Small and medium-size businesses have been hard hit by COVID-19 restrictions. Concerns about short-term cash flow and employee well-being jostle with long-term fears on if they can survive the slow-down and impending recession.

“Seventy-five percent of SMB revenues have been disrupted,” said Sandy Ono (pictured, right), vice president of marketing strategy and eCommerce at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. “I think revenue and cash flow is very much on top of everybody’s mind.”

Ono and Jas Sood (pictured, left), vice president of commercial sales at HPE, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. They discussed the effects of the pandemic on small and medium businesses and how HPE has adjusted its sales and marketing strategy to support them. (* Disclosure below.)

Businesses need to cut costs and find new revenue streams

“We realize that it’s a trying time right now and cash flow might be tight, and that’s OK,” Sood said. “We want to make sure that we’re just there for our customers.”

With change unavoidable, businesses are looking to streamline operations and open new avenues of commerce. The answer to both is to go digital. The flexibility of virtual infrastructure helps reduce costs and simplify operations. While having resources available on the cloud solves the problems of being forced to go remote with both work and sales.

“The world is much more virtual today than it was yesterday. How do we evolve our businesses?” Ono asked.

One thing HPE is doing to actively help is to provide financing to assist with revenue shortfall and investing in digital infrastructure and tools. “Currently, we have many offers that they don’t have to pay until the end of this calendar year, which is the end of our fiscal year,” Ono stated.

Customer interaction is another area where both Sood and Ono have experienced a change since working from home became the norm. Rather than point-focused — “Hey, can we talk about this project?” — conversations have become centered around the current changes and challenges. “[It’s] just opened up a general ‘how’s it going’ conversation,” Sood said. “We share best practices. We are all at home as well, so it really creates more of a personal conversation.”

The marketing message has also changed, according to Ono. “Really it has to be authentic — to the point where we can’t just be selling ‘the thing’ anymore,” she said. “Everybody is not only cash-strapped, time-strapped, but they’re also looking for a genuine connection to something that they need.”

This means that the conversation has been honed to “be much more articulate around the problems we solve, the solutions that are readily deployable, and how we can help in these moments,” Ono concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE