With top economists expressing concerns about an imminent recession, every business should be looking for ways to diversify its offerings, strengthen its relationships with existing customers, minimize risk from supply chain disruptions and differentiate itself from competitors.
Accomplishing one or two of these is a great start. But doing them all will help insulate your business from any volatility and expand your capabilities precisely when others may be retreating.
If there was a single solution that would achieve all these objectives for dealers, everyone would be doing it. Or at least, one would think so. But there is—and everyone isn’t.
Adding managed IT or cybersecurity services can require a significant investment in staff and resources, but offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) is relatively low-hanging fruit that’s also ripe for the plucking.
The Perfect Offering Doesn’t Exi…
Cloud software doesn’t require components that are only made overseas. It doesn’t require on-site installation of hardware components. In fact, it can be consumed almost as soon as it’s purchased. It only requires knowledge, which any software manufacturer is more than happy to provide. In fact, many independent software vendors are modifying their products to make sales easier and more profitable for providers.
If you’ve overlooked this offering up to this point, don’t beat yourself up. SaaS wasn’t always a clear winner with small-to-midsize businesses. Until a few years ago, most SMBs remained wary of having much of their infrastructure and tools hosted in the cloud, so they purchased and owned their software. The cloud felt less like a safe, accessible helper and more like a nebulous cybersecurity risk that cast a shadow of doubt on anything and everything housed within it.
But SMBs weren’t the only organizations to have reservations. Generally, larger organizations tend to be earlier technology adopters that signal the next big trend for their smaller counterparts. But larger IT departments once struggled to trust cloud solutions as much as their on-premises tools. Eventually, they realized cloud software was safer, more efficient, and less stressful.
Technology trends usually take some time to trickle down, but the pandemic dramatically accelerated this trend and others, initiating a storm of cloud migrations. Cloud solutions offer robust cybersecurity tools, and they’re now seen as the obvious choice to empower remote work and reduce the burden on IT staff. Demand has only intensified as many SMBs try to add capabilities without making a significant upfront investment while gaining the exceptional flexibility and scalability that SaaS delivers.
You Get to Be the Hero
The only thing you need to do to secure a deal that almost sells itself is deliver unrivaled support. SMBs will still need it, as cloud migrations and configurations remain a specialized skill. Therefore, if you’re uniquely positioned as a SaaS provider—for example, you have a Microsoft or Cisco Gold Partnership, or a wealth of other strategic partnerships similar to Marco—you’re now the clear choice. It makes it easier to deepen your partnership with an existing client and potentially pry business away from a rival.
While I take pride in making sure Marco stays at the forefront of our industry, I’m certainly not the only CEO who’s figured this out. If you had the pleasure of attending this year’s Executive Connection Summit 2022, you already know that facilitator Mike Stramaglio, who’s also president and CEO at Stramaglio Consulting and a founder of The Consortium, invited Microsoft to provide a detailed presentation. The company outlined exactly how dealers could use Microsoft licenses to help them secure and expand their business, and how Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience (NCE) is specifically designed with providers in mind.
It’s So Easy, Your Rivals Could Do It
To put it plainly, if you haven’t talked to your existing clients about SaaS and how you can provide them with the best support possible, it’s likely that someone else has beaten you to it. And as technology grows more interconnected and your clients realize it’s easier and often more cost-effective to bundle their needs with fewer vendors, the revenue you thought you locked up might have one foot out the door.
There’s still time to add this valuable offering. As long as you have the necessary competencies, becoming a licensed software provider can be a relatively easy win. From there, you can always evolve your capabilities over time. Like remote work, it’s difficult to imagine that the cloud solutions trend won’t eventually become yet another “new normal.”
SaaS offers a simple yet elegant solution for everything your SMB clients are going through now and in the future, and it provides you with an additional revenue stream that’s immune to supply chain disruptions. What’s more, a wealth of new collaboration and productivity tools are flooding the market, prompting you to have more in-depth conversations with your clients about how they work, how they communicate and what they need to grow.
Our business rarely gets such a gift. For the dealers who take advantage of it, it will keep on giving for years to come.
