The enterprise telecom market is saturated. For carriers like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, the next wave of growth lives in a sector they’ve overlooked: small- and medium-sized businesses.

The opportunity is massive. SMBs represent most businesses, yet most telecom providers approach them with the same playbook designed for Fortune 500 companies.

The result? Broad solutions that require dedicated IT staff to implement, manage, and extract value from. Marketing messages that speak to everyone and no one at the same time.

SMBs look like scaled-down enterprises, but they behave like consumers.

Why Enterprise Solutions Fail SMBs: The IT Staff Problem

Telecom providers built their business services around enterprise relationships. Large companies approached carriers asking for better rates and custom deals. From there, carriers built service packages and pricing structures designed for organizations with procurement teams, IT departments, and technical staff who could integrate complex solutions.

That model worked because enterprises have the resources to make it work.

But when you’re a five-person operation where everyone wears multiple hats, you don’t have someone who can spend three days configuring a business internet solution. You don’t have an IT professional to call in and discuss custom offerings. You need a solution that works out of the box.

Most telecom business offerings today are broadly valued: big capabilities that require organizational resources to capture their benefits. To gain value from these solutions, you need someone in your organization who can integrate it, learn it, manage it, and maintain it.

For SMBs, it’s a choice between suffering through their current state or diverting someone’s time away from the core business. When people are key to your growth and a massive investment, this choice can feel like a step backward.

How Verizon’s Whole Office Management Gets It Right

Verizon’s Whole Office Management (WOM) solution demonstrates how telecoms can win in this market when they think differently.

The company offers small-business internet via fixed wireless access with 5G routers. That’s table stakes. But they recently introduced WOM, which provides SMBs with an on-call IT resource for just $55 a month. This way, an SMB doesn’t need to hire someone to benefit from on-call support.

This solves the primary challenge every resource-constrained SMB faces: lack of capacity. When you’re running a business with fewer than 20 people, headcount dominates your strategic thinking. Everyone operates at capacity. Solutions that take something off your plate and allow you to focus on your core business at a reasonable price become attractive.

Method has observed this pattern across industries. When you understand the struggling moment for an SMB (not just what services they might need, but when and why they need them), you can design offerings that feel less like enterprise procurement and more like consumer purchases.

SMBs don’t want to manage multiple vendors. They’d rather pay one company slightly more than juggle five vendors for connectivity, security, phone, and support. Telecoms are uniquely positioned to be that one-stop shop.

Verizon’s Whole Office Management succeeds because it positions itself as “one phone number, one bill, one relationship” rather than forcing SMBs to cobble together solutions from multiple providers.

Segmenting by Size vs. Segmenting by Need

Most carriers segment SMBs the same way they segment enterprises: by size. One to two employees. Five to ten employees. Ten to fifty employees.

This misses the point.

A solo management consultant has different needs than a family farmer. A franchise owner faces different challenges than a construction company. Grouping them all as “businesses with five employees” ignores the jobs they’re trying to accomplish.

Needs-based segmentation requires a different approach. Start by examining your current business customers. What types of businesses show up most? What does a day in their operations look like? What do they wish they didn’t need to do? Where could current market solutions benefit them?

Take family farmers as an example. They face the same resource constraints as every other small business. They’re competing with both other family farms and large crop production entities. They can’t charge more for commoditized goods. They won’t buy more land. So how do they increase profit?

Reduce operating costs. Increase yield.

Connectivity-based solutions can help here. Soil moisture level monitoring. Automated irrigation controls. Equipment diagnostics. But will a family farmer research these options, evaluate vendors, and configure a custom solution?

A major carrier that packages these capabilities into a buyable offering solves the problem for them. The farmer doesn’t need to become a connectivity expert. They need to hit a button and improve their operation.

Here’s another example: A distributed team with no physical office needs mobile hotspots, unified mobile plans for everyone, and reliable connectivity wherever team members are. That’s a segment with a clear need: “Keep Your Remote Team Connected” — not “Businesses With 10–20 Employees.”

This is what needs-based segmentation looks like in practice. The question shifts from “What can we sell to businesses with X number of employees?” to “What problem can we solve for family farmers?” or “What problem can we solve for remote teams?”

What MVNOs Teach Us About Narrow Targeting

Mobile virtual network operators offer a useful parallel.

MVNOs don’t own network infrastructure. They resell access to networks owned by major carriers. But they’ve succeeded by breaking out specific segments of the consumer market, identifying particular needs, and creating offerings that address those needs.

Mint Mobile targets price-conscious consumers. Noble Mobile, which runs on T-Mobile’s network, offers cash back for using less data, speaking to people who value the discipline of using their phones less.

Each MVNO identified a segment, understood what that segment values, and built an offering around it. They applied consumer marketing principles to create targeted solutions instead of trying to be everything to everyone.

Telecoms can take the same approach with SMBs. Treat them more like consumers than like enterprises. Understand what segments value. Package solutions that solve clear problems.

MVNOs also choose who they’re solving for and who they aren’t, which is where I see larger telcos struggle. MVNOs don’t try to be all things for all customers. Each specific offering knows what its purpose is and who it’s for.

As a business going this route, capturing other types of customers requires discrete offerings optimized for specific customers and problems (a portfolio).

Three B2C Principles: Out-of-the-Box, Jobs-to-Be-Done, Progressive Disclosure

When Method partners with telecom clients on SMB strategy, we focus on translating proven consumer business principles into this B2B space.

