Partnerships play a key role in the evolution and future success in companies across industries, and in an era where technology is more important than ever, technology partnerships are particularly appealing to those seeking true excellence. Partnering with a technology company can help you not only bring in more revenue and more customers, but it can help you build a reputation for expertise and forward-thinking that can be applied to every aspect of running your business. But is now the right time to seek out a technology partner? Here are five signs that the answer is a resounding “yes!”
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1) You’re Looking for Supplemental Revenue
One sign that your company might benefit from a technology partnership is that you are actively looking for ways to create supplemental revenue. Supplemental revenue is incredibly important for a variety of business models, providing income in ways that add to that produced from the company’s primary function. This doesn’t reduce the company’s image or the importance of their main offerings, but rather grants them access to easy additional income that can then be applied toward the business’s main function. By pursuing a technology partnership, you can gain additional revenue with the greatest possible ease.
Using a technology partnership to produce supplemental revenue can take many forms, but perhaps the most common – and indeed, the most fruitful – consist of reselling your technology partner’s solution to your customers for a portion of the profit. This type of partnership makes receiving supplemental revenue both quick and easy. All you have to do is list the agreed upon partner offerings on your website or pass them along to new or existing customers. You’ll start seeing a profit as soon as you begin selling the product, all while your partner helps provide the materials and support that you need to get to that stage. If you’re looking for supplemental revenue, a technology partnership provides an easy and profitable solution.
2) Your Customers Want Fast Results
Another sign that your company could benefit from a technology partnership is that your customers are demanding fast results, especially if you work for a consulting company. One of the biggest challenges for business and technology consultants is that their business model includes doing repeated research for solutions that best suit specific clients as those clients come to them with a problem they need solved. This is incredibly time-consuming and requires patience on the part of the client. Unfortunately, patience isn’t something that all of your clients are going to have. In fact, there’s a good chance that new customers are coming to you because they have a problem that they need solved quickly; whether or not you’ve advertised a quick turnaround, they likely expect one regardless. And even once potential solutions are identified, you then have to contact the company that offers the solution and figure out how to work with both that company and the one that hired you. Luckily, developing partnerships with technology companies can help make the process a lot faster and easier, helping you keep your clients happy.
By partnering with a technology company as a business or technology consultant, you’ll be able to quickly provide that company’s solution to your clients when it’s the right choice. Your partner will be able to provide you with the resources you need to fully understand their solution offerings and the use cases they address. This means that you can spend less time searching for potential solutions if you know that one that fulfills your client’s needs is provided by your partner. You’ll also be able to establish a relationship with the company’s partnership team to answer any questions your clients may have about the solution sooner. Depending on the nature of your partnership, you may also be able to offer the solution to your client at a reduced price. Having a number of strategic technology partnerships that account for a wide array of solutions and needs can help your consulting business provide your clients with the technology they need faster, bolstering your own reputation for efficiency and responsiveness.
3) You Want to Expand Your Offerings Quickly
Another sign that it’s time for you to look into a technology partnership is if you’re attempting to quickly expand your company’s offerings. The more your company has to offer, the more customers you’ll bring in and the happier you’ll be able to keep the ones that you already have. After all, it’s a lot easier for a business to go through a single company for all their technology solutions need rather than having to deal with multiple at a time; if you have a solution that addresses a new need for an old customer, they’re more likely to simply go through you rather than taking the time and effort to research, identify, and build a relationship with another company. However, technology changes fast, and expanding your company’s offerings takes a lot of time and money. This is where a strategic technology partnership can come into play.
When you partner with an IoT technology company, you gain immediate access to their solution offerings as per the terms of your partnership agreement. You’ll be able to list their products under your own offerings so that you can offer it to new and old customers alike, taking home a portion of the profits. This is far quicker and easier than building a solution on your own for multiple reasons. For starters, depending on the size and scope of your company, it likely isn’t realistic to design and maintain more than a certain number of disparate solutions at the same time. It requires far more manpower and makes it difficult to identify priorities. Also, creating a mature, well-rounded solution of any kind from scratch takes years, during which you must court and keep a dedicated team of engineers. By the time you’ve produced a solution comparable to those already on the market, it likely won’t be the standard anymore. This process also costs a lot of money, so it takes far longer to see a profit even after the solution has been finalized for sale. When you partner with a technology company that already has a solution designed and a team in place, you can start selling their solution and turning a profit immediately, all while having access to an existing team of experts well-versed in the technology.
