IoT and Analytics Business Continuity Plan for the Channel

As businesses continue to adapt and pivot to keep up with the changing demands of customers in this new norm, they need to remain relevant. Resellers now know the trends to consider while helping customers build resiliency in response to the accelerated business transformation needs – as discussed in part one of this series.

To maintain a competitive advantage, resellers should strengthen their business continuity plans with these best practices for selling vertical market-ready IoT and data solutions.

1.     Align with the Changing Business Needs

As businesses adapt, new c-suite priorities focusing on the importance of business resiliency, customer experience and connectivity rise to the top as business priorities. Many companies have prioritized the now with a focus on social distancing measures and employee health and safety, acting quickly to address immediate changes that are critical components to organizational resiliency. By understanding the needs of customers and how these priorities affect specific businesses, companies can advise their customers on best practices and the relevant technologies that lay a foundation for what comes next. Companies can also support new business models and operations that not only support business continuity but help shape the future of their business.

2.     Consider a Use Case Approach

With companies having a laser focus on financial outcomes, reducing investments, leveraging existing resources and prioritizing projects based on the potential return, every project needs to be tied to driving more efficiency. Solutions must ensure customers can do more for less, creating additional value through investments that are easy to deploy, are impactful and are measurable. Start with quick-win projects aligned to specific business needs and more complex desirable projects can follow this when your customer is ready to start a broader transformation program. A ‘use case first’ approach provides a compelling opportunity to guide and deliver complementary solutions that solve for adjacent opportunities while focusing on immediate business continuity needs and supporting long-term business strategies.

3.     Offer End-to-End Solutions

Providing complete end-to-end solutions offerings gives resellers a jump start on this new approach to the market. This lowers resellers' barriers to entry and speeds their time to market by delivering proven solutions to fulfill their customers' needs. Having a toolset – access to an ecosystem that offers everything from edge to enterprise with a focus on business outcomes – allows resellers to deliver on the best solutions to fit end users’ needs. Repeatable, predesigned and certified solutions enable faster delivery to help optimize use case deployment, resulting in higher profits for stakeholders – and is key to a reseller’s success in IoT and analytics.

4.     Strengthen Skills and Resources

Customers are looking for not only a depth of knowledge, but also an understanding of the key metrics that will drive a successful project. Having an established presence, the right skills and delivery capabilities help resellers stay relevant and enable them to advise customers on the digital and business transformation strategies needed for new revenue streams and delivery on key KPIs. Resellers should identify their options for expanding their market share, by either honing in on their industry expertise or creating parallel sales across multiple industries to win opportunities with current and potential new customers. Having a vertical focus, the right enablement tools and a vast ecosystem of partners will support their growth in driving outcome-driven solutions, which is important in implementing IoT and analytics solutions.

A Glimpse at Tech Data’s Solutions Offerings

As a solutions aggregator, Tech Data is delivering best-in-class solutions and services by leveraging its technology partner ecosystem and providing aggregated and ready-to-deploy IoT and analytics solutions with best-of-breed components.

The ecosystem is fragmented and no one vendor can deliver everything that our partners need. Tech Data has invested in a solution factory – a comprehensive solution readiness methodology where we vet and build end-to-end channel-ready solutions. These fully vetted solutions are added to the Tech Data Solution Catalog, which has 50 channel-ready solutions that are repeatable and scalable with vertically focused use cases in retail, smart cities, industrial and healthcare. This allows resellers to focus on outcomes that solve their end-user’s specific business needs.

In the past few months, Tech Data has added more than 20 new solutions that focus on helping businesses re-open and making consumers feel safe leaving their homes to return to day-to-day activities. These solutions help customers make better decisions based on their end-user needs such as Social Distance Monitoring, Building Occupancy Monitoring, Hand Compliance and Sanitization, Temperature Screening, Telehealth & Telemedicine and Worker Safety.

In addition, Tech Data educates partners on how to monetize analytics and IoT through the Practice Builder – a methodology that simplifies selling solutions by aligning them to business outcomes.

Watch for part three of this series in which we learn how to navigate the current crisis to build a resilient business.

Don’t want to wait? Comment below and let's discuss how Tech Data can help channel partners connect the dots within the world of analytics and IoT. You can also schedule a consultation with the Tech Data team to discover how we can help you thrive in this growing market.