The First Principle: Out-of-the-Box Solutions That Work for 80% of Users

Consumers expect to sign up and start using a product right away, while B2B experiences involve lengthy setup, configuration calls, and implementation timelines.

For resource-constrained SMBs, that timeline represents lost capacity. If your value proposition centers on helping them increase capacity, but they have to invest time configuring your solution, you’ve failed to deliver on your promise.

Self-service options count here. Preconfigure services for the most common use cases. Make the value feel immediate. Don’t require multiple accounts or complex configuration.

The Second Principle: Jobs-to-Be-Done Messaging Over Feature Lists

Instead of leading with, “Here are all our solutions for businesses your size,” lead with the problem you solve.

Consider a solo consultant. They want to appear bigger than they are. They need to convey legitimacy to potential clients. An offering positioned around “appear competitive with larger firms” resonates differently than “business phone service with these technical specifications.”

The Third Principle: Progressive Disclosure

Hide complexity until it’s needed. Give SMBs smart defaults that just work, with the ability to customize if they want to go deeper.

This creates an opportunity for telecoms to act as guides: either wear the hat for the SMB (take it off their plate), or make it as painless as possible when you can’t. Progressive disclosure helps the SMB resource whose primary job isn’t managing your product act like an experienced IT expert, even when they don’t know what they’re doing.

AI Is Capability, Not Product

If your product depends on AI to function, you need to revisit your strategy. But as a capability within a broader solution, AI can accelerate how telecoms develop and scale SMB offerings.

Consider three use cases:

First, operational AI. Use it internally to develop offerings faster. Research, bundling, marketing analysis, and smoke tests that might take months can happen in weeks. This lets you test more segment-specific offerings and iterate based on what works.

Second, AI within the product. For that family farmer, you might need data recognition for soil conditions or crop health. AI can train quickly on specialized data and provide notifications or manage controllers. It becomes part of the technical solution.

Third, AI as an enabled service. AI agents are designed to increase capacity and should be highly valuable to SMBs. But if SMBs don’t have the capacity to research connectivity options and evaluate vendors, they probably won’t have the resources to capitalize on implementing AI agents.

Telcos can provide value-added services on top of their solutions, effectively allowing SMBs to deploy agents (e.g., an executive assistant agent that helps manage administrative tasks, which extends the “take something off your plate” value proposition).

Telecoms have the technological capabilities to build complete packages for specific needs. If an AI agent solves part of that need, include it, but remember that the value of the solution is the problem you’re solving; the need for AI is not. View it as one more tool in the connectivity toolkit.

Breaking Down Silos Between Consumer and Business Units

Telecoms operate in siloed structures. Consumer business and enterprise business often function as separate entities. Within business services, different product lines operate independently. Marketing messages scatter across these silos, creating the “all over the place and untargeted” experience that confuses SMBs.

Shifting to a B2C-style approach for SMBs requires breaking down these silos. It demands cross-functional teams who understand both consumer product principles and telecom capabilities. It needs marketing that speaks to specific segments rather than broadcasting broadly.

This organizational challenge is where Method’s cross-industry expertise creates value. We understand consumer business. We know telecom operations. When these two domains need to converge (which they must for telecom providers to win in SMB markets), we help clients navigate that intersection.

Apple or Android: Choosing Your SMB Positioning

When it comes to SMBs, neutrality isn’t an option. You either apply consumer principles or you don’t. You either segment by needs or you don’t. You either create targeted offerings or you maintain broad ones.

Some telecoms position themselves as the Apple of SMB services: radically simplified packages with opinionated defaults. “We’ve figured out what retail businesses need. Here it is. It just works.”

Others take an Android approach: more configurability for SMBs who want control. Enterprise-grade power, sized for your business.

Both strategies can work. But you have to make an informed choice that matches your strategic intent and your existing customer base.

Start with analysis. Look at your current SMBs. Which industries show up most? What patterns emerge in how they use your services? Where do they struggle? What would make them switch from consumer plans to business offerings?

Then test. Consumer brands iterate based on user feedback. They launch, learn, and adjust. Telecoms can adopt the same cycle. Create targeted offerings for specific segments. Measure adoption. Refine based on what you learn.

The opportunity window won’t stay open. We predict that within 12–36 months, we’ll see a wave of SMB-focused offerings from major carriers. The ones that succeed will be those that translated their capabilities into clearly defined value for specific SMB segments. They’ll solve one problem well and communicate it clearly.

That sounds less like account-based marketing and more like consumer marketing. That’s the point.

Stop Treating SMBs Like Small Enterprises

The SMB market is untapped potential for telecom providers. But winning requires a shift in approach.

Stop thinking about SMBs as small enterprises and start thinking about them as consumers who happen to run businesses. Apply the principles that work in consumer markets: needs-based segmentation, intuitive experiences, solutions that solve specific problems.

Your scale becomes an asset here. You have data on how different business types use connectivity. You have partner networks that can deliver complete solutions and would love to continue to partner with you. You have the technological capabilities to package services in ways smaller players can’t match.

The question is whether you’ll organize around these advantages to serve SMBs the way they need to be served, or whether you’ll continue applying an enterprise playbook to a different market.

For telecom providers ready to make this shift, Method brings the strategic perspective and design expertise to translate consumer principles into practical SMB offerings. We help identify the right segments, design the right experiences, and build the go-to-market strategies that connect your capabilities to SMB needs.

The enterprise market is saturated. The SMB market is wide open. The carriers that win will be those who recognize that serving SMBs well means thinking like a consumer business, not like an enterprise provider.