4) Your Current Solution Doesn’t Meet All Customer Demands
A similar issue that might indicate that your company should pursue a technology partnership occurs when you have a solution that is proving to not meet all of the demands of your customers. What makes this sign different from the previous one is that in this scenario, you do have a technology solution or IoT platform that already addresses the most basic needs of your customers. However, your customer wants to use the technology in new ways that the solution could theoretically support, but that it is not currently designed to do on its own. For instance, if you already have an asset tracking solution that succeeds in providing location data for your customers, it might not support condition monitoring features for conditions such as temperature, humidity, or shock. If your customer requests these capabilities, you know that your solution could theoretically support the use case, but that it is not currently designed or prepped to do so. You can expand your solution on your own, but sometimes it’s easier to seek out a technology partnership instead.
Much like when you want to expand your base offerings, partnering with a technology company allows you to supplement your existing products with new functionalities far quicker and far cheaper than you could do it on your own. The reality is that if your customer is requesting a given supplement to the solution you’re already providing them, that supplement likely already exists. After all, where else would they have gotten the idea to make the request or to think that you could solve it? While this might not take nearly as long as developing a whole new solution from scratch, it still takes time and money to figure out how to integrate new functions into an existing, established solution. By partnering with an IoT company that has these capabilities and builds their own solution with the intent of being integration-friendly, you can expand your offerings virtually overnight instead of having to figure it out for yourself.
5) You’re Getting Leads for Solutions You Don’t Offer or Intend to Offer
Our fifth and final sign that you might benefit from a technology partnership is that you’re consistently getting leads for solutions that you don’t currently offer and don’t intend to offer in the future. This is remarkably common in technology and IoT spaces. Potential customers don’t have the same experience with the field, so it is always possible for them to misunderstand the purpose, capabilities, and functions of a solution that they’re considering. This is doubly true if your solution is closely related to but not interchangeable with a similar technology. Getting these false leads born from misunderstanding and lack of technical understanding is always going to happen; it’s a long-standing truth of the technology industry, no matter how in-depth and complete you think the description on your website is. Not every customer is going to read every page, not every customer is going to understand what they’re reading, and not every customer will refrain from making assumptions about a technology that is largely new to them. Thus, technology companies often end up with false leads. But by partnering with other technology companies, these false leads don’t have to be a waste of time or a threat to your reputation.
When you partner with other technology companies toward this end, your partnership is based on the exchanging of referrals. After all, if you’re having problems with false leads that are actually looking for something else, other companies are likely having the same experience in the opposite direction. With this kind of partnership in place, you can direct leads better suited to a different solution to your partner, and they can direct leads toward you in return. This means that the leads are not fully lost and helps your company build a reputation as an industry expert that’s able to point you in the right direction even if you can’t help directly. Depending on the agreement between you and your partners, you might be able to receive payments for any fruitful referrals, too, allowing you to still get paid for the time spent with a given lead.
The Advantages of a Link Labs Partnership
Link Labs offers partnerships to companies looking to alleviate the above challenges and more. We partner with companies looking to increase their revenue and expand their offerings by selling our asset tracking technology with IoT edge capabilities; we also partner with consultants and other technology companies to ensure that both our customers and yours are always getting the best solution for their needs. We offer a number of benefits to our partners, including:
- Additional Stream of Revenue. Our partnerships are designed to bring monetary value to your company quickly. Depending on the terms of our agreement, you can start profiting from a partnership in as little as months or even weeks.
- Access to New Markets. When you offer our solution through your company, you gain access to new markets and new customers. This helps you offer even other solutions to customers who you might not have thought to or been able to reach before.
- Sales Training and Support. We provide the knowledge and training that you need to sell our products to your customers. Unlike a wholly new technology, we’ve already figured out the best way to communicate with regards to our technology, taking the trial and error out of selling a new offering.
- Marketing Alignment and Co-branded Materials. Our marketing team will be able to provide you with co-branded materials to help you discuss and sell our products. This will reflect the knowledge and language presented through the sales training process.
- Engineering Support. If you or your customers have any questions either before or after the system is installed, our team of expert engineers are available to help. We don’t leave the engineering support to you, and instead make ourselves readily available to address any challenges.
If you think it’s time to start a partnership with a technology company and want to know if Link Labs’ partnership program is right for you, book a demo with our team today.
