses to scale up the relationships they build naturally with customers during periods of growth, especially rapid growth. These are natural trends that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with human nature, and ones that organizations should put more thought into.

Here’s a bit of data that goes to part of that big/small dichotomy: The Lloyd James Group in the U.K. surveyed 1000 finance directors and senior financial managers, and they discovered a dramatic difference in how they allocated resources during the downturn. At large companies (defined as more than 1000 employees), 70 percent of the respondents favored a reduction in resources for CRM while boosting investment in prospecting for new customers. At the 250-1000 employee level, support for that sentiment rose to 79 percent.

However, at smaller companies, the trend was much more toward retaining customers. Of those businesses with 1 to 10 employees, only 42 percent were in favor of greater spending on customer acquisition. The tendency toward chasing new customers rose with the size of the company: if there were 11 to 50 employees, 49 percent wanted to shift resources to prospecting; if the company was 51 to 249 employees, the number shot to 57 percent.

The survey’s creators said the numbers showed that small businesses are missing out by not moving resources to prospecting. However, I think it demonstrates the small business/big business dichotomy perfectly – and there’s validity to both ends of the spectrum.

Customer acquisition can be expensive – and an expense that a small company often can’t afford, especially in a downturn when finding the few buyers that are out there is increasingly difficult and expensive. The customers they already have are precious to them; job one for surviving the recession is not to hunt for increasingly scarce customers but to keep the ones already on board from bolting. A key aspect of this is the cultivation of relationships, which can be more intimate between a small company and its customers.

Larger organizations can lack that organic intimacy with the customer, and may compete on factors that don’t lend themselves to loyalty, like price. If that’s the case, the hunt for new customers is critical; if customers became customers based on price and companies haven’t put sufficient effort into creating loyalty, there will be customer churn and thus customer acquisition is critical for maintaining revenues.

I submit that the larger a company becomes and the less personal a connection the buyer has with the seller (and not because of poor intentions by the seller but because of the organizational needs of larger companies, which can hamper customer intimacy), the more it needs to be on the customer acquisition treadmill. The challenge becomes keeping that treadmill going while at the same time working to figure out how to build real relationships with customers and to transform that treadmill from a sustainability engine into an engine for growth.

Also, growth is perceived differently by small and large companies; the numbers of customers added by a small company in what would be considered a successful year of growth are proportionally much smaller than the number a larger company would need to achieve.

If small companies are missing out by not pursuing customer acquisition aggressively, as the survey’s authors assert, then it’s also true that large companies are missing out by not building customer relationships that help tie buyers to sellers. Both sides of the equation stand to benefit by peeking at what the other side does well and trying to introduce that into their approach to retention and acquisition.