How can tech providers survive today’s economy?

We are living in exceptionally unusual and testing times. The Coronavirus (or COVID-19) has turned our world upside down, with anxiety levels now through the roof. Every day, we are witnessing its impact, not only on how we go about our daily lives, but also the economic damage that will follow.

According to IDC’s latest Black Book Forecast, the COVID-19 pandemic is already impacting global IT markets. IDC expects to see a significant slowdown in spending on hardware in particular during the first half of 2020, with software and services spending also affected. In fact, IT spending could grow by 1% compared to the original forecast of more than 4% growth, by the end of 2020.

What does all this mean if you are technology provider? Clearly, you are going to need to reassess your current business model to determine how to survive, starting with driving down costs whilst still growing your business where possible.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, because in any great upheaval, there are opportunities.

To start, if you haven’t already, you need to commit to the entire customer and product lifecycle journey and ensure that not a single stone is left unturned – or in this case, no opportunity is left unexplored. It’s really all about proactively pursuing potential growth opportunities within your existing installed base, which will in turn lead to increased customer lifetime value and incremental growth.

In addition to mining your installed base for growth opportunities, protecting your existing, recurring revenue is even more critical. You need to ensure that you action all license, maintenance and tech renewals to (at the very least), keep the original investment sold to your customer alive, current and useful over its workable life. It simply isn’t an option – it is mandatory in today’s environment.

Driving adoption of your products/services, particularly at the vendor or reseller level is also essential. Your offering might be fantastic, but if your end users are not actively adopting or using it, then you are at risk. Which is why you must have an adoption strategy in place, that will not only protect your existing revenue, but help provide opportunities to add more licenses or users in future as well.

But in order to do all of the above effectively, you cannot rely on legacy systems or additional resources, because all that will do is impact your operational efficiency and costs. Which is why leveraging automation to help execute all of the above – at scale, is a must.

There’s no better time than now to implement a cost-effective installed asset lifecycle management platform that can bring your installed base data to life by collecting, organizing, analyzing and monetizing it, to ensure proactive management of your customer and product lifecycles.

Reach out to find how iasset.com can help protect and protect your business.