Resellers missing out on cloud cross-selling opportunities

Resellers selling cloud offerings need to widen the number of subscription services they provide to avoid missing out on revenue opportunities and to ensure they deliver a range of applications and solutions that are wanted by customers.

Far too many are selling just a single subscription service and as a result miss the chance to not only sell more but put themselves in the driving seat helping guide customers through the digital transformation process.

Research out earlier this week to celebrate MSP Day found that there was a gap in what was being offered and the services SMEs wanted. One of the main conclusions of the study from Barracuda MSP was that managed service adoption remains narrow and the services most commonly offered by managed service providers don’t match the services most commonly purchased by UK SMEs.

That theme was echoed at the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit with the firm sharing its views about the market and the need for more involvement by resellers.

"How you move from being a build partner to a scale partner is essentially about selling more subscriptions. Many of our partners are still selling one or a few subscriptions to their customers," said Apay Obang-Oyway, Director of Cloud & Software UK&I at Ingram Micro Cloud.

"The breath customers make up about 30% of the base and they are selling 3-6 subscriptions but when you look at the cross-sell it's only 10% of their customer base they are cross-selling into, which means 90% of their base they are only selling one subscription, which tends to be Microsoft Office 365," he added.

He said that with digital transformation customers were looking to drive greater change and were looking to digitise their business, which meant that more solutions and subscriptions needed to be sold to them.

"The opportunity to working with us is to move along the roadmap from build to scaling the business and you are able to get greater customer reach and depth," said Obang-Oyway.

He added that some of the causes for reticence in those selling low numbers of subscriptions were due to the challenges that some partners were facing transforming their own businesses to sell cloud services.

“In many cases the partner is going through the transition from being a traditional IT player to becoming a services orientated, cloud-first business and that takes time and has its challenges and you have to work your way through that. It is all about being fast and fluid and what we are saying to partners is that you have to have a tunnel vision about that change," he added "it is adapt or die without a doubt."

Ingram has set out its stall around the cloud and invested in building its own platform to deliver services to ensure it can keep ahead of the growing customer demand.

"We are seeing fundamental change in industry and our partners, their customers are fundamentally changing, so there is change and it's happening fast," added Obang-Oyway "We have a role to play with our partners and that continues to be to enable them to realise and grow their opportunity in cloud."

“The customer is getting wiser and knows what they want,” he added “The role for the IT partner...is going to be to enable that business strategy with the various technologies and platforms around that. Digitisation is here to stay.”