EDITOR’S
HOW WILL THE ROLE
OF THE RESELLER
CHANGE WITHIN
THE NEXT FIVE
YEARS IN THE
VENDOR-PARTNER
ECOSYSTEM?
32Q&A
Though offices across the world have
gradually been re-opening as COVID-19
lockdown measures ease, many
organisations are still hesitant to stray from
remote working – and why should they, when
it keeps their employees safe and has proven
to be so effective? With the help of efficient
communications and collaborations tools,
remote working has been a success for many
organisations during the lockdown period and
employees have managed to maintain, if not
improve, their productivity levels.
This shift towards remote working will be
a permanent change, and in turn means that
organisations will need flexibility, agility and
speed to stay competitive. With employees
constantly on-the-go and working from
INTELLIGENT
TECH CHANNELS Issue
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
ALISON HASTINGS, UK&I CHANNEL
LEAD AT AVAYA
many different locations, organisations
must ensure they can adapt to any sudden
changes and communicate, no matter where
their teams are or what devices they are
using. This has made the need for cloudbased,
Unified Communications-as-a-Service
(UCaaS) platforms non-negotiable.
To meet these new business needs,
it is clear that resellers will need to
change their strategy – currently, indirect
sales for SaaS are below 30%, and even
major SaaS leaders such as Salesforce
have had to shut down their reseller
programme. Subscription sales, however,
are understandably thriving – no two
organisations will have the exact same
needs and no cloud migration journey is the
same, therefore it’s important to provide
customers with flexible choices.
By following this subscription model,
resellers are empowered to provide
customers with every option available
to meet their various, unique cloud
requirements; ultimately helping them to
gain market share and drive revenue.
When it comes to cloud SaaS solutions
nowadays, many vendors also directly
provide the end-customer with the specialist
support and expertise needed to manage
service deployment. This means that
resellers no longer have to invest extensive
amounts of time into becoming solutions
specialists themselves – the vendor handles
the entire process for them. With this
minimal investment, the role of the reseller
pivots from being an installer and interpreter
of the technology to being a recruiter –
armed with more time, resellers can refocus
their efforts on identifying other sales
agents to help sell these solutions; ultimately
accelerating customers’ journey to the cloud
quickly and efficiently.
By referring and signing up other agents,
who in turn help to drive further cloud
subscription sales, resellers are not only able
to target new customer segments, but also
increase their own recurring revenue.
As remote working becomes our new
normal, cloud-based UCaaS solutions
will be vital to enabling agile, seamless
communications in a distributed workforce.
Every organisation’s journey to the cloud
will be different, and it will be the resellers’
role to help them complete that journey as
quickly as possible. By offering a flexible
subscription model to accommodate these
unique needs, and by partnering with a
provider who can provide direct solutions
support, resellers can focus on what they
do best: selling.
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