Growth Playbook: Going From SMB to Mid-Market

When SMB to mid-market growth is chased after reactively, small- and medium-businesses tend to expand headcount, systems, and processes in an uncoordinated way. This reduces a company’s ability to adapt to changing market expectations.

The transition to mid-market can impact communication, creating silos that break the communication flow. As a result, sales cycles, support, operations, service, and other functions suffer, ultimately affecting customer relationships.

When you’re scaling from SMB to mid-market, you need a unified communications system that gives you the visibility required for decision-making. Too often, SMBs only realize this when something breaks.

Below, we’ll help you spot potential problems early and offer a scalable approach for navigating the SMB to mid-market growth phase.

What Makes Mid-Market Growth Different?

As you grow into a mid-market company — with over 500 employees and an annual revenue of $10 million to $1 billion — your operations fundamentally change. Scaling this growth requires a new approach.

You can no longer rely on ad-hoc solutions

The lean, mean revenue machine may have worked well in the past. But keeping a single main phone line, having staff wear multiple hats, and using spreadsheets to track everything will create information gaps when operating with a bigger team. As your team size increases, communications grow across various apps, often resulting in competing sources of truth. A typical SMB deploys 58 different apps to run operations:

Imagine the scale of apps when you reach mid-market. At the mid-market stage, you can’t afford to have different sources of truth — they slow down decision-making and create confusion. You need to move away from improvised, individual-driven solutions and toward standard systems.

Growth brings complexity

With SMB to mid-market growth, complexity multiplies. You may expand to multiple offices or manage remote teams across different regions, requiring real-time coordination despite the distance. Departments become more specialized, but customers still need a seamless experience.

The expectation of integrated service grows. Customers expect you to be responsive on different channels, and this is a good thing. A Bain survey found that customers who engage on multiple channels spend more and have a higher LTV than single-channel customers:

However, as you scale, you need to have the right communication platform to deliver such an experience.

Your tech stack has to level up

If your tech stack isn’t integrated, there’s a high chance that your data will be fragmented across systems, which makes it tricky to get an accurate, unified view of customers.

To achieve SMB to mid-market growth — and realize the benefits of this growth — you need a unified approach where the CRM, communications, and customer experience (CX) tools work as part of a centralized system. As you scale, it becomes easy to work with a system of apps rather than juggling 50 different apps across functions.

Why Communication Tools Are the First to Break During Growth

Communications tools tend to be the first to crack when a business scales. Below, we’ll explore the main reasons for this.

Channel sprawl

Many SMBs have scattered communication across different apps. Employees text each other internally on one app, message customers on another, and follow up separately with personal text messages. As you grow, this channel sprawl gets harder to control.

The result is chaos with no unified customer record or conversation history. An agent might be helping a customer via email, unaware that the same customer had already called last week. It’s frustrating for both sides, leading to confused staff and annoyed clients.

Missed opportunities and lost deals

When communication systems don’t scale in line with company growth, you start missing revenue opportunities.

A classic example is slow lead response. As inquiries to sales reps ramp up, an SMB that values a personal touch can struggle to respond promptly because of limited tools. Speed matters enormously. Research from Xant shows that 35% to 50% of sales go to the vendor that reacts first.

When the volume of customer queries increases without a robust communication workflow in place, leads start slipping through the cracks. This represents a lost opportunity and lost revenue, which is a critical pain point for those with mid-market aspirations.

To avoid this, you need a streamlined approach to communication, enabling your teams to have visibility into real-time interactions.

Inflexible systems kill agility

Basic phone systems or free versions of software often lack the features to route calls, queue customers, support new channels, or add users easily. As you hire more people and extend service hours, these limitations become painfully apparent. Without flexible call routing or an IVR, customers are often bounced around or forced to wait on hold for an extended period.

Similarly, if your helpdesk software or email workflow can’t auto-distribute messages, you end up manually forwarding customer emails to the right person — something that tends to break at scale.

All this rigidity hurts your agility. It slows down how quickly you respond or adapt. What’s more, onboarding a new hire to an outdated phone system might take weeks due to number assignments and manual setup.

When SMB to mid-market growth is fast, you need a communications infrastructure that speeds you, not holds you back. Modern cloud systems let you add a user in minutes.

Signs You’re Outgrowing Your Tech Stack

How do you know it’s time to overhaul your communications and related technology? Growing companies often experience similar “uh-oh” moments.

