Two thoughts
[1] SME definition
In Australia, the definition of an SME (or small-medium enterprise) is: 1-200 employees.
SMEs:
- make up 98% of all business
- produce 33% of total GDP
- employ 4.7M people
- are 90% of all goods exporters
- are 60% of all services exporters
- approx 200,000 businesses with revenue > $2M
- close to 100,000 of those have revenue > $5M
[2] HubSpot Partners
The HubSpot Partner ecosystem has been changing over the last 12-18 months:
- Minimal focus on the hundreds of small partners
- Focus is on a few big partners (likely the big 5 or so in any region)
- Most referral leads will go to big partners
Cause for concern?
I’ve seen people on LinkedIn calling out the impending doom for small partners as they ‘fight over the scraps’ left by the big partners.
But I’m not actually worried.
Because, we – a small partner – only need a few juicy ‘scraps’ each month to live a wonderful agency life. And there’s plenty of juicy scraps in the SME market – out of the 100,000 or so from the table above, we only need a few.
Our focus is on saying No to most opportunities that present themselves and just saying Yes to the few that are a fit.
If anyone should be concerned it’s the big partners, with big teams and lots of mouths to feed. Saying No gets harder, even if the fit isn’t there.
The issue for me and our agency is how we plan to handle this as we grow. The problems change at each stage of the business.
