One of history’s great lessons is that whoever controls the principal assets of his age emerges a winner. Thus, those who owned the machines dominated the industrial age as much as how the landowners gained control and ruled the agricultural age. In our times, knowledge is the asset and those who have the best of tools and aptitudes to capture and focus on the knowledge bank will be the ultimate winners.
In today’s fast-changing IT marketplace, knowledge and innovation are two key factors for success, among others, driving business strategies. If you look at the channel business as well, the resellers without value-add propositions and sufficient product knowledge are all box-pushers who would find it extremely difficult to survive.
Today’s market is more a customer’s market – driven by neither dealers nor vendors. It’s the customer who is the king. Also, the customer has become more demanding, especially on the qualitative front, in addition to bonanza of schemes and discounted pricing.
The awareness level among customers is high and they do not want to spend money without sufficient cost-benefit analyses. This has forced channel partners to re-look at their existing capabilities and invest in building new ones. Only then they will be able to retain and win more customers.
Whenever there is talk about new business strategies among partners, they need to look at certain key issues before chalking out their new plan like:
– Firstly, what’s their geographical market coverage?
– Next comes, what selling and promotional support they want from vendors and distributors?
– And finally, how they are positioned on the logistics front and what pre- and post-purchase services they require from vendors and their distributors?
Answers to these queries put together can be called a knowledge bank.
However, channel partners who have not yet caught on with the new market dynamics will find that the competition is already acquiring expertise and sharpening their professional skills, and still others have already stolen the march by handling these key issues more sensitively and systematically.
Several new expectations are emerging. These include information availability, product knowledge and ability to provide technical support. Vendors want their distributors and resellers to add value. On the same line, I must also say that in these defining times if customer expectations have undergone qualitative change, so have reseller expectations from their distributors. And all these can be handled well only with effective evangelization – creating an expertise bank.
In the channel business, perhaps this is better understood as value addition. The value addition becomes significant to push products as distributors can leverage partner strength to influence the customer’s buying decisions.
Lastly, creating and refining knowledge bank is not confined to knowing their business alone, but also knowing their customers on a personal note. After all, the entire channel business is also about human relationship. This can only spell long-term business success by creating a loyal customer base.