Editor's note — GPO published a first, shorter version in its « Tribunes libres » op-ed section, under the title « La stratégie ne doit plus être un luxe pour les PME » (March 2026); this piece goes further: it sets out the approach and the convictions behind the creation of PME Strategies Business and the open release of the GTM NEXUS 360® model. Every figure cited is tied to its primary source — see the notes at the end of the article.
SMEs and mid-market companies form the backbone of the French economy. They are also the ones that decide with the least method. This asymmetry has never been a matter of intelligence or ambition: it is a matter of access. I spent my career on the side where access was granted. I am creating PME Strategies Business to move it.
What you see from the other side
At Gartner, I spent years advising the general-management and strategic-marketing teams of French technology players and French subsidiaries. At RepTrak, whose French subsidiary I led, I measured the reputation of companies that devoted annual budgets to it. Both experiences taught me the same thing, stated twice over: large organisations do not buy intuition, they buy a framework.
They pay handsomely to objectify what an SME leader perceives every day without being able to demonstrate it: a positioning that no longer stands out, a sales pitch that has stopped convincing, an employer brand that is eroding, a long-standing client shopping around. The SME leader senses these signals. They have no framework to name them, measure them and connect them to their decisions.
So the difference between the two worlds is not clear-sightedness. It is tooling.
And on one decisive point, the advantage actually lies with the SME. Bpifrance Le Lab has documented it for ten years: in an SME or mid-market firm, the identification between the leader and the company is total, on a scale no large-group executive can match. Where a multinational must organise a difficult transfer of leadership between the executive committee and functional divisions, the SME natively holds what large structures are trying to rebuild: strategy, brand and execution are already in the same hands.
What the SME leader lacks is not the power to decide. It is the framework to decide.
A complexity that no longer depends on size
For decades, structured strategy was proportional to resources: access to the big firms, dedicated in-house teams, analysis budgets, long study cycles. SMEs built their growth differently — through technical expertise, closeness to clients, agility, the leader's intuition. In readable markets, with long innovation cycles and little globalised competition, that model worked perfectly.
That balance belongs to the past. Digitalisation of markets, international competition, constant pressure on margins, accelerating innovation cycles: complexity has changed in nature. It is no longer correlated with the size of the organisation. It has become structural.
To this is added a dimension long treated as secondary and now central: perception. Image, credibility, reputation, public signals — what the market believes about a company now weighs directly on what it grants that company: a price, a lead time, a job application, a place on a shortlist.
The French paradox
The paradox is all the more striking because these companies form the skeleton of the economy. In France, 159,000 SMEs excluding micro-enterprises and 6,600 mid-market companies — fewer than 4% of firms in the market sector — employ on their own 54% of salaried staff in full-time equivalents: 29% for SMEs, 25% for mid-market firms (1). A tiny fraction of the number of companies; more than one employee in two.
And yet they are the ones with the fewest tools to objectify their strategic decisions.
The companies with the smallest margin for error are historically those that have had the least access to method.
A rift is opening between two SME models
On one side, those that structure: they clarify their value proposition, define their Go-To-Market, build a coherent brand platform and actively manage their reputation.
On the other, those that move forward by successive adjustments: opportunistic tweaks to the offer, fragmented communication, scattered commercial initiatives.
In a simple environment, the second model could suffice. In an uncertain environment it becomes fragile — and the gap between the two trajectories does not widen linearly: it accelerates, because clarity is cumulative and so is confusion.
The market has changed its point of entry
Most of the B2B buying journey now takes place without a salesperson present. Gartner establishes that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time meeting suppliers — across all offers considered. And in its most recent survey, of 646 buyers between August and September 2025, 67% say they would prefer a rep-free buying experience (2).
In other words: for more than four-fifths of the process, a company is not represented by its salespeople. It is represented by what the market finds about it.
In this context, Go-To-Market stops being a peripheral marketing topic. It becomes a steering tool that governs the differentiation of the value proposition, pricing, speed of conversion, sales effectiveness and employer appeal.
Reputation stops being an abstract concept to become a measurable operational asset. Surveyed by Edelman and LinkedIn, 73% of B2B decision-makers judge an organisation's thought-leadership content more reliable than its marketing materials for assessing its real competence — and 60% say they are willing to pay more to work with an organisation that produces it (3). What is at stake here is not image: it is acquisition cost, decision lead time and bargaining power.
The same work documents the reverse effect, more brutal: 70% of executive leaders say that content produced by a third party has already led them to question whether they should continue with an incumbent supplier. Among them, a quarter actually ended the relationship or sharply reduced it. A competitor who explains your client's problem better than you do is not taking share of voice from you. It is taking your client.
Generative AI, the new prescriber
A further shift is under way, and it is already quantified: in the same Gartner survey, 45% of B2B buyers say they used artificial intelligence during a recent purchase (2). A company's informational footprint — its content, its reviews, its public signals — now determines how generative-AI systems present it to the decision-makers who query them. These systems shape the make-up of shortlists; in practice, they become genuine prescribers.
Their effect is asymmetric and unforgiving. Structured companies see their coherence amplified. Those that are not see their contradictions surface faster. It is neither a question of size nor a question of budget: it is a question of method.
The question is no longer whether SMEs and mid-market companies should adopt a strategic approach, but how much longer they can afford to do without one.
My conviction: three levers, one mechanism
Lasting performance does not rest on the isolated excellence of one function. It rests on the alignment of three levers that traditional organisation separates — and often sets against one another.
- Go-To-Market — Structures access to the market: segmentation, value proposition, execution tactics, measurement.
