Partnering outside of IT

AS A RESELLER OR SYSTEM integrator, there are several ways that you can market your business. In a lot of cases, you may rely on your vendor and distributor partners to provide the necessary funding to support your events, trade shows or anything else that gets you in front of your customers. Another might be to spend money on advertising your business and the services you offer through newspapers, magazines, radio, and billboards.

Do these methods really work? Is taking a ‘scatter-shot’ approach to marketing your business — meaning that you are touching lightly on all your target markets but never really penetrating deeply into these markets — the right thing to do?

In many cases, it’s just far too ‘hit and miss’ and generally difficult to measure whether or not you are getting the results that justify the investment.

But are there opportunities that you are missing out on? How can you be more specific in the markets that you target rather than adopting a blanket approach?

The answer just might be your ability to partner with organisations in specific vertical markets that don’t offer IT services. A good example of a key vertical that you could target is real estate agents. There are several examples of situations where resellers and system integrators have partnered with real estate agents who are developing new commercial properties.

From the agent’s perspective, having a partner who is capable of providing voice and data infrastructure services to their clients is a value-added service that they can offer when they are selling new properties. For the buyer, it eliminates the tedious job of having to select an infrastructure provider, for example, to provide voice-over-IP services inside their new commercial building.

Construction companies want their buildings to be state-of-the-art, and having the latest VoIP infrastructure in place inside these buildings can only add to the package they are selling to prospective buyers. In addition, there’s no reason why you can’t partner with organisations’ office ‘fit-out’ companies or even interior designers.

Having a proven track record working with construction companies/builders, designers and real estate agents can only help your cause when you are marketing your business and trying to reach the plethora of small and medium enterprises that can benefit from rolling out the services that you provide.

By Tony Warhurst, managing director, south east Asia for ShoreTel