Here are a few signs that your current tech stack isn’t keeping up:

• Using five or more separate tools just to communicate: You have one app for phones, another for video meetings, a chat tool, and an email client, and none of these talk to each other. What’s more, if your team requires a separate login for each mode of communication, efficiency and information sharing suffer.
• No unified view of the customer: If your sales processes, support, customer success, and marketing data reside in silos, and no single dashboard provides a 360-degree view of the customer, it presents a challenge in scaling. When a customer calls, your agent should instantly see who they are, their purchase history, and past interactions. If your staff are instead asking basic questions or scrambling through emails, it’s a sign you have outgrown your systems.
• Relying on manual routing and processes: Manual workflows buckle under higher volumes. If you can’t automate tasks like call routing, ticket assignment, or follow-up reminders, you will need to put more people to work, which leads to inefficiency and human error.
• Lack of visibility into metrics: Signs include not knowing your call volumes, average handle time, first response times, or SLA compliance rates. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Many SMB sales scale up and hit a wall here because their basic phone or email systems don’t offer reporting. As a result, they operate in the dark until customer complaints or backlogs expose the gap.
• Rising customer complaints as you grow: An uptick in negative feedback can be tied to overwhelmed, disconnected systems. Customers can experience longer hold times, repeat issues, or get lost in handoffs between departments. This becomes more frequent with disjointed tools.
• Adding staff as a band-aid: If you’re handling increased support or salespeople load by hiring significantly more people, it’s time to re-evaluate. Growth requires new hires, but it’s also essential to automate and streamline processes where possible. If you find yourself frequently saying “We need more hands on deck” instead of improving your systems, it’s probably time for a tech upgrade.

How to Scale Your Communications the Smart Way

Scaling from an SMB to a mid-market firm doesn’t have to be a chaotic, reactive scramble. With the right strategy, you can build a communications infrastructure that supports your growth rather than stifling it.

Here are five smart approaches to future-proof your communications and CX as you scale.

1. Centralize your communication tools

Bring all your core communication channels into a unified platform — including phone, video, chat, email, and SMS.

The benefits are immediate:

• A single login for users
• A consistent interface that facilitates easier onboarding
• All interactions aggregated in one place

These benefits make it easy to enforce SLA standards while providing the visibility you need to track everything from a single location. You eliminate the productivity loss that arises from app switching.

Choosing a cloud communications suite helps eliminate channel sprawl by unifying your apps. This preserves context across conversations.

Platforms like Nextiva integrate seamlessly with CRMs, automating updates to customer records, interaction history, and other key data. It helps the human part of the system work more effectively and efficiently.

2. Build for omnichannel CX early

Customers want to reach you on their terms. This could be via phone call, text message, live web chat, email, or social media. As you grow, the percentage of customers expecting full omnichannel service continues to increase.

It’s best to embrace an omnichannel strategy sooner rather than later. You may not be active on all of the above channels right away. However, when choosing a communication platform, ensure it supports all channels that may be necessary in the future.

That way, you don’t have to deal with painful and resource-intensive migrations later, ensuring a consistent experience from the start. A good communication platform will allow the various channels to work together seamlessly. This will give you a unified inbox, providing visibility regardless of increasing scalability across various channels.

3. Prioritize integrations

No matter how useful each tool is, if they don’t integrate, you will end up with siloed data. You need technology to cohesively build into one system that works and shares information with the CRM, e-commerce platform, ERP, and other new technologies.

Prioritize native integrations, as they enable seamless information flow, which has an immensely positive impact on operations. A support agent, for example, can see billing and shipping details and use the customer-preferred channel to respond to customer queries.

Many modern communications platforms offer one-click integrations or an “integration marketplace” for popular apps. For example, Nextiva offers native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Zendesk, Microsoft, and more, bridging the gap between your phone system and customer databases.

4. Embrace automation

When it comes to communications, automation lets you scale your service without dramatically increasing headcount. For example, an interactive voice response (IVR) system or auto-attendant greets callers and routes them to the correct department or person via a menu, eliminating the need for a human receptionist.

There’s no more “Let me transfer you” — the system does it instantly. Platforms like Nextiva provide AI chatbots and virtual assistants to handle common inquiries 24/7, deflecting many calls, emails, and chats. This enables human agents to focus on more complex issues that require specialized expertise and more time to resolve.

Beyond these, there are various other tasks you can automate, including:

• Voicemail-to-email transcription: Staff can read voicemails on the go.
• Automated callback scheduling: Connect with callers you missed earlier.

