small, medium-sized businesses
also referred to as: small, medium business · smb · smbs
32 statements across 25 episodes · 12 bullish · 4 bearish · 19 people on the record · first statement Aug 21, 2017 by Matt Rissell · across every show →
Everything said about small, medium-sized businesses, oldest first
Aug 21, 2017 bullish
Rissell: Best-of-breed point solutions with seamless integrations will win in SMB SaaS
“The ones that I actually think are going to win in the marketplace are those that solve, ah, one problem. They're the best in breed solution. And then what they do is they seamlessly integrate with, ah, other applications that provide a solution.”
Oct 9, 2018
Grace: Nail SMB and end users before expanding to enterprise
“If you are selling to both enterprise and SMB, then I think just like anything else, nail the hell out of SMB first before you try to scale up into enterprise, because that is actually where the truism of, you know, like, oh, just follow the end user and don't…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Enterprise Sales Require Slow Discovery Rather Than Transactional Demos
“When we're selling to an SMB, it's very transactional. It's about demoing the tool and demonstrating utility. When you're selling upmarket, you are you have a selling process where you want to slow things down and go through a process of discovery.”
Sep 19, 2019 positive
Lawrence: Promoted SDRs ramp 600% faster than external SMB sales hires
“In fact, when I look at my performers across SMB, the ones that came in through the SDR org, like, hands down, the most successful people. Right? You already know that they're a culture fit. You're sure of the competence fit. And they ramp 600% more quickly th…”
Oct 8, 2020
Shah: Fortune 1000 buyers tolerate poor usability via expensive consultant armies
“Now, in the Fortune 1000 market, that's not that big a deal. Usability, yeah, people like it, It's not a huge deal because they have armies of consultants that can do implementations. They have the budget, they have pain tolerance, which an SMB just does not h…”
Oct 8, 2020 neutral
Feb 18, 2021 bullish
Jul 26, 2022 positive
Jul 26, 2022 positive
Zocchetto: Transparent pricing prevents drop-off and protects NPS during price hikes
“So we decided not to over optimize pricing so that it can just fit the requirements of the mass, and so that it's, you may think that you are losing money on the table, but you're not. When you have a transparent and simple Pricing structure. You know, you jus…”
Jul 26, 2022 positive
Zocchetto: SMB SaaS hits a ceiling without B2C-style brand awareness
“At the beginning, it may not be a problem because there are so many prospects out there that applying all good B to B marketing, reaching out with outbound can be great. But at some point, you reach a level where if you don't have the great brand awareness tha…”
Oct 13, 2022 positive
Oct 18, 2022 positive
Oct 18, 2022 positive
Shah: HubSpot won through an all-in-one suite, not a killer feature
“There was no killer app. Everything that we had in our product existed. There were better products with great companies behind them. The value that we brought was the fact that we made it simple for these SMBs to actually get into the internet, get in the game…”
Dec 2, 2022 negative
Matthew: Accel SMB-Focused SaaS Companies Struggle with Retention Versus Enterprise
“In terms of gross retention, we're seeing varying degrees of success of gross retention across different customer segments, meaning SMB in this environment is more challenged than enterprise.
And our companies that are exposed to SMB in particular are having a…”
Dec 8, 2022 neutral
Dec 29, 2022
DigitalOcean Uses Free-to-Paid Conversion Points for Sales-Assisted Expansion
“If an SMB, it's that conversion of the FTO or free trial offer to pay that creates an uplift in, in overall customer value. And that, that point is a very key inflection where we expand via sales assisted, if you will, motion with more use cases, Multi-product…”
Dec 29, 2022
Bockard: 14 Million New SMBs Are Created Globally Every Year
“And the compounding effect is that we have, you know, fourteen million of new SMBs that are created globally every year. So if you kind of look at that, you know, from a perspective of, hey, there's forty three million developers out there, and that's obviousl…”
Jan 3, 2023 negative
Mar 3, 2023
Mar 10, 2023
Apr 26, 2023 neutral
Mehta: SMB customers often require more hand-holding than enterprise clients
“And actually, ironically, SMBs sometimes need more hand-holding, because they have less internal capability, and they're, like, more distracted, so it's kind of weird, like, you know, the smallest customers sometimes need more help, so.”
Aug 3, 2023 bullish
Oct 10, 2023 positive
Zinman: Sell SMBs specific tools first, gradually revealing platform depth
“You don't need to tell the whole story from the beginning especially when you sell to SMBs. I think that we focused on giving them value as soon as possible. So if you were searching for a project management or CRM, we wanted to serve them a CRM or a project m…”
Oct 27, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: Launch a Second Product Before Hitting 100 Enterprise SaaS Customers
“In enterprise, it's often around a hundred customers in a group. In mid-market, it's a thousand. And in SMB, you're lucky to get to 10,000 customers without hitting significant headwinds, ok? So my rough, way too rough rules are enterprise, mid-market, SMB. Be…”
Sep 6, 2024 positive
Lang: Rushing SMB onboarding actually lowers successful go-live rates
“Meaning sometimes, you know, you think that, oh, like more momentum is a good thing and let's, you know, onboard you really quick. Let's go live next week. But actually the success rate drops quite a bit when you push that hard for it because you know, you wan…”
Sep 6, 2024 neutral
Lemkin: SMB SaaS go-live rates typically land around 80%
“The actual number of paid customers that go live is in the eighties. They're often, as CEOs, we think, oh God, it must be 96%. And they're often shocked when they look at the data and they're like, oh my God, it's 81% of our customers go live, right? They're a…”
Oct 8, 2024 neutral
Oct 15, 2024 bearish
Lemkin: Competitors offering instant AI onboarding will capture the SMB market
“So this whole cheat, this whole thing of SMBs tolerating weeks to go live, I think is dying right now. So I would challenge you if that's you think about how you can eliminate onboarding in your app, even if you think it's impossible. Even if you think it can'…”
Oct 22, 2024
Choice overload drives small businesses to demand software consolidation
“So what that tells consumers and all of us is that there's too much choice. Which is why consumers, small businesses, I think of as consumers are asking for consolidation, which is why we've acquired companies is why we built our platform to continue to be ext…”
Oct 22, 2024 neutral
Non-AI SMB spend per customer has been flat for three quarters
“What we've seen this year is more stabilization in the last maybe three quarters. And so I call this the wait and see economy. This is, nobody's investing for growth the way they were three years ago, which is crazy. People were just investing, investing. Obvi…”
Feb 28, 2025 bearish
Zinman: Upmarket SaaS firms become irrelevant by abandoning SMBs
“People don't realize that the SMBs and mid-market of today are the enterprise of tomorrow. So they getting used to use another product, they're getting used to use another platform, and eventually they become the enterprise companies. And then those enterprise…”
Mar 14, 2025
Mehta: SaaS gross retention ranges from mid-70s (SMB) to 95%+ (core)
“In general, you find roughly in SAS that SMB oriented businesses that sell to SMB have gross retention somewhere between mid seventies and mid eighties.
Enterprise oriented businesses that are maybe departmental apps are anywhere from 85 to low nineties.
Poor …”