Activating the long tail: A digital-first strategy for SMB customer acquisition

Companies today are missing a big opportunity hiding in plain sight: their smallest customers. In many industries, the “long tail” of small and medium businesses (SMBs) makes up a very large share of the customer base—but most are served with a one-size-fits-all model that simply doesn’t work well. These generic approaches lead to low engagement and poor conversion, leaving too much value on the table.

The good news is there’s a better way: a digital-first SMB customer acquisition and engagement strategy to engage small businesses at scale. One Fortune 50 technology company generates 20% of its total revenue from SMBs by centralizing digital orchestration and automating how it attracts, qualifies, pursues, onboards and serves small business customers at scale.

While individual SMBs generate less revenue than larger businesses, together they form a large share of the overall market. Yet, most go-to-market strategies are still designed for enterprise accounts, leaving smaller customers underserved and underdeveloped as a growth engine.

The gap presents an untapped opportunity: SMBs are less crowded with competitors, making acquisition faster and brand loyalty easier to obtain. In addition, SMBs often feature fewer decision-makers and shorter buying cycles, and they tend to cover a wide range of industries and niche markets that could unlock new whitespace and drive better service utilization. Targeting small business travelers, for example, can help fill off-peak demand.

So, why do traditional sales models fail for SMBs across the customer life cycle? Because they are manual, costly and rigid, making them poorly suited to SMB needs. Relying heavily on field or inside sales reps makes these models expensive and resource-intensive, rendering them unprofitable for smaller customers. Limited use of data and lack of automation prevent personalized engagement, resulting in generic, irrelevant outreach. To top it off, legacy technology systems underutilize modern CRM, marketing automation and AI tools, making it difficult to track and respond quickly to SMB buying behaviors.

Rather than forcing traditional sales models to stretch where they don’t fit, leading companies are now building something better: a digital customer hub that combines technology, data and AI to connect the dots between customer insight and sales action. Done right, companies are unlocking scalable, personalized engagement for the long tail, powered by an intelligence engine that links data to recommendations and coordinates outreach across marketing and sales channels.

This shift gives companies a smarter way to grow by using digital tools to find, engage and support small businesses more effectively at every stage of the journey. The goal isn’t just more outreach; it’s more targeted engagement that leads to higher conversion and significant incremental revenue.

The digital customer hub adds value across five pillars:

1. Customer intelligence: See the full picture. Bring together scattered data to create a single, evolving view of each customer. As new signals come in—whether from internal systems or third-party sources—you can continuously enrich profiles, refine segmentation and tailor how you engage.
   
   In action: A large healthcare products company uses a demand hub to synchronize information and outreach across a wide mix of channels, including direct sales, company emails, third-party messaging, closed professional networks, webinars and online advertising. A central data lake stores customer profiles, transaction histories, interactions and engagement signals from digital channels. AI tools determine the optimal channel and timing for each contact—ensuring relevant, timely follow-ups.
2. The lead engine: Build smarter, more actionable leads. Don’t just score leads—build better ones. By continuously enriching customer profiles with external and behavioral data, companies can sharpen segmentation, fine-tune lead scoring and route the right prospects to the right channels at the right time.
   
   In action: An energy management provider started with siloed CRM and service data, making it hard to spot SMB opportunities. They developed an AI-powered “digital opportunity factory” that merged customer profiles, past sales and service interactions with IoT sensor data from installed products. The system identified upgrade or replacement needs, scored opportunities by likelihood to convert and routed them to the right salesperson—reducing time-to-close by about 30% while improving lead quality.
3. Engagement personalization: The right message at the right moment. Static campaigns don’t work for dynamic customers. With the right signals, companies can adapt messaging in real time—based on behavior, industry or even a single click—and refine it with every response (or lack of one).
   
   In action: A financial services organization built a digital engagement engine to support early-stage interactions. As visitors engage with online tools, attend webinars or download materials, the system dynamically adapts follow-up content and delivery channels. Prospects receive personalized sequences of emails, ads or social media touch points. Only when signals of intent—such as repeat visits or content downloads—are strong does the system escalate the lead to sales, ensuring reps focus on prospects most likely to convert.
4. Customer experience: Support that scales. Onboarding isn’t one-size-fits-all, and neither is support. A strong digital setup can guide each customer through the journey they actually need, flag friction points early and trigger human support only where it matters.
   
