Grow Your Revenues Through New Routes to Market

Four ways to sell into the SMB market for maximum revenue growth

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) form the backbone of the economy, representing an astounding 99.9% of all businesses in the US alone—over 30.2 million companies. Despite their prevalence, reaching this vast market remains a complex and challenging endeavor for technology providers and advisors. Fragmented buying patterns, a crowded tech landscape, and rising sales costs create roadblocks that stall growth and stall revenue.

In this article, we cover:

• Why reaching SMB customers is so complex — and how that complexity eats into revenue

• How to navigate the evolving SMB channel landscape with a strategic mindset

• Four proven strategies to broaden your routes to market, tailored for both providers and advisors

About this article
This article is part of our Thrive 2025 Blog Series, offering a glimpse into the trends and insights we’ll be exploring at Thrive in Austin, August 25-27.  

The lucrative SMB market opportunity

The technology market serving SMBs is poised for tremendous growth. The global software market alone is projected to reach $1.15 trillion by 2033, while the hardware segment is expected to grow to $206 billion by 2030. Other sectors such as AI, managed services, cloud infrastructure, and security are also expanding rapidly, with compound annual growth rates (CAGR) ranging from 10% to as high as 36%.

Industry giants highlight the critical role of partner channels in tapping into this growth. Microsoft generates 95% of its commercial revenue through partners, and Apple earns between 50% to 70% of its revenue via its partner ecosystem. This underscores a powerful truth: building strong partner routes to market is essential for any provider targeting SMBs.

However, tapping into the SMB segment is not as straightforward as you might think. It demands tailored strategies that address the unique challenges SMBs present and leverages the right channels and ecosystems to scale effectively.

5 factors hindering your SMB market potential

Selling technology solutions to SMBs is inherently complex and costly, often more so than selling to large enterprises. Providers face multiple interrelated challenges:

1. Access barriers—SMB decision makers are often difficult to reach, with many companies involving multiple stakeholders across roles, making sales cycles longer and more complex. SMB leaders tend to be risk-averse, intensifying the difficulty of closing deals.

2. Higher cost-to-serve ratio—SMBs generally require more personalized support and tailored solutions. The smaller deal sizes combined with extensive customer service needs result in a higher cost-to-serve ratio.

3. Market complexity—The SMB technology landscape is highly fragmented and crowded, with thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) competing for attention. Standing out requires significant marketing investment or presence in highly visible marketplaces.

4. Price sensitivity—SMB buyers carefully evaluate expenses, increasing pressure on providers to offer competitive pricing while maintaining margins.

5. Customer relationships—To succeed, providers must cultivate strong, trusted relationships with SMB customers, which calls for the right teams, tools, and marketplace visibility.

Why traditional approaches fall short in the SMB market

Selling into the SMB market has traditionally been a tough and costly endeavor. Many providers still rely heavily on direct cold outreach or one-off sales campaigns to reach busy SMB decision-makers. These methods not only extend sales cycles but also drive up marketing and support expenses, making growth slow and expensive.

Another common misstep is having a limited presence—whether that means listing products in only one or two marketplaces or trying to scale sales without tapping into established partner ecosystems. SMB buyers today increasingly prefer to purchase through trusted marketplaces and advisors who understand their unique needs, yet many providers overlook these critical intermediaries.

Additionally, providers often underutilize the vast network of technology advisors, MSPs, and resellers who have built strong, trusted relationships with SMB customers. These intermediaries can accelerate deal velocity, improve conversion rates, and dramatically reduce the cost of customer acquisition.

To overcome these challenges and unlock the true potential of the SMB market, providers need innovative, scalable strategies that go beyond traditional selling techniques.

Four routes into the SMB market

Effective routes to market aim to minimize sales costs, multiply market presence, streamline operations, and amplify visibility. These four approaches can transform your SMB distribution efforts and drive maximum revenue growth.

1. A vibrant technology advisor channel to maximize reach and cut distribution costs

For technology providers, navigating technology distribution can be challenging due to the complexities of scaling, marketing, and offer management. AppDirect addresses these challenges by connecting providers to their customers through a vast network of over 10,000 technology advisors, MSPs, and resellers who already have established, trusted connections with SMB customers.

Advisors do more than recommend solutions—they accelerate deal velocity and improve conversion rates, which is especially important given SMB buyers’ risk aversion and price sensitivity. Leveraging this vibrant community helps providers dramatically reduce sales and marketing expenses while increasing revenue predictability.

The AppDirect platform also supports discovery and onboarding with tools that help providers and marketplaces efficiently integrate new sellers and products. Partnerships with industry distributors such as Ingram and TD Synnex further amplify this reach, offering access to even broader markets.

2. A multi-category network catalog to amplify your market presence—Build once, scale many

Imagine building your product catalog once and instantly syndicating it across multiple marketplaces—a concept AppDirect has perfected with its network catalog. Housing over 5,000 digital products from more than 1,000 vendors, the catalog spans every technology area, including cloud services, AI, connectivity, security, SaaS, energy, infrastructure, managed services, and hardware & logistics.

