VAR Profitability Series:
Creating a Competitive Advantage
Read time -2.5 minutes
Boost your VAR’s competitiveness with an integrated portal for IT asset management and customer service efficiency.
Why Your VAR Needs an Integrated Portal to Stay Competitive
If you’re the CEO, the sales leader, or just a leader at a VAR, you want to have a competitive advantage over all the other VARs out there.
Imagine being so sticky—you are irreplaceable. There are several ways to do this: cloud service contracts, rebate programs and MSP services that lock you in.
But we have another problem: customers these days are accustomed to immediate answers, shipping, and data.
Why?
We live in a world where we’re buying so much product off of Amazon. Amazon has conditioned our brains to have this sort of instant mentality to buy things.
At the same time, we also live in a world of sales where it’s harder and harder to get in touch with people.
Why is this such a problem?
Because customers demand answers, and if they don’t have easy access to them, they’ll resort to calling your sales people for tactical, analytical information—this drags your sales people off task. Now, overall reps want their customers to call them, so some reps actually love it – but when someone shows up with a better mousetrap – the rep (and you) are left in the dust.
To solve this problem of customer service and engagement, a lot of VARs will tell me that they want to buy a portal. They want something that allows them to track the contracts and associated assets and the renewals, so a customer can view what assets and renewals they purchase from the reseller.
But what is a portal?
A portal allows you to do a lot of things. A good portal allows you to store the assets and contracts that you sold the customer, but a great portal will allow you to combine assets that the customer bought from somebody else as well as the OEM.
So why is a great portal important?
An integrated portal that allows you to combine assets allows for IT asset management or IT lifecycle management, and that is a super sticky process that enables you to proactively serve your customers by telling them:
- what to buy
- what to refresh
- what to service
- what to put on support of
- what to consolidate
- what to dispose of
- what to monitor
- what to backup
If you’re thinking about how to improve the service to your customers, a portal can deliver a lot of benefits to your customer base, including:
- helping you be a lot more sticky,
- integrating with your quoting system,
- being your contract management system
- being your service system.
- housing all your assets that you have sold your customer
- housing all the assets your customer bought from someone else!
If you’re interested in talking about this, my name is Reid. I built a reseller, and we built software to better run that reseller, starting with a portal at first.
Over time, though, we added more functionality to provide IT asset management, lifecycle management, quoting contracts, and service in one unified system.
I’m passionate about having one unified system because it combines all that data so you can make better decisions. If you want to talk about that, please let me know.
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