There is a shift in the way businesses make buying decisions today that is forcing the reseller channel to shift their sales strategy from a product discussion to a “how do we do this” discussion with their customers. One approach to facilitate the shift in strategy is to focus on vertical markets, leveraging what a reseller learns from one customer’s business issues to open up discussions with other companies in that same industry. The reseller becomes an “expert” and a problem solver. This has been done quite successfully by many channel partners.
The next step is to expand this concept to different vertical markets. For example, NEC introduced a “role-based” approach to communications, whereby a person’s role in a company determines their technology needs. In a hospital, an ER nurse has different communications needs than the admitting nurse. However, one could argue that the admitting nurse has similar needs to the front desk clerk of a hotel. These “adjacent similarities” in roles were raised by Jeff Kane, Senior Vice President of NEC Corporation of America, while discussing the company’s recent consolidation efforts in his recent podcast with Jim Burton of UCStrategies.
To build on this example, Jeff described the similarities between the importance of keeping beds filled in the hospitality industry, dealing with dormitory rooms/beds in the higher education industry, and managing patient bed availability in the healthcare industry. The needs of these seemingly different markets are actually very similar, and therefore the solutions should be similar. NEC plans to bring to its channel a stronger focus on the role-based approach, which will enable those channel partners with a vertical focus to expand into new markets.
This should create exciting opportunities for NEC’s channel – and for any other dealers and VARs clever enough to embrace the role-based concept. From a channel perspective, the role-based concept provides the potential for opening up new market opportunities by finding business similarities between different verticals. Resellers (Solutions Integrators) that now focus on Healthcare, for example, can take some of the solutions that they have developed for that industry and, using the role-based concept, approach customers in other industries where similar “roles” exist.
As we have moved from convergence to unified communications and added in hosting and cloud-based services, an increasing number of reseller channel members have found the level of expertise required by today’s technologies almost demands that they develop specializations. Traditionally, the majority of resellers have taken a horizontal or generalist approach to their sales efforts, but those who are achieving the most success today have shifted to a more focused or “specialist” approach. Yet for the channel, specialization can be somewhat limiting, as opposed to that more horizontal approach. The beauty of the role-based concept is that it sheds a new light on specialization and enables a channel partner to extend a particular expertise and knowledge base to other industries as well.
In a recent conversation with David Nick DiLucia, Senior VP at DCI Design Communications Inc., we learned how one integrator is putting the role-based concept to use. DCI Design focuses primarily on the hospitality industry, providing solutions for many of the largest high-end hotel chains in the country. They are using their knowledge and expertise gained from that industry to provide related solutions for the healthcare industry. DiLucia explained that while DCI Design partners with other vendors as well, they focus on NEC for their high end, more complex solutions for a variety of reasons. Using NEC as the foundation, DCI Design has taken from their hospitality solutions such elements as IP TV/video-on-demand, high-speed Internet access, and IP/SIP telephones for guests, and adapted these elements for hospital patients. DiLucia described how in today’s world, a hospital patient isn’t content to lie in bed for days without access to their laptop or to the latest movies to help pass the time. And of course there are numerous other issues that need to be considered, such as how bed occupancy is monitored and billed. With a suite of products all under one banner, especially after the current re-organization, DiLucia sees NEC as one of, if not the strongest player in both hospitality and healthcare. Although sometimes sounding suspiciously like an advertisement for NEC, it was clear that DiLucia and DCI Design depend on NEC solutions to help them win contracts for implementations in high-end hotels across the United States and beyond.
What can other companies in the reseller channel take away from DCI Design’s experiences? Specialization usually leads to “expert” status, which positions a channel partner at a much higher level with the customer and often provides a significant competitive advantage. For years we’ve been hearing the phrase “trusted advisor”. Every reseller wants to be viewed as one by their customers for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the opportunity for higher margins. Developing a strong sense of the business issues for a particular industry enables a reseller to actually achieve that “trusted advisor” status.
“Specialization” can also lead to reduced costs for implementations when the channel partner is able to replicate elements of a solution and avoid the time and pitfalls of having to create from scratch for every single installation. Given today’s environment of integrating a number of products to create a “solution” for a customer, the time spent on integration issues and testing the final results can be onerous and expensive. But if a solution can be created once and replicated again and again – via verticalization – imagine the savings in time and money for the reseller. For the channel partner, think higher margins! Think successful implementations with fewer hiccups!