Today’s office environments leverage many different tools and services to maximize business efficiency. Having the capacity to offer bundled solutions to your clients gives you a competitive edge in this increasingly complex market.
For office technology providers, SalesChain allows you to sell different types of products individually or as a bundle. This could include IT products, IT Services, print products, print services, document management and scanning services, or some combination of these. Using bi-directional integrations to tools such as ConnectWise, e-Automate, and Etilize, SalesChain helps dealers leverage items of work across different platforms to maximize business efficiency and give you complete, actionable data.
What Do We Mean By “Blended Solutions?”
SalesChain’s business automation software solution provides the help dealers need to sell any combination of print, service, IT products, managed services, telephony, and mailing systems, using a single, cohesive platform. As dealerships expand into these diverse offerings, sales teams need more product and service-specific details. SalesChain’s order breakdown CPQ tool allows different sales teams within dealerships to tailor-make blended solutions packages for their clients and allows managers to better track progress and trends.
Does this mean Diversifying Your Offerings?
Inherently, yes.
Product diversification in the office technology field is becoming increasingly necessary, as dealers focus on offerings that are compelling for both work-from-home and hybrid offices.
One System for Dealers in Imaging and IT.
Watch this brief video to learn a bit about where our offering is headed in 2022!
What are the benefits?
Futureproofing – Office technology dealers must be willing to target expansion to reflect the changes in the industry or risk becoming irrelevant. Merging all their offerings into one comprehensive quote has many benefits. It connects all the separate processes required to do business into a single price, which helps to avoid confusion and indecision when offering many different services to a customer.
Customer Retention – Dealers can also experience increased customer retention with their clients when selling blended solutions. It’s easy for a business to replace a dealer who provides their copiers or their IT. But when a business relies on their office technology provider for copiers, IT, managed services, the help desk, and their phone systems, replacing all of this would come at great expense and with great challenge.
More Sources of Revenue – No matter the approach or the offerings, companies are in business to make money. Diversification of revenue streams is a no-brainer when it comes to securing your business’ revenue and protecting it against market volatility. Dealers who had significant IT offerings at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, reaped significant benefits as their client base continued to utilize and even expand in these areas. Having multiple streams of revenue helps to ensure that no matter what changes in the world, your business is set up well to continue being successful.
What are the challenges?
Building or acquiring an MSP is expensive – Expanding into other offerings, through acquisition or through expanding your own business, is expensive. Costs that factor into building an MSP from the ground up can be staggering. MSPs have extremely high costs for employees, as IT staff are in higher demand than ever. In addition, MSPs that make a help desk available after hours, or even 24/7, come with the inherently high operating cost that comes with keeping people on call.
IT equipment costs have been volatile and are especially subject to vulnerabilities from global supply chain issues, chip shortages, and rising costs due to inflation. Equipment maintenance costs are ongoing, and if MSPs choose to outsource their compute to the cloud via AWS, Azure, or others, this ongoing expense is inherent.
Many dealerships with capital at hand have opted to buy an existing MSP, acquire its clients and staff, and keep it running smoothly rather than taking on the challenge of building one from scratch. This is a valid and keen strategy that avoids the several years of investment it takes to start fresh.
It is a very competitive market – Aside from the expense, the MSP market in general is much more saturated with small, passionate startup companies than the print market, which is currently experiencing increased M&A. This poses both tangible and intangible challenges.
From a tangible perspective, having more competition in the market makes it harder to stand out initially. Building trust in a fresh brand image in a completely new field in a saturated market… well, we won’t take too much time to dive into why this is a challenge.
From an intangible point of view, you’re competing from a business perspective but also on a personal level. Peer recommendations are one of the most powerful sources of business growth, and the amiability of ownership, technicians and other employees plays a big role. In simple terms, making a good impression in a saturated market is even more essential.
Why employ a CPQ Capable of selling Blended Solutions?
In one sentence: The adoption of a ubiquitous system for your business significantly increases its value as compared to maintaining separate systems for your different offerings.
Having all your business data at your fingertips allows both front and back-office staff to communicate efficiently and save valuable time. Sales teams can get multiple iterations of blended solutions to clients quickly, generating more profit. Managers are better able to analyze data and identify important metrics, regardless of what product team they represent. Workflow automation is streamlined for the entire operation, with constructs for tickets, projects, and opportunities. Ultimately, companies can futureproof their services and grow intelligently.
SalesChain, for example, alleviates the need for office technology providers with diverse offerings to invest in multiple software systems by combining all the required tools into one complete toolbox. This single system can manage the presales and sales process, price proposals and generate documentation, and fulfill orders in every segment they serve, which makes it a more economical choice.
Schedule a demonstration today to see if SalesChain is right for your business.