The Store Is Not the Strategy: Why Marketplaces Will Force Sales and Marketing Together

Continuing on from Foundry’s Edge Channel Conference in Australia, the Pax8 session by Rob Rae on The New Buyer was also excellent discussing SMB market opportunities and was one of the standout moments of the week for me. It has stuck with me since, not for what it showed, which was absolutely impressive, but for the strategic questions it left hanging in the air.

What we heard at Edge

Rob opened with a number worth sitting with: IDC now puts the SMB tech total addressable market at $777 billion, and for the first time in history that is higher than the total addressable market for enterprise tech. SMB has spent decades sitting under what the speaker called the technology poverty line, waiting for the scrap’s enterprise left behind. That is no longer the shape of the market. Vendors are now designing for SMB first, not scaling down from enterprise.

The session then moved into why: buying behaviour has permanently changed. The pandemic normalised transacting without a salesperson in the room, and Gen Z buyers, now roughly a quarter of the workforce, are pushing that further still. The speaker’s own anecdote landed the point better than any slide could: his daughter ordered Uber Eats, and when the driver stood at the door to hand it over, she texted him from the next room asking him to collect it because she did not want to talk to a stranger. That is the buyer Pax8, and every one of us is now building for.

Pax8’s answer is the marketplace and, more specifically, the storefront: a white labelled, Amazon-style shopfront that partners put on their own website, where customers browse products, manage their account, pay invoices and buy upsells without ever picking up the phone. The results are hard to argue with. One Australian partner set up a storefront, went home, and came back to a five-figure Microsoft order that had arrived overnight with no sales conversation at all. Across the board, self-serve marketplace transactions are running 123% higher in average order value than assisted sales. The same upsell effect Amazon has trained all of us to expect and now quietly accept as normal.

It was a genuinely excellent session, and I do not think Pax8 missed a beat on the platform, marketplace, or storefront piece. What went largely unaddressed around an epic session like this was what a fully digital buying journey does to the humans and teams sitting behind it.

Predictions from Edge

Pulling together what was presented and what was left unsaid, a few predictions stood out to me for where this is heading over the next few years and potentially where the next Edge may fill the unaddressed stages to complete The Path to Growth theme:

• Traditional, quota-carrying sales roles built around relationship-led, high-touch selling will keep shrinking as a share of SMB revenue, not because relationships stop mattering, but because the moments where a human adds value move earlier and get rarer, concentrated around trust, complex problem framing and escalation rather than order taking.
• Marketing will stop being the function that fills a funnel for sales to close, and start being the function that designs, merchandises and continuously optimises the buying experience itself, because in a self-serve storefront, the storefront is the sales team.
• The vendors and MSPs that win will not be the ones with the best marketplace technology. Pax8, Microsoft and others are already solving that layer well. The winners will be the ones who rebuild their GTM org chart to match a buyer who now expects to research, configure, buy and expand entirely on their own terms.

My advice for GTM teams

This is where I think Edge 2027 could bring The Path to Growth theme home and address all key predications and roadmap enablers to get there.

Building a marketplace with re-imagined service models is genuinely exciting, but it is the midway point on the path to growth. A brilliant storefront that nobody finds, trusts or knows how to use, converts nothing. How a buyer gets there and stays throughout the customer lifecycle will be a catalyst for growth, and that is a GTM design problem, not just a platform one.

New Zealand’s channel is small enough to make this an opportunity rather than a threat, provided teams get ahead of it deliberately – if SMB is where you’ll play to win when these Gen Zer’s come of age.

A few practical thoughts:

1. Stop treating marketing and sales as sequential functions and start designing them as one GTM capability. The traditional MQL to SQL handoff assumes a human closes the gap between interest and purchase. In a self-serve marketplace, brand, content, digital experience and enablement must do that job together, continuously, because there is no handoff moment left to catch what falls through the cracks.
2. Build genuine platforming and analytics capability inside GTM, not bolted on beside it. Storefront merchandising will become a component to the GTM mix, as will upsell logic and buyer journey data in the same way a retailer owns its shop floor. Today that capability sits in neither a classic marketing team nor a classic sales team. If you’re in SaaS, you’ll have a customer success team, but most MSPs today are very light on dedicated people across onboarding & customer success and customer lifecycle marketing.
3. Map the trust and discovery layer before you launch the storefront, not after. A buyer who is happy to never speak to a human still needs a reason to believe your brand, find your storefront and stay for the long haul.

The platform, marketplace, and storefront layer of this transformation is basically solved, and Pax8 deserves real credit for how far they have pushed it. The harder, more interesting problem is what transformation this may have on existing teams and capabilities. I’d love to hear more on predictions for teams who operationalise GTM before these digital natives come of age.

Reflections drawn from the SMB Market Opportunities session at the Foundry Edge Channel Conference, Australia, 26 to 28 July 2026.