Most operators that have attempted to launch a B2B subscription commerce marketplace have made the same foundational mistake: they built a catalogue first and asked commercial questions second. The result, as Beyond Now has documented across CSP market reviews, is a platform that functions more like a glorified app store. A digital shelf of disconnected SKUs rather than a coherent offer that an SMB can actually buy and use. The catalogue grows, the adoption rates stay flat, and the organisation loses confidence in the initiative before it has had a fair chance to prove out. The problem was never the platform. It was the offer selection logic that preceded it.
Getting the first five to ten offers right is arguably the most consequential commercial decision in the lifecycle of a B2B marketplace. It sets attach rate expectations, establishes the support model, shapes how sales teams learn to position the platform, and determines whether early customer cohorts generate word-of-mouth or complaints. This article sets out a practical framework for how operators should approach that selection.
Start with what SMBs are already trying to buy
The starting point is not the operator’s existing product portfolio. It is the current, documented demand profile of the SMB customer base. When McKinsey surveyed more than 3,000 B2B decision-makers, nearly 80 percent indicated they believe telecom operators should play a larger role beyond core connectivity, with small businesses in particular seeking simplicity, integration, and comprehensive support rather than specialised expertise (McKinsey, 2025). That finding has a direct implication for offer design: the first wave of products should map to things SMBs are already planning to spend on, not things operators believe they should want.
Across North American markets, three categories consistently appear at the top of SMB demand surveys. Over 20 percent of global B2B respondents identify security as their most compelling priority, a finding that held consistent across all regions, with cybersecurity ranking as the top priority for small businesses ahead of cloud and connectivity categories (McKinsey, 2025). Productivity and collaboration tools represent a second category where demand is already evident and vendor infrastructure for resale is mature. Gartner data shows Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace collectively hold 91 percent of the SMB productivity suite market, with only nine percent of SMBs still relying on on-premises alternatives (Gartner, via Medhacloud, 2026). Cloud backup and data protection round out the third category. The BaaS market reflects the urgency: the global Backup-as-a-Service market is expected to reach $8.34 billion in 2025 and grow at a CAGR of approximately 32 percent through 2030, with North America accounting for roughly 38 percent of revenue, driven in large part by ransomware frequency and cyber-insurance requirements mandating immutable backups (Mordor Intelligence, 2025).
These three categories form a defensible, commercially validated first layer that corresponds to demonstrated willingness to spend rather than operator aspiration.
Apply a filter for operability, not just market size
Market size is a necessary but insufficient criterion. The more useful question is: which offers can the operator actually provision, support, and bill for at launch without significant new infrastructure? Operators entering the marketplace space routinely underestimate how much of their early execution capacity will be consumed by the mechanics of delivery. Provisioning workflows, billing reconciliation, first-line support scripting, and activation follow-through all create friction that catalogue breadth only compounds.
CompTIA research finds that 56 percent of SMBs cite lack of internal expertise as the primary barrier to adopting new technologies, ahead of budget constraints at 41 percent and integration complexity at 38 percent (CompTIA, via Medhacloud, 2026). That finding cuts both ways. It validates managed services as a high-value offer, since SMBs will pay a premium to have implementation handled on their behalf. But it also means that offers requiring significant customer-side configuration or technical literacy will generate poor activation rates and elevated support costs in the early stages of a marketplace. The operability filter should favour products that are provisioned largely by the operator on behalf of the customer.
This is also where the hyperscaler resale opportunity is best understood. According to Analysys Mason, Microsoft Azure and AWS together account for over 70 percent of all operator partnerships for B2B cloud computing services globally, with 57 telecom operators already active in reselling public cloud services to their business customers (Analysys Mason, via Light Reading, 2024). The infrastructure is proven and the partner channel economics are established. But reselling raw cloud compute to SMBs without a managed services wrapper produces the same low-adoption problem as a bare catalogue. Telstra’s cloud portfolio, which includes Azure and AWS Managed Services alongside Microsoft SaaS implementation, grew cloud revenue by 12 percent year-on-year in 2023, illustrating what the combination of hyperscaler infrastructure and operator-delivered managed services can produce at scale (Analysys Mason, 2024). The lesson for mid-size North American operators is not to avoid the hyperscaler layer, but to package it correctly from the start.