- Brand — Translates that value proposition into a coherent, differentiating and memorable narrative.
- Reputation — Reflects the way the company is perceived by its clients, its talent and its ecosystem.
Intuition sets them in competition: sales against marketing, communication against the field, short term against long term. Measurement brings them together. Go-To-Market lays down the brand, layer after layer, in every commercial interaction. The brand feeds reputation by making the experience predictable. And reputation, in turn, lowers the cost of access to the market — less friction, less justification, less sales effort for the same result.
This is what the GTM NEXUS 360® model formalises. Not a fourth discipline added to the other three, but the framework that makes it possible to objectify their alignment. It crosses two distinct and complementary grids: a maturity grid, which describes what the company has built; and a perception grid — clarity, differentiation, credibility, appeal — which describes what the market retains of it.
At the intersection of the two grids, nineteen measurable components pinpoint where the blockage comes from.
This shift is the essential thing: you stop debating opinions about strategy and instead locate a gap. A leader does not need to be told that their brand “lacks visibility”. They need to know whether the problem comes from their value proposition, from their ability to make it stick, or from the trust it inspires — because the three call for neither the same decisions, nor the same budgets, nor the same timelines.
Understand → Retain → Act.
Why I created PME Strategies Business
Making the method accessible is not an intention: it is a business-model decision. It means giving up what usually creates the perceived value of consulting — the scarcity of the method and the opacity of how it works. PME Strategies Business rests on three explicit commitments.
Commitment 1 · The method is published, not guarded
The definitions, grids, components and scoring approach of the GTM NEXUS 360® model are documented publicly. A leader can understand the framework before committing to anything — and use it on their own if they wish.
Commitment 2 · The analyses are free
The founding white paper and the three thematic cahiers are freely accessible. They are not brochures: they are sourced analyses, drawing on the work of Gartner, Kantar, BCG, RepTrak and Bpifrance Le Lab, and illustrated by documented French companies.
Commitment 3 · The format is the SME's, not the large group's
No six-month engagement, no twelve-person steering committee. Diagnostics that fit into a leader's real calendar, produce a score, a hierarchy of priorities and a trajectory — and that stop where action begins.
A method you keep to yourself is not a method. It is a rent.
I do not claim that the method replaces the leader's judgement; it documents it. Nor do I claim that a model exhausts the complexity of a company: it reduces the share of arbitrariness. That is already considerable for organisations whose every major decision commits a significant share of their resources.
Democratising is not simplifying
Democratising strategy does not mean impoverishing it. It means making the method accessible: speeding up diagnostics, comparing scenarios, objectifying decisions in formats compatible with the reality of an SME. Analytical technologies now make possible what once required weeks of study.
Strategy then stops being a one-off exercise — a seminar, a document, a binder — to become a continuous steering tool, built around four moves:
- Measure — establish the real position, not the assumed one.
- Decide — rank the gaps and arbitrate priorities.
- Implement and steer — turn the trade-offs into monitored execution.
- Adjust — feed the market's signals back into the next cycle.
Survival or expansion
For a long time, structured strategy was a privilege. Today it is becoming a factor of economic selection. In an environment where perception directly influences performance, where competition is permanent and where information circulates instantly, deciding without a framework is no longer neutral: it weakens you.
Conversely, the companies that clarify their positioning, structure their Go-To-Market, align their message and manage their reputation acquire a cumulative advantage: stronger pricing power, shorter sales cycles, greater appeal to clients and talent alike.
Strategy must no longer be a luxury. It has become a factor of survival — and, for those who seize it early, an accelerator of growth.
Original publication — an earlier version of this op-ed, without the section devoted to PME Strategies Business, was published by GPO Magazine (« Tribunes libres » section, March 2026): « La stratégie ne doit plus être un luxe pour les PME » — gpomag.fr.
The GTM NEXUS 360® Cahiers — open access
A founding white paper and three thematic cahiers. Each lever is treated in its own right, with data and cases — and connected to the other two.
- White paper · Foundation — The mechanisms of corporate attractiveness. The virtuous circle Go-To-Market → brand → reputation.
- Cahier I · Go-To-Market — Access to the market as a discipline. Case: Armor-Lux.
- Cahier II · Brand — The brand as a strategic asset. Case: Opinel.
- Cahier III · Reputation — Reputation as an operational asset. Case: Duralex.
Olivier Forlini
Founder of PME Strategies Business and of the GTM NEXUS 360® model
Ex-Gartner (Senior Leader France) · Ex-RepTrak, Managing Director France
Specialist in Go-To-Market, brand and reputation. Newsletter Image & Perception.
Sources
- Insee, Les entreprises en France, 2023 edition (Ésane 2021 data, non-agricultural and non-financial market sectors): 159,000 SMEs excluding micro-enterprises and 6,600 mid-market firms, employing respectively 29% and 25% of salaried staff in full-time equivalents, out of a total of 4.5 million companies. insee.fr
- Gartner, press release of 9 March 2026, Gartner Sales Survey Finds 67% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Experience: survey of 646 B2B buyers, August-September 2025; 67% prefer a rep-free experience, 45% report having used AI during a recent purchase. gartner.com. The B2B Buying Journey: B2B buyers spend 17% of their total buying time meeting the full set of suppliers considered. gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey
- Edelman & LinkedIn, 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report: 3,484 executives and senior leaders surveyed from 30 November to 14 December 2023, margin of error ± 2.8%. Average across seven markets (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, Australia, India — France is not in the sample). Half of respondents work in organisations of fewer than 200 employees. edelman.com — full report (PDF)
- Bpifrance Le Lab, work on the SME and mid-market leader and on the employer brand.