The challenges facing today’s SaaS resellers—and how to turn them into opportunities

Is the digital economy a buyer’s market? Where business is won or lost based on whether it takes one click or two to complete a transaction? If you’re a “two-click” seller, is all hope lost?

The hallmarks of our digital world—simple, immediate, always-on, personalized—do not mean that sellers and resellers, operating in an increasingly complex environment, are now driven by a buyer’s sporadic whims. Just the opposite. They provide us with a roadmap to create superior customer experiences that turn challenges into opportunities.

At AppDirect, we’re focused on creating these experiences. We help companies enter, grow and thrive in the digital economy. And we do that by providing the cloud technology and expertise that SaaS resellers need to create that positive buying and lifecycle management experience their customers desire.

Experience is everything

In business, the customer experience has always been important. But in our new digital economy, it is becoming a make-or-break factor for success. According to IDG, 62 percent of companies say that customer satisfaction scores are the most important factor that indicates the success of digital initiatives. While a separate study from Walker Information found that by 2020 “customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.”

Trends like these may be giving technology resellers pause. But why? As technology becomes more complex, resellers, especially those that sell SaaS solutions, face more complexity. This complexity stretches across every aspect of their businesses, from provisioning and integrating software, to migrating users, to billing and much more.

Thanks to advances in consumer technology, B2B buyers now expect a procurement process that is intuitive and seamless. For resellers that fail to deliver, the consequences can be lost revenue or, perhaps even worse, lost competitive advantage.

Crucial questions

How to provide a best-in-class SaaS experience is an important question for every reseller, but it’s particularly critical for companies that resell IBM’s portfolio of SaaS products, such as IBM® Cloud™, IBM MaaS360®, IBM Watson™ Studio and IBM SPSS® Statistics.

IBM is a global technology leader and has been for the past 100 years. And as the business world makes the transition to digital, customers still expect a best-in-class experience from their IBM solutions. This is the challenge that IBM resellers must now rise to meet: delivering a seamless experience—from purchase, to provisioning, to ongoing management—for complex, mission-critical applications.  

As an IBM reseller, you have a choice of cloud aggregators to work with. Here are three factors to consider as you select an aggregator partner:

1) Is the partner born in the cloud?

Born in the cloud can offer an advantage. As Deloitte Consulting’s David Linthicum explains, born-in-the-cloud companies “have not gone through the pain of migrating to the cloud but have all the advantages that cloud computing provides.”

2) Does the marketplace offer a best-in-class experience?

Digital marketplaces are becoming a huge business. Forrester predicts that marketplace-based B2B commerce will be worth USD 1.2 trillion by 2022.

3) Does the partner make it easy to bundle solutions?

Bundles can help you drive higher revenue and better traction with customers, since using more services will help them see more value from their investment. It can also be a great way to differentiate from competitors who can’t easily combine multiple solutions into a single package with a single recurring subscription fee.

These questions can help you determine which cloud aggregator partner is best to meet your needs.

Source: ibm.com