Channel partners to aggressively develop outbound sales capabilities: Techaisle
2013 SMB & Channel Outlook, Trends & Predictions: Techaisle Take
December 27, 2012: Techaisle, the global SMB, ICT market research and industry analyst organization has made a few predictions on the outlook and trends for 2013 based on its surveys and research.
All predictions below are compiled based on 44,700 SMB and 3,990 channel surveys, 420 depth interviews conducted in 2012 covering Cloud, Mobility, Virtualization, Business Intelligence, Marketing Automation, Managed Services, Business Issues, IT Priorities, Channel Challenges in 12 countries – US, UK, Germany, Australia, Brazil, India, Italy, Malaysia, Canada, China, Singapore, Mexico. In addition, continuous informal conversations were conducted with many of the 420,000 business panel members and 105,000 channel panel members who form the base of our survey universe.
Here are a few channel-focussed predictions:
Channel partners will aggressively develop outbound sales capabilities to compete with vendor direct sales and to counter the rise of the independent consultant to prevent being cut out of the distribution chain.
• Successful channels will finally realize and pursue their individual respective competencies and roles as consultants, business process advisors, integrators, aggregators or plain vanilla cloud deliverers.
• Expect that channel partners will be more successful going deep with integrated suites or a few applications that they integrate rather than trying to provide a complete infrastructure, communications, applications and vertical solutions
• Channel partners will begin to put together a repeatable, profitable SMB solution that will include proprietary integration value-added services or software, accelerated with productivity suites and collaborative combinations, such as Office 365 and SharePoint, or Google Apps, or the new Citrix ApplicationMe@Work or XenDesktop.
• Cloud aggregators will continue to enter the market, however, few will be profitable as aggregators will need to be able manage reseller relationships with structured sales and marketing programs, implementation and post-implementation support for the channel, and tier-2 customer support for end users.
• Mid-market focused channels will look up to their vendor partners to help combine mobility, cloud, virtualization offerings while others will rely on a partner-to-partner network.