SD-WAN and UCaaS sit in a similar tension. Both are high-revenue and growing. McKinsey identifies SD-WAN and unified communications and collaboration as near-core products in which telcos are expected to make inroads as part of a connectivity-led growth strategy (McKinsey, 2025). But both carry enough deployment complexity that they are better positioned as second-wave offers, once the support model and provisioning automation are established.
Anchor, extend, and deepen
A practical sequencing framework for a first marketplace cohort uses three layers. The anchor offers are products with broad demand, simple activation, and low support overhead. Business email, Microsoft 365, and endpoint security fit this profile. They generate consistent monthly recurring revenue, carry high familiarity among SMB decision-makers, and benefit from vendor-managed provisioning infrastructure that reduces operator burden at launch.
The extension offers build on the anchor layer by addressing adjacent problems the same SMB customer already has. Managed backup and cloud storage extend naturally from productivity tools. Any business running Microsoft 365 has cloud data worth protecting, and the SaaS Application Backup segment, driven by Microsoft 365 and Salesforce adoption, is projected to post the fastest growth rate within the BaaS market through 2030, as governance mandates for granular restore of email and SharePoint records become standard (Mordor Intelligence, 2025). Cybersecurity bundles extending from endpoint protection into email threat protection and DNS filtering follow the same adjacency logic. Techaisle research identifies endpoint protection, email threat protection, and data loss prevention as the three fastest-rising adoption categories among SMBs in the security segment, with endpoint protection showing an 83 percent likely adoption increase (Techaisle, 2024).
The deepening offers introduce a managed services layer on top of the underlying technology. This is operator-delivered monitoring, configuration management, and support that converts a product sale into an ongoing service relationship. Hostopia’s analysis of operator digital service programs finds that bundled customers frequently churn 30 to 50 percent less than connectivity-only accounts when activation is strong, and that they generate 60 to 200 percent higher ARPU in mature programs (Hostopia, 2026). That uplift does not come from the product alone. It comes from the activation and support wrapper around it, which is precisely what a managed services layer delivers and what the SMB market demonstrably values.
Resist the temptation to launch everything at once
The pressure to populate a marketplace catalogue quickly is understandable. It reads as completeness. In practice, it is one of the most reliable ways to dilute execution quality and confuse the sales force. BCG’s analysis of telco ICT strategy recommends that operators standardise their offerings and leverage automation to maintain price competitiveness and scalability (BCG, 2025). That discipline applies as much to offer count as it does to product architecture. A sales force that cannot confidently position ten well-chosen products will not perform better with thirty.
The most effective marketplace launches in the North American operator market have followed a deliberate restraint model: five to seven offers at launch, each with a defined activation playbook, mapped to a specific SMB buyer persona, and supported by trained first-line agents. Additional offers are introduced in subsequent quarters as adoption and support capacity justify the expansion. Beyond Now’s analysis of CSP marketplace performance finds that many operators have fallen short precisely because their platforms became overly product-centric, functioning as repositories of individual technologies without addressing the integration, management, and outcome questions that SMBs actually need answered (Beyond Now, 2025).
The commercial case for discipline
A global telecommunications study by Simon-Kucher found that telcos capture only around 60 percent of their full customer value potential, with the revenue-per-customer dimension scoring just 4.3 out of 10 (Simon-Kucher, 2025). The gap is not primarily a product gap. The offers exist. The gap is a go-to-market and activation gap, and it widens when operators try to sell too many products without the underlying enablement infrastructure to drive consistent adoption.
Choosing the first five to ten offers is, in the end, a discipline exercise as much as a commercial one. McKinsey analysis shows the beyond-core segment, encompassing cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and managed ICT services, is projected to grow at 8.9 percent CAGR through 2028, six times faster than the combined growth of core connectivity and near-core services (McKinsey, 2025). The opportunity is real and the window to capture it is open. The operators that get it right will be those willing to resist the pull toward catalogue breadth and instead ask a harder, more operational question: which specific offers, in which sequence, can we provision reliably, support credibly, and activate consistently for the SMB customers we already serve? That question, answered honestly, is the foundation of a marketplace that compounds over time rather than one that peaks at launch and plateaus.
Alep Digital’s turnkey platform gives mid-size North American operators the infrastructure, cloud product catalogue, and managed services capacity to execute exactly this kind of disciplined launch, without building the internal cloud team required to sustain it.