Partnerships are becoming an increasingly popular strategy for providing value in the IoT space. Simply put, it’s easier to take advantage of, build upon, and sell a well-established, fully-realized IoT platform than it is to create a comparable technology on your own. It also lets you start seeing monetary benefits far sooner than if you had to put time and money into creating something new. However, not all IoT partnerships are of the same quality. An ideal IoT partnership should not only give you something new to provide to your customers or increase your revenue, but it should also be built in such a way that it lets you optimize your business’s overall operational efficiency.
Increase Your ROI by Investing in AirFinder Everywhere
- Loss Prevention. Reduce the amount of loss that occurs during the supply chain process
- Location Coverage. AirFinder Everywhere uses a combination of GPS, Cellular, and WiFi to determine location everywhere
- Security Alerts. Know when a delay in shipment has occurred so the problem
can be addressed immediately.
Who Can Benefit from an IoT Partnership?
Any number of businesses and organizations with any number of business models can benefit from an IoT partnership. It’s just about making sure that the partnership you choose to pursue is right for your business. Most IoT companies and their partnership teams are highly experienced in building partnerships with a variety of companies. With their help, you’ll be able to identify the best partnership format for your company’s individual needs, offerings, and goals.
Some types of companies that commonly seek and benefit from IoT partnerships include:
- IoT Solution Resellers. Some companies are built on a model of selling IoT solutions created by other companies or by selling those solutions in addition to one or more solutions of their own.
- Ecommerce Companies. These businesses focus on selling the products and services of other companies in a centralized location dedicated to one or more specified markets with a wide range of needs.
- Business and Technology Solutions Consultants. Organizations that make money by advising other companies can benefit from partnering with IoT companies in order to provide reliable solutions for the problems their clients face.
- Other IoT Companies. Different IoT companies with different offerings often partner together to either provide technology or customers to the other. One might make an element that is a component of another’s solution. Or they could have an agreement to exchange customer referrals based on shared knowledge. These partnerships take many forms depending on the needs of the companies involved.
Optimizing Operational Efficiency with an IoT Partnership
Optimizing operational efficiency is all about cutting down on the time it takes to complete a given task while also having an established strategy in place to deal with that task. It’s about promoting speed and quality in a way that leaves you prepared to deal with challenges instead of requiring on-the-spot solutions. After all, when you have a strategy in place, problem solving becomes a lot easier and a lot less stressful for all parties involved.
While it might seem odd, at first, to view IoT partnerships as having a positive impact on your efforts to optimize your business’s operational efficiencies, it actually helps in a number of ways. By forging a partnership with an IoT company, you are allowing them to take on some of your work for you, which in turn gives you more time in the day to allocate to other critical tasks in a way you couldn’t if you were working on your own.
Here are some of the ways that an IoT partnership can save you time and help you optimize your operational efficiency:
You Don’t Need to Create a Solution on Your Own
The biggest way that an IoT partnership can help you save time and increase operational efficiency is simply by providing a ready, proven solution that fills the gaps in your offerings that you need to be filled. Because let’s face it: creating an IoT solution takes years and years of time and money, and you want to be able to offer a new solution to your customers now. Even if you do decide to create a new solution on your own, putting in all the time and money to generate a workable solution, it will not immediately be as refined as what’s already available on the market. In fact, by the time you create something that meets today’s standards, today’s standards will likely become the bare minimum for the comparable solution of the time!
By choosing to sell or combine with an existing IoT solution that’s had time to evolve and prove itself, you’re able to provide a quality solution to your customers a lot sooner, within a matter of months or even weeks. It’s readily apparent why this is preferable to a timeframe of years. In fact, this is the preferred model for many companies that operate within the IoT industry. Creating your own solution takes time and money; by utilizing what other people have already perfected, you can focus on achieving the goals you want to achieve. For an IoT company, that might mean using existing or mass-produced technologies to form a new solution or to perfect a solution. For resellers and other solution providers, this can simply mean finding a company that is willing to let you sell their solution to your customers.
You are Provided with Appropriate Sales and Marketing Materials
Another time-consuming element of selling a new solution is generating the appropriate sales and marketing materials to send to potential customers, as well as figuring out what language and strategies work best for selling that product. Traditionally, this is a long process of trial and error that occurs over months or years. Every time you think you have everything you need, there might be something else that a customer requests to see or know. This means that you have to either tell them you don’t have it or quickly switch gears to provide what they’re asking for. Realistically, it will be the latter more often than not, because no one likes telling a potential customer “no.” But when you do so, it has a ripple effect on everything else you were hoping to accomplish that day.
When you provide an IoT solution through a technology partnership, you won’t have to go through this alone. Instead, a good partner will provide co-branded materials upfront and provide training on the language and strategies that you can use to most effectively sell the product. After all, any company you partner with would have been selling their solution for years before your relationship; they would have had the time to figure out what works and what doesn’t, as well as to amass a library of materials based on requests and experiences. If you need information or material, chances are that your partner has already accounted for it and can provide it to you rather quickly. This saves the time that you would have spent creating the material yourself or figuring out the best way to talk about and sell the product.
You Know Where to Go for Engineering Support
One of the recurring services that you often have to provide when selling IoT technology of your own is engineering and other customer support. Things go wrong with even the best technology. This is an unavoidable fact. No matter how much safeguarding you do and how careful you are, there’s always the chance that technology will glitch or experience complications. It could also simply be that you’re trying to do something new with it that you’ve never done before, so you need guidance on how to do it properly without causing problems for the system. This might mean that you have to put things down when you get a call for help from one of your customers who’s having this kind of problem, once again resulting in priorities needing to be rearranged and best laid plans being foiled.
Through a partnership with an IoT company, the engineering, maintenance, and troubleshooting work for the solution largely does not fall on your shoulders. After all, you did not create the solution and you don’t work with it every day; how can you be expected to know the exact ins and outs of every aspect of the system? Instead, there are people who this knowledge comes naturally to and who have worked with the system at length who can provide this service to your customer. They’ll likely be able to answer far more quickly and with far more surety, and you can get on with your day and your plans instead of trying to work through a problem that you do not fully understand with your customer. When you have experts in the field at your fingertips, you’re saving yourself time and a headache by allowing them to do their job and excel in their chosen field.
What Link Labs Provides to Our Partners
Link Labs is open for partnerships with our revamped partnership program! We make partnering with us as easy as possible, further helping you save time throughout the exploration stages of our relationship. We’ll arrange scheduled meetings that can be used to figure out where the intersection of your needs and our offerings lies so that we can bring value to both companies and forge a fruitful, lasting partnership to both of our benefits. We help you improve your operational efficiencies and drive your company toward success by offering:
- Reliable Additional Stream of Revenue. When you sell our product, you’re able to tap into an additional revenue stream to increase your business’s overall profitability quickly.
- Access to New Markets. By expanding your company’s product offerings to include our solution, you can appeal to new customers in new markets for an expanded base of potential buyers.
- Sales Training and Support. We’ll take the time to teach you how to talk about our solution to your customers. You don’t need to learn on your own; we’re here to help you and answer your questions at any stage.
- Marketing Alignment and Co-branded Materials. We will provide you with a selection of co-branded marketing materials that accurately and effectively reflect our product offerings that you can pass on to your customers.
- Engineering Support. Our extremely knowledgeable engineering team is available to answer any questions or address any challenges that you or your customers may have both before and after installation.
Most importantly, our partnership team is always available to help answer your pressing questions and help make the most out of our partnership. If you want to learn more about what a Link Labs partnership might look like for you, book a demo with our team of experts today!
