In today’s hyper-connected and rapidly evolving business landscape, the digital revolution has transformed the way channel partners operate, communicate, and engage with customers. For channel businesses, the strategic utilisation of digital leverage has become imperative to drive growth, expand market reach, and remain competitive. By building digital portfolios, strategies, and partnerships, channel partners can tap into the vast potential of the digital realm and unleash its power to amplify their business growth.
Eaton India offers its channel partners various digital tools, technologies, and solutions to optimise business performance, enhance customer experiences, and unlock new opportunities. Through digital leverage, channel partners are addressing the digital transformation projects of their customers, breaking through traditional limitations, and embarking on a journey of accelerated growth. By harnessing Eaton’s digital Brightlayer solutions, data analytics tools, channel partners gain a competitive edge, a first-mover advantage, and the ability to make informed decisions, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and increased revenue.
In an interview with CRN India, Deb Banerji, Director – Sales & Services, Eaton Power Quality, delves into the strategies, opportunities, and challenges of amplifying channel business growth through digital leverage. He further highlights how businesses can optimise their presence, harness the power of available digital solutions, tools, leverage data analytics, and cultivate strategic partnerships to unlock the full potential of digital. By embracing digital empowerment, channel partners can revolutionise their operations, foster customer engagement, and unlock unparalleled growth opportunities in the digital age.
Q1: How can digital leverage help channel businesses accelerate their growth?
Digital leverage allows businesses to promote their products and services online and get their fair share of the limelight so that customers, as well as partners, can optimise their reach. It also helps to build up a strategy for establishing, maintaining, and strengthening relationships with customers effectively. Engaged customers become brand advocates, provide useful feedback, and are part of the product’s innovation. While customers are first drawn to high-quality products, customer experience and service are what keep them coming back. The sustained high-quality interaction creates new revenue strength that yields enormous dividends for the business’s growth. Digital leverage also leads to data-driven decision-making, allowing partners to make informed choices, optimise operations, and drive business growth.
Q2: What are some key strategies for channel businesses to leverage digital effectively?
A digital channel strategy enables businesses to prioritise their efforts at various customer-facing contact points. With a focus on identifying the measures that create the greatest value for customers and for businesses as well.
Firstly, businesses need to build up a strong digital portfolio to address digital transformation projects, understanding their audience, their preferences, their values, the causes they support, and more. Another important strategy is to create a strong online presence and leverage data-driven insights for businesses to identify strongly with their target audience.
Q3: How can channel partners build and leverage a digital portfolio to drive growth?
Partnerships are increasingly crucial to business growth. Partnerships take many shapes, but all are increasingly critical to helping companies grow revenue by accessing prospects and customers that they may not otherwise reach. Channel partners need a broad range of technology, like partnerships with channel-friendly OEMs with digital solutions, to invest in creating an ecosystem that supports digital portfolios like tools, resources, platforms, etc. to optimise their approaches to enabling, engaging, measuring, and optimising the value and success of their digital initiatives. Also, partners need to pursue digital skillsets among team members to support growth on both ends of the customer spectrum-acquisition and retention, to enhance the business on a significant scale.
Q4: What role do strategic partnerships play in amplifying channel business growth through digital leverage?
In business, the right strategic partnerships can help to increase revenue, keep existing customers engaged, and attract new business without requiring the investment to create new products or services. By forming partnerships with OEMs having digital solutions, channel partners can enhance their portfolio by adding digital solutions, which can also expand their reach, give them access to new customer segments, and allow them to easily tap into emerging markets.
At Eaton, we already addressed one of the most common objections to deploying DCIM solutions, which is the inherent complexity of these enterprise-wide solutions, with Eaton’s Brightlayer Visual Power Manager (VPM), a scaled-down version of the full suite focused on managing power assets only.It allows for fast deployment, a reduced learning curve, and a cost that customers can easily afford, even if the CAPEX investment was not part of their annual budgeting process. Eaton is also providing an easy upgrade migration path for customers who would like to unlock the full DCIM capabilities of Visual Capacity Optimization Manager (VCOM) at a later stage. In a strategic partnership, the partners remain independent, share the benefits from, risks from, and control over joint actions, allow knowledge exchange, and also make collaborative solutions in strategic areas. Also, with the adaptation of OEM solutions, businesses can drive innovation, enhance their competitive advantage, and accelerate growth.
