Ask Steve: How Can Partners Succeed in Tough Times?

“The nation's economy will be in shambles throughout 2009,” laments the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet. Juxtapose such sentiment with the euphoria of slot machine winners and you’ll appreciate the panel I moderated last month in Las Vegas at the Spring 2009 Channel Partners Conference & Expo. We put four channel partners in front of several hundred of their peers and asked them what it takes to be successful in dour economic times.

This column presents some practical advice from Laura Bernstein of CRA Inc., Steven Gerhardt of D&M Enterprise Group, David Goodwin of Advanced Technology Consulting (ATC) and Ben Stiegler of Synertel.

We discussed successful and not-so-successful tactics in five categories:

Customer segments. Tough times incent us to rethink the types of customers we serve. Are we wasting our time with existing segments? Are there adjacent customer segments demanding our time? Bernstein drives communications costs out of CRA’s customers’ businesses. She’s found that two unexpected segments — CLECs and subagents — make good customers for CRA’s solutions. She believes her supply chain-based segments make good customers because increasing efficiencies and lower costs are absolutely critical for their selling models to their customers.

Gerhardt and D&M take a holistic view of its selling proposition in relying almost exclusively on referral-based selling. In essence, he relies on exponential growth believing a happy customer is three more referral-based customers.

Products and services. We came back to Bernstein to kick off a discussion of CRA’s services, focused on cost avoidance/minimization services. These solutions, although not as sexy as others, squarely meet the needs of customers in a rough economy.