I know that my last article has been written quite a lot of time ago. I must say that I’m not so happy about that, but sometimes life is giving you reasons why you have to pospone some activities and focus on others.

During this “silent period” I had the chance to live the market after pandemic period, experiencing a new approach to the business and, once again, reshaping my business development and sales strategy accordingly.

Today I have new responsibilities and, after almost a couple of years dealing with Spanish market, from December 2023, I came back to the market I really like, the international one.

Today I’m not dealing anymore with network infrastructures, but with digitalization solutions for SMEs and SOHO, sold to telecom operators worldwide. The common point I have from my past commercial activity is the huge network of contacts with different operators in the Countries I worked all over my long experience.

Since my first day in the new position I had to learn the caracteristics of a portfolio quite new for me, the addressable market and study the most appropriate business development strategy. Not easy because my background was quite different. But, at the end of the day, I reached the conclusion that my target market had to be developed starting from the best connectivity solutions that a telecom operator must give. So, my previous experience helped and is helping me actually to understand better how a telecom operator can give value to its customers towards a joint offer based on conectivity and digitalization solutions.

When I was selling network infrastructures my approach to telecom operators was based on their coverage and conectivity targets to fight for example, against digital divide in the remote and rural areas. Today, on top of conectivity sold to SMEs and SOHO, I sell all the solutions to make them visible in the internet ans push their business like never before.

Today telecom operators are fighting to recover their investments in network infrastructures, trying to increase ARPU and reducing churn. The digitalization of SMEs and SOHO is one of the solutions they can adopt to do this.

If we have a look to the annual report on European SMEs 2022/2023, we can see that the figures are really impressive.

SMEs play a key role in the EU economy having extraordinary economic and social challenges during the last couple of years. They have also had to prepare for the transition to a digital and sustainable economy. For this reason, telecom operators can be unbelievebly of help in supporting these companies to grow.

Leaving Europe and talking about the entire world, we can estimate SMEs to be more that 330 million!

The world Economic Forus states: SMEs play a vital role in the global economy, contributing up to 70% to employment and GDP. However, 67% of SMEs and mid-sized businesses are fighting for survival. This is partly because SMEs face intense short-term business pressures, limited expertise and resource constraints, which hinder their technology adoption.

Over 85% of organizations recognise increased adoption of new technologies and expanding digital access as key drivers of transformation. Digital infrastructure has been identified as a significant driver of long-term financial growth and adaptive capacity for SMEs.

Staying up-to-date with these trends is crucial for SMEs to remain competitive in the evolving digital landscape. While this may involve a significant upfront cost in the medium to long term, investments in digitisation can enable SMEs to gain valuable insights from their data, increase the efficiency of their operations, make cost savings, improve competitiveness and create greater opportunities for scalability and growth potential.

It is clear now that telco operators are the main actors in the digitalization process of SMEs and SOHO because they can give bundled value added solutions to their customers.

Coming back to the the aim of this article, I had tro adapt my business strategy studying each addressable operator, the characteristics of its market, its goals and, above all, try to propose and adapt my company’s portfolio to perfectly fit. In addition, one of the main important point to be taken into consideration is the fact that SMEs and SOHOs must be continously helped with professional people, locally based and able to support customers in their daily activities assuring continuity of their business.

My international experience and the quantity of different projects developped and managed worldwide, oblige me to add also other considerations and suggestions that a company selling digitalization solutions must take into considerations.

• Adopt an international Marketing approach. If you are addressing a country, study local market caracteristics and demostrate to the customer that you know it perfectly.
• Prepare a mailing list with dedicated sections to a particular country you are trying to address. Very good that you are showing your references but more effective to show how you are able to successfully adapt them to an international market.
• It is good to avoid unneccessary trips to visit customers. After COVID pandemic, everybody is used to videoconferencing, but sometimes the face-to-face meeting is really necessary to improve customer intimacy. Take into consideration that, chose the most appropriate time, avoid to throw away your money, but sometimes visit your customer.

Being digitalization process for SMEs and SOHOs fundamental in the following years to help these small industrial and professional realities to grow, we have a really huge potential market to be addressed but we need to do it in the proper way: enambling operators to sell digitalization solutions evidencing their core benefits on top of connectivity.

These customers must perceive the value of being present in the internet in the most professional and effective way and will be aware that in this way they will innovate and quickly adapt their offers and business models in response to market changes, generating more revenue and increase their client base.