Are You Reactive, Or Have You Embraced Proactive Customer Management?

Today's successful solution provider model bears little resemblance to the successful model of two or three years ago. But what will the successful model look like three years from now?

Let me propose to you that the evolution of the channel is proceeding toward a model where the relationship between solution provider and customer will become increasingly more entwined and more strategic, and the vendor/solution provider relationship will become less entwined and less strategic.

If you read CRN's ongoing series titled Demand Generator, you will see some trends that suggest where we are headed. But in order to understand this, you have to review the past.

When this industry began, the channel's value-add was access to products, given that technology vendors at that time required authorization to sell their wares. Over the years, the channel began selling products in concert with basic services such as hard-drive image burn-in.

Later, we saw the channel flip that model in favor of first selling services such as network design and deployment, and then dragging the products in behind the services sale. More recently, we have moved to a model where successful players are selling single-point solutions for automating a single business function or making processes such as sales forecasting more efficient.

I would categorize most of these models as reactive sales. But I believe we are now moving into a period where reactive sales will be replaced with proactive management of a customer's business process.

The Demand Generator series is great at showing how solution providers are making this happen.

When a solution provider is called on by a doctor's office to provide a medical records management system and ends up selling that plus integration with a wireless network tied into a tablet PC so the doctor can easily access patient records and write prescriptions from the tablet, this falls outside the realm of reactive sales. When that same solution provider, who understands HIPAA requirements, next helps the customer become compliant by adding the proper security, then mirrors the servers and adds remote backup to protect data loss, it shows there's much more afoot. And when that solution provider then adds a telephony component to this office, so that medical records of patients calling to schedule an appointment are called up on the screen when the receptionist answers the phone, it is using IT to help change an entire work process.

Ultimately, when you count up all this technology, plus a vertical application designed for medical records management, you find there are products from EMC, Computer Associates, Microsoft, Gateway and five other vendors in place. Scenarios like these really help you begin to understand how solution providers drive demand.

So what does all this mean?

Fundamentally, it means the most strategic relationships that solution providers have are no longer with their suppliers but rather with their customers.

Today's solution providers are building best-of-breed solutions. And many times, they are incorporating products from vendors with which they have no formal relationship. Vendors need to come to grips with this and understand that they have to focus on teaching solution providers how to fish for new solutions business—even if their own products are just one small component of the bait.

Make something happen. I can be reached at (516) 562-7812 or via e-mail at [email protected].