Q5: How can channel businesses stay ahead of the curve in the fast-paced digital landscape?
To remain competitive, players in this space must sustain their existing revenue streams while exploring newer upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Instead of starting from scratch, partners need to check closely with technology OEMs and system integrators to identify how they can build on and modernise existing solutions and digital infrastructures to fulfill customer-specific requirements. Also, they need to stay updated with the latest digital trends, emerging technologies, and consumer preferences, which require more investment in employee training and upskilling to ensure that the workforce is equipped with the necessary digital skills.
Q6: How do you see the role of partners evolving in this digital disruption era?
In the era of digital disruption, partners are undergoing a significant transformation. Instead of merely being traditional resellers, partners now serve as strategic advisors and comprehensive solution providers. They are expected to deeply understand customer needs, offer tailored digital strategies, and excel in cutting-edge technologies. Nowadays, partners are required to possess an in-depth understanding of their customers’ industries, challenges, and objectives. This knowledge enables them to provide customised solutions that align with their customers’ specific needs. Additionally, partners need to be well-versed in a range of technologies, from artificial intelligence and machine learning to cloud computing and the Internet of Things.
Partners are also required to be more agile and flexible in responding to changing customer needs and market trends. They need to provide end-to-end solutions that integrate hardware, software, and services and deliver measurable business outcomes. This technological expertise allows partners to effectively guide customers in adopting the right technologies for business growth. This transformation empowers businesses to navigate challenges and seize opportunities. Understanding this disruption not only helps companies maintain the satisfaction of existing customers but also creates opportunities to attract new customers. Moreover, it provides companies with valuable insights into human behaviour and how trends may evolve over time.
Q7: What sort of competencies and capabilities do the partners need to build to address customers’ complex digital challenges?
Partners need to build a range of competencies and capabilities to address customers’ complex digital challenges. Firstly, they need to cultivate deep industry expertise and a keen understanding of customers’ needs as per industry trends, regulations, and challenges. By comprehending the specific challenges customers face, partners can tailor the right solutions that directly address those customer issues. Secondly, partners must have a firm grasp of digital technologies like managed services, cloud computing, data analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and more, to suggest and implement the most suitable technologies for specific challenges and optimising solutions.
Most importantly, partners must have the capability to design and implement
comprehensive solutions and effective project management skills. Designing covers the entire spectrum of a problem, which involves many components like hardware, software, and services into a seamless system. Also, partners should exhibit strong project management skills to ensure that initiatives are executed within time budget and in line with customer expectations. With all these capabilities, partners establish themselves as reliable and valuable allies for customers navigating complex digital challenges and demonstrate their commitment to delivering innovative and effective solutions.
Q8: Eaton is helping enterprises envision and realise their digital future. How critical will be the role of your partners here?
The role of partners is critical in helping Eaton realise its vision of aiding enterprises in envisioning and achieving their digital future. Partners bring deep industry expertise, technical skills, and customer relationships and their industry-specific knowledge ensures that solutions are finely tuned to address sector-specific challenges, fostering successful transformations. Moreover, partners’ technical prowess helps Eaton’s vision to execute into reality. Their adeptness with digital technologies facilitates the implementation of cutting-edge solutions, thereby amplifying the impact of Eaton’s offerings.
Partners also assist Eaton in expanding its market reach, building brand awareness, and driving revenue growth. Their collaboration allows us to provide holistic solutions that align with customer needs, integrating hardware, software, and services to propel digital advancement. Also, partnerships empower to innovate efficiently, utilising resources and expertise to craft novel solutions that enrich customers’ digital journeys.
