Boost and Sustain Your Revenue with the Right Technology Vendor

What are the key success factors of partnering and working with a technology vendor?

As an agency or system integrator, your number one priority is to have happy customers, who in turn sustain long term revenue for your organization. One of the key factors for achieving this goal is to choose the right partner—the right technology vendor for your customers.

Choose the Right Platform

Partnering up with a vendor boils down to several factors, like chemistry, mutual goodwill, and transparent business practices. But you cannot escape the fact that the technology, the digital platform the vendor is offering, is of utmost importance.

You should therefore make sure that the platform can solve multiple customer requirements, and also fulfill the needs of different customers. As for the customer journey, a future proof digital platform should be able to fill many, if not all your required touchpoints.

A handy tip in choosing the right digital platform is to research whether it is under active and continuous development, and the state of the community. If the platform is open source, you will also be able to investigate open issues for the repository.

Be an Advisor

Having a longstanding and symbiotic partnership with a technology vendor can provide a solid foundation for you being a trusted advisor for your customers.

Being an advisor entails helping your customers to create value over time, providing best practice examples and strategic input for how to grow and scale with the given solution, as well as how to make the best possible use of every feature.

Also, by having a close relationship with the vendor you get to know the platform exceptionally well, essentially becoming an expert on implementation, maintenance, and use cases. To be an advisor also requires you to be familiar with the goals and strategy of your customer, so maintaining an equally close relationship with them is a given.

Be an Expert on the Technology

As mentioned, the vendor’s digital platform is essential to the success of your customers, so you have a profound need to become an expert on the technology. Additionally, being an advisor also involves giving the best advice in regard to the platform itself, as mentioned above.

Being an expert on the given technology means that you should know all the possibilities with the solution: what specific solutions you can build, how the platform can solve your customer’s tasks, and how you can grow and scale with the platform.

In order to stay in the loop on all of this, you and your relevant colleagues need to pay attention to the vendor’s meetups, webinars, published content, documentation, and news—as well as general industry news. Another important aspect is to ensure that your developers always are certified for the latest major version of the platform, as this assures your customers that you know what you’re doing.

Also, being a technology expert entails a close collaboration with the vendor: this means keeping dialogue transparent and sharing honest feedback both ways. Finally, make sure that you designate an architect who knows the strategy and technology, as this will be the ambassador and go to person internally.

Simplify Resource Allocation

Whether the technology vendor is a right fit for you depends on many factors, but one you should pay close attention to is the resource allocation. Is the digital platform easy or hard to learn? Does it feature a steep learning curve?

If the platform is harder to learn, it will be more difficult to get developers up and running, and it will be harder to sustain revenue as developers are coming and going.

Getting developers up to speed is important for scaling your business and your customers’ business, so make sure the solution is based on open standards and familiar technology. A solution based on e.g. JavaScript can be easier for developers to get started, as all web developers can easily get acquainted with this programming language.

Happy Customers

We have already explicated this, but let’s hammer the point one more time: happy customers equal boosted and sustained revenue for at least the next 5–10 years. Partnering with the right technology vendor can thus make or break your long term financial forecasting, so choose wisely.

Customers are happy when the solution is continuously developing and is functioning the way it is supposed to. Also, the customers love getting help when they need it. If you have a close collaboration with the vendor, chances are that all these positive features will reinforce your relationship with your customer as well.

The Sum of All Virtues: Best Practice

To sum it all up: When you know a given solution well, you know the best practice of practical implementations. You can then make great solutions, which lead to happy customers and a sustained revenue over time.