Automations like these save precious minutes on each task, which adds up when volumes are high. With the proper setup, your growing business delivers speedy, large enterprise-ready responsiveness without a proportional increase in headcount.

5. Invest early in analytics

As you scale, you need visibility into how your teams and systems are performing. Investing in analytics capabilities early on will pay huge dividends. You need dashboards and reports to measure key metrics such as:

• Call volume trends
• Average wait time
• First-contact resolution rate
• Customer satisfaction scores
• Ticket backlogs
• Response SLAs

By tracking these metrics, you become more proactive in managing your workload. (Explore other customer service metrics you can track to gain comprehensive visibility.)

Many SMBs delay thinking about analytics until they feel “enterprise level,” but that’s a mistake. Even a support team of five people benefits from knowing their daily call volume or busiest inquiry times.

Modern cloud communication platforms often have built-in analytics or easy integrations with business intelligence tools. For example, Nextiva’s solution includes real-time dashboards and custom reports, enabling managers to closely monitor call activity by team.

How Nextiva Helps SMBs Grow Into Mid-Market

Below is an overview of the various ways Nextiva helps SMBs grow into the mid-market segment.

Unified platform for all channels

Nextiva offers a unified platform for virtually all communication channels. From one application, your team can manage phone calls, team messaging, video conferences, SMS texting, and more.

Lee Baker, Systems Administrator at Reliance Partners (an insurance SMB), describes Nextiva as “the lifeblood of what we’re doing. It’s our phone calls and internal messaging throughout the company. Everybody is using it for everything they do.” With fewer information silos, it’s easier to make business decisions.

Built-in CRM and integrations

Unlike the many providers who focus only on phone or chat channels, Nextiva includes a built-in CRM and tightly integrates with external business apps. If you already use a CRM like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zoho, Nextiva seamlessly connects with those as well. These integrations bridge the gap between your communications and customer data.

With CRM and communications in one ecosystem, Nextiva helps growing companies avoid the silo trap. Your support and mid-market sales teams share context without extra effort. This prevents you from bolting on a separate contact center solution just to track customer interactions. Many mid-market businesses find this appealing because it reduces the number of vendors and tools they need to manage.

Scalable call routing and IVR

When your call volume doubles or you open a new office, you need a phone system that adapts instantly. Nextiva excels in this area with flexible call routing, IVR menus, and admin controls that are easy to update.

You simply set up rules to direct calls based on department, time of day, or even caller characteristics. The platform lets you optimize these rules on the fly through a web portal, eliminating the need for a technician to rewire a PBX. All of this boosts your agility.

Nextiva also offers simultaneous ring groups that route priority calls to other stakeholders when one agent is unavailable. As you scale, these features are invaluable, allowing you to maintain a personal, responsive touch with customers, even as call volumes increase.

Real-time analytics for smarter decisions

Nextiva provides a central dashboard that managers can use to monitor key metrics, including call volumes, average talk time, hold times, missed call rates, and agent availability — all in real time. It lets you slice data by team or period and set up custom reports to measure contact center ROI.

This transparency helps managers to identify coaching needs and allocate resources effectively as the company scales.

Proactive support and 24/7 reliability

Nextiva’s enterprise-grade infrastructure offers responsive, around-the-clock support and a highly reliable service, which is vital when your communications are mission-critical. The company operates numerous geographically distributed data centers and has a 99.999% uptime goal.

On the support front, Nextiva is available 24/7, with real, knowledgeable people ready to help when you need it. This level of service is essential as you grow because any communication downtime or issue can have a significant impact on your business. You need to resolve problems quickly, and Nextiva’s support team makes that possible with proactive assistance.

Reviewers consistently praise Nexitva’s support. For example:

Grow From SMB to Mid-Market With Nextiva

With the right tools and strategies, an SMB can grow into a mid-market company sustainably, without losing the qualities that made it successful. Reinforcing your communication foundation should be your top priority, as it’s often the first thing to break under pressure.

Nextiva enables you to unite your team on modern platforms and streamline your customer engagement across various channels. Its communications platform allows you to use data and automation, making your work smarter and less prone to errors.

Too often, businesses only realize their infrastructure is lagging once issues begin to escalate. Don’t wait for that to happen. Upgrade your communications stack as an investment in your future growth.

Looking for SMB to mid-market growth? Upgrade to Nextiva to start scaling strategically.