As Chief Data Scientist at Kinnek, I’m interested not only in how the platform impacts small businesses, but how small business dynamics on Kinnek relate to the broader economy as well.

Using Kinnek presents a new mode of operation for most suppliers, and they often ask what they can do to be more competitive on the platform. In attempting to answer, we'll start by considering issues of time. How does a supplier’s timing affect their performance?

Studying consumer purchasing behavior is a time-honored tradition for many consulting and market research firms, but studying small business buyer behavior is generally trickier due to decentralized and under-collected data across industries. Kinnek has a pretty unique look into this process, so we thought we’d take look at SMB buyer timelines. Here's what we found: