EMERGENT 14 CHANNELVISION | SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2023 Here’s how: 1. Providing better data. Resellers and channel pros have lost out on renewals and partnership opportunities for decades — and it isn’t because of a lack of hustle or knowhow. Inaccurate, incomplete, out-ofdate and inaccessible data about customer install bases has held them back for years. Without a clear snapshot of all owned customer assets — and the partners who help supply them — it’s nearly impossible to construct a cohesive renewal strategy. Automation creates a revolution. The same pros can now schedule notifications and alerts, getting reminded about everything from renewal opportunities, upsell potential, cross-selling prospects, upgrades and refresh cycles. Automation in action: Imagine a vendor releases a new product that perfectly complements an existing installed product. With comprehensive install 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. Streamlining processes. The aforementioned lack of install 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 because of bad data. Not only does automation help significantly reduce the time to sew these deals up — it reduces the administrative overhead as well. Order processing, invoicing, contract and technology lifecycle management can be automated and taken out of a sales pro’s hands, allowing them to act in real-time when customers need them. Additionally, automation can solve for more complex channel process challenges. New regulations demand proper communication when certain sensors and installed equipment are being decommissioned or no longer supported. And with billions of connected IoT devices installed globally, managing this level of communication for each individual product line can be impossible for a human. Automation can handle notifications to customers and simultaneously notify a sales agent that the customer is due for an upgrade — helping to ensure compliance and avoid a lapse in contracts. 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. Leadership and sales leads can then work together to reimagine more valuable and revenuegenerating tasks to fill the time. 3. Enhancing 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 time and giving sales more time to interface with customers. 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 service providers 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. With economic uncertainty abounding, automation emerges as a steadfast ally in the channel. By harnessing automation to streamline operations, leverage data and enhance customer engagement, resellers and channel partners can future proof their business and win more deals. Automation is not just a tool; it’s a path to resilience and growth. o Scott Frew is founder and CEO of iasset.com. Source: ABI Research Which of the following IT processes at your organization would benefit the most from automation technology? Source: 451 Research; S&P Global Worldwide Total Addressable IT Market by Category, 2023 Forecast Source: Canalys 27% 25% 20% 19% 19% 18% 17% 15% 15% 14% 14% 13% 12% 12% 11% 11% 11% Security management Database management Application management Backup and recovery management Network management Server management Storage management Disaster recovery Testing Virtualization management Provisioning infrastructure, software, services Configuration management Incident management Continous integration/deployment (CI/CD) Patch management Problem management Change management 100% Total IT spend: US$4.7 trillion Growth: 3.5% 0.9% 1.0% 1.7% 90% 80% 6.9% 8.9% 17.8% 30.5% 32.3% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Components and peripherals 2023 forecast Unified communications Cybersecurity Client devices, imaging and printing Infrastructure Software Telecommunications services IT services US$43 billion Growth: -7.1% US$45 billion Growth: -2.6% US$79 billion Growth: 11.1% US$324 billion Growth: -2.8% US$417 billion Growth: -0.1% US$833 billion Growth: 5.5% US$1,423 billion Growth: 0.9% US$1,506 billion Growth: -7.1% Automated Fingerprint Identification System Market Source: Market Research Futures 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 2030 2031 2032 67.83 11 13.46 Market Size in USD Bn
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4Njc=