This build once, scale many approach not only increases your visibility exponentially but also meets SMB buyers where they prefer to shop: trusted marketplaces with familiar buying experiences. Because SMBs often rely on marketplaces they know, syndicating your offering across these platforms opens doors to new audiences and revenue streams.

In addition, AppDirect’s robust no-code tools simplify product content ingestion, transformation, and enrichment, enabling providers to bundle digital and physical services seamlessly. This capability enhances buyer choice and simplifies procurement.

Leading independent evaluations echo these strengths. The Forrester Wave™: Marketplace Development Platforms Q4 2024 recognizes AppDirect’s catalog capabilities as a market leader, highlighting its role in enabling omnichannel, scalable go-to-market ecosystems. You can read more in our blog, How to Choose a B2B Marketplace Platform—The Top Forrester Criteria, and How AppDirect Measures Up.

By leveraging this vast catalog, providers and advisors alike can diversify their revenue streams while reducing the complexity of managing multiple marketplace relationships individually.

As digital buying behaviors evolve rapidly, providers must also equip themselves with streamlined, scalable sales platforms. This is where an integrated marketplace platform becomes critical—allowing providers to effectively market, sell, and manage multiple products and channels while delivering a seamless customer experience.

3. An all-in-one marketplace platform to monetize, sell, and manage everything

Operating in the SMB market often means juggling numerous products, sales channels, and customer expectations. As companies rush to buy, sell, and manage products online, B2B marketplaces have become the fastest-growing digital sales channel, experiencing a 100% sales growth year over year in 2023. According to Gartner estimates, 80% of B2B sales will be generated digitally by the end of 2025, up from 13% in 2019, and cloud marketplace spending will grow from $15B in 2023 to $100B in 2026.

AppDirect’s unified marketplace platform enables providers to capitalize on this thriving landscape to market, sell, and manage both first- and third-party solutions within a single integrated environment.

This all-in-one approach streamlines operations, increases operational efficiency, and delivers a superior customer experience. Providers can launch customizable, white-labeled storefronts, enhancing brand presence while maintaining the flexibility to tailor offerings for specific verticals or regions. These storefronts become powerful customer engagement tools, building trust and loyalty.

Moreover, the platform supports seamless integration with multi-marketplace syndication, allowing providers to build once and scale widely without multiplying workload. This scalability is key to thriving in the fragmented and dynamic SMB landscape.

Industry analysts recognize the power of a strong seller network for marketplace success. According to Forrester, marketplaces must look beyond technology to distribution capabilities.

“When you’re looking for a marketplace development platform, look beyond technology to distribution. Consider how the platform can support your go-to-market and distribution goals. It’s crucial to ensure the platform can provide access to a community for successful distribution.”—Laura Stevenson, VP Marketing, AppDirect

4. A provider growth program to amplify your visibility and accelerate sales

Standing out in the crowded SMB ecosystem requires more than listing products—it demands strategic marketing and strong relationship-building. AppDirect’s Provider Growth Program (PGP) offers providers dedicated marketing expertise and community engagement to amplify your visibility and close deals faster.

The PGP bridges the gap between providers and advisors, fostering co-marketing and co-selling initiatives within AppDirect’s extensive advisor community. Providers gain access to tailored campaigns, networking events, and training sessions designed to deepen advisor relationships and generate qualified leads.

This highly customizable route to market helps technology providers accelerate their entry and growth in SMB and other segments. Whether you’re a new or established partner building strong advisor ties, PGP adapts to your goals with flexible initiatives that maximize visibility and drive results. By leveraging the advisor network and marketplace infrastructure, providers engage more effectively with the SMB market.

Beyond marketing, AppDirect extends expert sales engineering support from connectivity to cloud solutions, acting as an extension of the provider’s sales force. This team helps advisors articulate complex value propositions and overcome buyer objections, accelerating the sales cycle.

Together, this comprehensive support helps providers overcome common channel challenges like resource constraints and misaligned incentives, enabling scalable and sustainable SMB sales channels.

Building momentum across the ecosystem

These four strategies aren’t isolated tactics. They work together to create a cycle within an ecosystem that keeps growing and gaining momentum over time—a flywheel that creates growth for everyone. Providers bring more solutions for advisors to sell, creating more choice and value for end customers that truly meet their needs across the entire IT stack.

By embracing these new routes to market, all players can unlock the full potential of the flourishing SMB market.

Further reading:

• Winning at Scale: Practical Tactics to Grow and Differentiate Your Marketplace

• Scale & Optimize your Channel Sales: How a Streamlined Marketplace Strategy Fuels Growth

• How White-Labeled Storefronts Can Become Your Most Powerful Customer Engagement Tool

• How to Choose a B2B Marketplace Platform—The Top Forrester Criteria, and How AppDirect Measures Up

Join us at Thrive

We’ll explore this theme in depth in a panel session with leading experts at our Thrive 2025 conference in August, August 25-27.

Whether you’re an IT leader, advisor, or provider, Thrive is your opportunity to align strategy, execution, and insight to unlock the full potential of your technology investments.