What key challenges are partners facing?
Partners are operating in a highly challenging environment. This is made more complex by the shift to subscription and recurring revenue models. They need to juggle legacy technology with new, as well as manage the intricacy that comes with multivendor sales.
Market challenges
The past few years have been turbulent for many businesses around the world, to say the least. The pandemic accelerated partners’ shift to recurring revenue models and spurred the increase in end customer demand for solutions ‘as-a-service’. This brought about a plethora of new challenges for partners. But what are they most concerned about in the market?
Cost pressures have been apparent in many economies around the world since countries started to reopen after lockdowns. This was driven initially by increased demand for gas and depleted gas storage supplies and was soon followed by disruptions to global supply chains because of delayed production of semiconductors due to the pandemic.
Business challenges
The market pressures are creating increasingly challenging global and local dynamics. The challenges are intensified when looking at the business level.
With business growth at the top of the agenda, partners are looking for new ways to improve growth and achieve higher profitability. The good news is that partners believe subscription and recurring revenue models pose a good opportunity for higher profitability and predictable revenue streams over the long term.
The remaining challenges within the top 5 such as changing customer buying behaviour, ensuring customer success, and implementing new sales models reflect the additional challenges partners face in pivoting to subscription and recurring revenue models. To be successful in their transformation, they need to change the focus of their sales models and incorporate Customer Success methods. That takes a unique skillset and a deep understanding of customer behaviour.
Subscription and recurring revenue model challenges
When looking at specific challenges around the shift to subscriptions and recurring revenue models, around half (52%) of respondents believe that managing a complex multivendor portfolio of products is the biggest challenge they’re experiencing.
Given that partners are on their transformation journey, the reality is partners need to manage hardware, software, and services simultaneously. In some industries, like in the public sector in the UK for example, end customers may be slower to adapt to recurring models so partners need to strike a balance between servicing legacy customer needs while accommodating the more progressive ones.
This is no simple task to do at scale and across complex, specialised vendor portfolios. Complexity increases with managing enterprise solutions across multiple suppliers and is compounded by vendor acquisitions and changing solutions portfolios.
“Partners who serve the public sector must navigate a tricky path – our customers are by nature more careful and risk-averse, but like any other customer, we want to provide the best solutions and services for their specific needs. This can mean a different approach to procurement and providing a more complex mix of products and services, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Managing this complexity can be challenging for any partner.”
Dan Worman, Executive Director Cinos, UK
Also cited as a top challenge by 40% of partners, is access to the right data to support the customer lifecycle. Data is key to success in subscription models. Partners need data to improve customer experience, gain insights for better decision making, build pipeline for new products and services based on customer trends, and more.