TD Synnex focused its Vendor Summit and Inspire conference in Greenville, South Carolina. this week on transformation, and investing in long term success. Facing headwinds of a potential (whispers) recession, this is, or should be, top of mind for all partners.

Regardless, the technology landscape is certain to change, as are partners’ businesses. Resiliency and internal adaptation are vital components for not only surviving times of upheaval and uncertainty, but thriving despite them. The reality of the technology channel of today is that a partners’ business needs to stay agile. The sessions and overall theme at Inspire centered around just that.

One of the sessions at Inspire, led by TD Synnex’s Stacy Nethercoat, SVP, advanced solutions North America, focused on helping partners respond to market changes, transform their businesses and grow. Channel Futures spoke with Nethercoat about her session, “Finding Growth & Opportunity In the Next Business Cycle.”

One thing is for certain — change is a constant motivator. Right now, according to Nethercoat, there is a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of change in the air. To prepare for this, Nethercoat has a playbook of four ideas, recommendations for navigating the next 18 months. Of course, it all starts with internal adaption.

Sell Your Differentiated Value

TD Synnex’s Stacy Nethercoat

“Most partners fall into either strong on the financial side of things, but weak on the strategic position, or it’s flipped,” said Nethercoat. “So the advice is to sell your differentiated value. Define what the core is, and defend it. Back away from strategic investments that aren’t paying off. Take a hard look at your pricing models, and how you’re going to market to drive more profitability out of that strategic capability. You want to make more money? If you don’t have good strategic positioning, and you’re not financially strong, it’s probably time to think about succession planning.”

Retain Your Key Customers

The next insight is to retain key customers. This is nothing earth-shattering, but bears emphasizing all the same. 

“It is incredibly, incredibly expensive to go out and acquire more customers,” said Nethercoat. “It actually costs about five to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing customer. By improving your customer retention by just 5%, you can increase your profits by 25-95%. This is done by focusing on increasing the footprint and the share of wallet with those clients.”

Line of Business

The third insight addressed expanding your account footprint through lines of business. 

“I think 2018 was the tipping point where the line-of-business technology budgets were actually growing much faster than the IT budget,” said Nethercoat. “It continues to be the case now. Lines of business – whether you’re marketing, HR, sales, etc. – need technology solutions to differentiate and to compete. And so my recommendation for partners, whose bread and butter is working with the IT people associated with the account, is to find ways to to drive a consultative introduction and relationship with line of business. This is to really expand, again, that footprint and the wallet spend.”

Invest In Your People

The last insight that Nethercoat shared was around investing in people. Retention of key talent is critical to cost control and growth, Nethercoat says.

“We are at a 16-year high in terms of talent shortage. According to sources like Gallup, Future Forum and ManpowerGroup, 75% of organizations can’t find skilled people to fill open positions that they have. And then, of course, it’s also really expensive to replace an employee who leaves. We want to retain our employees, pure and simple. Employees want control over when and where they work. So, the recommendation or the suggestion is for partners to think about expanding geographically where they allow employees to live and work. And then also build expertise, virtual client engagement, etc.”

The second point is around upskilling, rescaling, cross-training and giving employees the opportunity to not only do their jobs, but also add to their skill sets. 

“That’s what they want; that’s what employees want,” concluded Nethercoat. “They want to learn, because they recognize that by learning more, by doing more, that creates career opportunities. And honestly, it’s very good for the partner. It’s good for any organization to build that redundancy in terms of skill set.”