‘We’ll have a lot of momentum going into 2026’: Climb CEO and CRO talk evolution

The distie’s leaders discuss European acquisitions, Middle East expansion, and filling the Citrix gap

Despite stock dipping slightly in the last quarter, Climb Global Solutions still considers it a very good period for the company, giving its leaders confidence to reach full-year targets.

Following gross billings of $504.6m (£378.2m) in Q3, CEO Dale Foster and CRO Gerard Brophy tell CRN that their ambition is to finish the financial year on a high.

The organisation now aims to hit over $2bn in gross billings and $100m in gross profit for FY25.

“We are off to a good start, and we’ll have a lot of momentum going into 2026,” says Foster.

“We are right on track.”

Vendor portfolio driving growth

Brophy adds that the company’s momentum has also been propelled by US vendors scaling their coverage with Climb.

Climb works with 70 brands globally and 18 in Europe.

“We do have other vendors in the portfolio, but our true focus is around 18 of them,” explains Brophy.

The business also intends to expand its array of vendors.

“We’ll be announcing early in the year significant partnerships with some large vendors in our portfolio,” highlights the CRO.

Foster adds that through the organisation’s division, Climb Elevate, the distributor interacts with other firms.

“They will not get sales teams, they will not get marketing, but we will transact.

“We operate with probably 200 to 300 vendors in both North America and Europe.”

Vendor collaborations have also partly been dictated by customer preferences.

“We use our resellers to vet out who we should be looking at,” highlights the CEO.

“We also use our vendors, and we look at their technology partners that we should consider, because we want to sell multiple products to a customer rather than one-to-many.

“That is really our scaling and growth factor.”

Thanks to new partnership, the organisation has filled the hole left by the loss of Citrix, Foster explains.

To do so, Climb began selling Parallels and Microsoft products to its customers previously using Citrix.

“[Citrix’s] resellers are disenchanted with them as well.

“Citrix decided they are going to take their top customers direct and let Arrow deal with the long tail.

“If you looked at Arrow and how they stated earnings in Q3, there was messy Citrix stuff there.”

‘We plan on doing multiple European acquisitions in the next 12 months’

Foster previously told CRN he had four European acquisitions on his radar.

He now expects the first deal to happen within the next six months, most likely in Q1 next year.

One reason for buyouts is to bring on team members, such as Brophy himself, who used to be MD of Spinnakar, a firm purchased by Climb in 2022.

Other factors include vendor portfolio, geographic reach and services.

“We plan on doing multiple acquisitions in the next 12 months, all focused on Europe.”

While the company’s current focus is on Western Europe, it also sells in other parts of the continent but has no acquisition plans there.

“We have seen quite significant growth through a number of our vendors in the Central and Eastern European regions,” says Brophy.

Foster also previously said 15 per cent of Climb’s market share comes from Europe, a number that has since reportedly increased, even though positive development in the US tends to mask this when comparing raw figures.

“If I were to keep the North American number flat for the last couple of years, then that number would be much bigger,” highlights Climb’s boss.

Asked about ambitions in the rest of EMEA, the company might also be looking deeper into the Middle East and is currently doing a consultant project to assess some of the disties down there.

He notes that the firm would expand into the Middle East and South Africa before it goes to APAC.

Tech levers

To drive further growth in the future, the firm intends to leverage AI to boost productivity.

Brophy explains that the company is finding educating the channel key to driving success.

“We have a modular training system, ISO-certified.

“We invested in our pre-sales teams so they could provide the training.

“We ran some events in Germany recently and had over 60 per cent end users rather than resellers, which we have not seen before.”

He notes that while grasping AI is important, so is understanding security, governance and compliance.

“Those are the technologies we are harnessing because that is where the real growth will be.”