Soft Sell

Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) surveyed 500 small-business owners and senior executives for its second-quarter 1998 Small Business Hot Topics Research Report on marketing practices. The businesses were selected randomly from D&B's global database of companies.

More than half the firms surveyed had one to five employees; the balance of the firms split into three groups--those with six to 25 employees, 26 to 100 employees and 101 to 500 employees--each representing about 16 percent of the total.

Surveyed firms were located throughout the country. About 45 percent were female-owned, and 25 percent were minority-owned, with "other" being the largest non-Caucasian ethnic group named as owner.

This article was originally published in the September 1998 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Soft Sell.