Despite a strong performance by the channel in 2023, MSPs, VARs and even distributors should be prepared to navigate some complex challenges in the year ahead. According to Canalys, customer budget constraints alongside ongoing price inflation, skills shortages, rising costs and economic instability are likely to act as headwinds.
So, what can channel partners do to pass through these headwinds and emerge stronger than ever?
Investing in automation is a sound strategy no matter the economic climate, but it’s particularly helpful during uncertainty. For channel partners, ensuring their own sustainability while providing value to both vendors and customers is a delicate balancing act. Automation helps strike this balance, and can make a huge impact on how they work through some of the most challenging aspects of their jobs.
How channel partners can automate and make an impact on their bottom line immediately.
1. Mine installed base data.
Channel partners have lost out on renewals and growth opportunities for decades — and it isn’t because of a lack of hustle or know-how. Far too many partners still rely solely on their vendors to communicate revenue events. Inaccurate, incomplete, out-of-date and inaccessible installed base data has consequently resulted in missed potential revenue from existing clients. With low hanging fruit left on the table, channel partners have had no choice but to work harder to meet their revenue targets by fighting for new logos.
Without a clear snapshot of all owned customer assets, it’s nearly impossible to construct a cohesive renewal strategy, or be geared to proactively identify opportunities to extend customer lifetime value (CLV). But you can completely revolutionize this part of your business, by implementing a revenue platform that tracks, analyses and acts upon your critical installed base data. And, by integrating with your existing systems (such as your ERP, CRM or ITSM), your team will never have to deal with bad data or manipulate countless spreadsheets ever again. Sales can now receive notifications and alerts about everything - from renewal opportunities, upsell potential, cross-selling prospects, upgrades, refresh cycles and even end of life or end of service events.
Automation in action: Imagine a vendor releases a new product that perfectly complements an existing installed product. With comprehensive installed base data, sales can quickly locate all customers with that established product and introduce the new offering as an upgrade or upsell, thereby creating immediate opportunity, at minimal cost.
2. Enhance quotes.
Traditional quoting is time consuming. If the customer changes their mind or edits a request, hours can be added to an already long process, tying sales leaders up in paperwork. Partners are often stuck spending far more time than they’d like on tasks like approvals, requoting, converting currencies, checking price lists and prepping multi-vendor quotes.
With automation in place, quoting is reduced to minutes, improving response times and freeing up sales to interface with customers more. Moreover, modern automation tools can directly integrate with vendor systems, allowing real-time price book access and cutting out reliance on suppliers to find the right pricing. By generating quotes independently, resellers and channel partners increase their autonomy and agility.
Automation in action: The vendor relationship cost often rises during renewals and quoting. For example, value-added resellers (VARS) and managed service providers (MSPs) rarely provide their own data for monitoring and tracking installed assets. Instead, data and information are often locked behind complex databases and systems that can be time consuming to access. Automation, however, reduces the vendor relationship cost and can make the data more immediately accessible, so you can be more proactive and get in before your competitors do.
3. Streamline processes.
The aforementioned lack of installed base data often leads to a slog of manual sales processes. In order to make timely offers and enticing deals to customers, a lot of time gets wasted manipulating spreadsheets or logging into vendor portals. Not only does automation help significantly reduce the time to sew these deals up — it reduces the administrative overhead as well.
Analysing customer data, order processing, invoicing, contract and technology lifecycle management can all be automated and taken out of a sales pro’s hands, allowing them to act in real-time when customers need them.
Automation in action: Every sale is accompanied by a host of administrative tasks — quoting, invoicing, contract prep and other actions can take a significant time. Automation can minimize, or even eliminate, those tasks for sales. With the administrative burden eliminated, and valuable business intelligence available at their fingertips, leadership and sales leads can then work together to reimagine more valuable and revenue-generating tasks to fill the time.
Now is the time for channel partners to take matters into their own hands.
With economic uncertainty abounding, automation emerges as a steadfast ally in the channel. By harnessing automation to streamline operations, leverage data, reduce costs and enhance customer engagement, MSPs, resellers and distributors can future proof their business and win more deals. Automation is not just a tool; it's a path to resilience and growth.
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