   In action: A technology company uses a digital hub to personalize onboarding and support. Customers are guided through their unique journeys using behavior-triggered tutorials, help content or chatbots. If signs of friction appear—such as repeated failed attempts or abandoned setup—the system triggers human support. By automating routine support and focusing human effort where it matters, the company improves onboarding efficiency and customer satisfaction.
5. Customer success: Staying one step ahead. Track usage patterns to anticipate what customers need before they even think to ask—and initiate proactive interventions. Smart systems can detect spikes, stalls or support gaps and automatically trigger upselling, education or outreach. Routine questions get handled automatically, freeing up human reps to focus on the conversations that build loyalty and long-term value.
   
   In action: A large tech company’s global demand hub provides ongoing performance monitoring across sales, marketing and service interactions, enabling the timely diagnosis of issues and the identification of opportunities to improve. The hub plays a late-journey role in customer support, renewals and value reinforcement. By unifying signals in one place, it surfaces expansion opportunities and early signs of disengagement, routing targeted interventions to customer success teams to protect retention and drive long-term growth.

These ideas draw from core principles in “The Harvard Business Review Sales Management Handbook,” by ZS’s Prabha Sinha, Arun Shastri and Sally Lorimer.

The right digital customer hub doesn’t just make outreach more efficient. It transforms how companies engage and grow across the long tail. By combining automation, intelligence and personalization, a digital customer hub unlocks five key advantages:

First, it enables true scalability, allowing companies to reach thousands of small and midsize customers without the need for a matching increase in cost or headcount. At the same time, automation drives higher ROI by lowering the cost-to-serve while preserving the kind of targeted, relevant engagement that small businesses respond to.

A digital customer hub also boosts organizational agility. With real-time data flowing through the system, teams can quickly adapt to changing customer needs or shifting market dynamics. Every interaction feeds a growing intelligence engine, which gradually builds richer, more complete customer profiles while closing critical data gaps. This level of data maturity sharpens everything from segmentation to timing to channel selection, making each touch point smarter than the last.

Over time, this intelligence pays off in the form of stronger loyalty and higher lifetime value. When customers feel seen, supported and proactively served, they’re more likely to stick around and grow with you.

United Airlines uses a digital customer hub to target roughly five million accounts to find, acquire and nurture prospects and existing customers. The system intelligently targets both new and existing customers and delivers customized digital content tailored to customer needs. It also features automated deal modeling and contracting that allow customers to secure curated offerings and manage their programs via self-service. A continuous nurturing engine tracks engagement and surfaces timely opportunities for cross-sell and upsell.

Standing up a digital customer hub isn’t just a tech play. It’s an organizational shift. Before standing up a digital customer hub, leaders will need to rethink roles, invest in change management and actively champion the effort across teams. But before any of that, they will need to answer three fundamental design questions.

Question No. 1: Who will lead the engagement—sales or marketing?

The answer to this question will shape the hub’s entire structure. For businesses with a large volume of small customers, a marketing-led model often works best. In this setup, digital tools manage most of the buyer journey, with inside sales stepping in for higher-potential leads or complex later-stage deals.

Question No. 2: Build from scratch or stitch together from existing capabilities?

Many companies already have disconnected tools, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems and marketing platforms, that don’t talk to each other. For these companies, it may make sense to start by linking these tools to create a more connected experience for SMBs. Even basic integration, such as syncing CRM and marketing data, can unlock early wins that build momentum.

For companies that haven’t historically focused on SMBs, a fresh start will be preferable. In these cases, it often makes sense to build a dedicated digital customer hub that handles both sales and marketing in one streamlined system. This clean-slate approach often works best when there’s little existing infrastructure to build on.

Question No. 3: Are your commercial and technology leaders in it for the long haul?

Unlocking the long tail isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. It requires sustained leadership commitment to make strategic, future-forward design decisions, invest in new capabilities and rethink how teams work. The results will make the upfront investment worth it by building a sustainable competitive advantage—but it won’t bear fruit overnight.

Whichever path a company chooses, the long tail of small and medium B2B customers is no longer out of reach. By investing in a digital-first commercial sales capability, businesses can tap into this vast and growing segment to fuel sustainable, profitable growth. Those who act now will build a durable competitive advantage with a digital-first SMB customer acquisition and engagement strategy that delivers value where others see only complexity.