It’s a truth universally acknowledged that growth in technology SMBs is getting harder
Our first Growth Forum
In February ReStrategy brought together a small group of senior sales and marketing leaders from across software, data, AI and managed services businesses for the first Growth Forum session.
The participants came from different companies, working in different markets, offering different propositions, but it didn’t take long to realise that everyone in the room was dealing with a very similar set of challenges.
The overriding conclusion was that growth in technology SMBs isn’t behaving the way it used to. It’s not that businesses aren’t investing, or that teams aren’t working hard enough. If anything, there’s more activity than ever. But the outcomes are less predictable, harder to scale, and increasingly dependent on a small number of variables going right at the same time.
That’s where the pressure is coming from.
What’s changing for CMOs and CROs, and why it matters
As the conversation opened up, a number of themes surfaced quickly, and none of them felt isolated.
- Growth in technology businesses is becoming harder to predict, even in businesses with strong pipelines and good market positioning. Forecasts move more than they used to, deals take longer to close, and confidence is harder to maintain quarter to quarter.
- At the same time, traditional marketing approaches are starting to lose their edge. Channels are more crowded, audiences are more selective, and the cost of getting genuine engagement continues to rise. Many teams are still doing the right things on paper, but not seeing the same return.
- There’s also a persistent challenge around articulating value, particularly in subscription and service-led models. When what you’re offering is ongoing, complex, and often bundled, it becomes harder to communicate clear, differentiated outcomes, and when that clarity is missing, sales conversations slow down.
- Layer on top of that the reality of longer, more complex sales cycles, involving more stakeholders and higher scrutiny, and it’s easy to see why so many organisations are feeling exposed. Too much still hinges on a relatively small number of deals, which makes growth feel fragile rather than repeatable.
None of this is entirely new, but taken together, it points to something more structural.
The gap most organisations haven’t closed
What stood out most wasn’t just the challenges themselves, but the gap between recognising them and actually adapting to them.
Most organisations are still structured around models that were built for a different environment, where demand was easier to generate, differentiation was clearer, and growth was more forgiving.
Marketing is still often treated as a separate function and a volume engine, rather than part of a coordinated system. Sales is still expected to convert leads without always having the clarity or support it needs. And relationships, referrals and partnerships, which everyone agrees are valuable, are rarely developed in a consistent or intentional way.
The result is that growth sometimes feels disjointed and uncoordinated, with different parts of the organisation or teams pulling in slightly different directions. Some things work, but not consistently enough to rely on.
The shift that’s starting to happen
What’s becoming clearer is that the next phase of growth won’t come from simply doing more of the same, or even doing it better within the existing model. Instead, many of group are starting to question the model itself. There’s a growing sense that the traditional middle ground, broad-based marketing feeding into sales-led conversion, is becoming less effective, and that future growth may sit at the extremes.
At one end of the spectrum, there’s a push towards greater use of technology, automation and increasingly agentic AI, systems designed to scale activity, improve targeting, and drive efficiency across the funnel.
At the other, there’s a move in almost the opposite direction, towards highly targeted, relationship-led approaches, where effort is concentrated on a smaller number of high-value accounts, with far more tailored, one-to-one engagement.
Both approaches are being explored, often in parallel. What people are less sure about is how they come together, or whether they do at all.
What is clear is that CMOs and CROs are becoming more deliberate in how they think about growth: more focused on where value is actually created, more selective about where time and resource is invested, and more conscious that different parts of the organisation need to work together more intentionally.
It’s not that anyone feels they’ve fully solved it, but the shift has started, from optimising the existing model, to rethinking it more fundamentally.
Why this kind of conversation matters
One of the most valuable aspects of the Growth Forum wasn’t any single insight, but the shared recognition across the group. These are experienced operators, all dealing with similar pressures, but rarely with the opportunity to step back and compare notes in an open way. Hearing the same patterns reflected across different businesses creates a different level of clarity, and a different kind of conversation. It moves things away from theory and into something much more practical and grounded.
What comes next for The Growth Forum
The next session will take a more focused approach, picking out a small number of these themes and exploring how different teams are actually responding to them in practice.
Because while the challenges are widely understood, the solutions are still evolving, and that’s where the real value of the forum sits.