The Margin Q4 2015

Buy what you sell

Do you eat your own dog food? Or drink your own champagne? Or to phrase it in a less cryptic way, do you buy what you sell?

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not a sales person. When I was younger I tried out for a part-time job cold-calling unsuspecting victims to persuade them to attend timeshare meetings about 100kms away from where they lived. After spluttering and stuttering through about ten calls I realised the job wasn’t for me, and my sales career ended right there. Part of my failure was because I don’t have the ‘gift of the gab’, but also because I think you need to believe in the value of the product or service you’re trying to punt.

The questions above often go beyond simply believing in the product’s value gained through training, they imply that you believe and understand its value through experience, and use the products or services as a routine part of your own business or life.

This is a theme that I think intertwines through a number of the stories in this issue. Our main focus is on mobility and the opportunities it provides for the channel. We also report back from the Gartner Symposium and provide some insight into new tech business areas that the analyst firm believes will start evolving soon, as well as the wave of technology-driven business disruption set to reshape the world in the coming years. You’ll also find a piece on remote working, and its adoption by channel players.

Let’s face it, the channel sells the benefits of technology to other businesses well. It sells the idea that, thanks to digital enablers like mobility and cloud, we can work from anywhere, anytime allowing us to be closer to customers or work in a way that suits us. The perfect application of such tech with a scalable business model also allows new disruptive companies to rocket into the $1 billion market capitalisation figure in next to no time leaving a wake of ‘old school’ industries changed forever. But do we really take that to heart in our own businesses? How many systems integrators can say their entire local workforce is truly mobile enabled and are actively looking to reduce the size of their premises or move to an increasingly contractor-based employment model as a result? How many resellers are looking at disruption in other industries to apply to their own business model?
With that said, I hope some of the points raised in some of the articles in this magazine give a spark about how your business can benefit from some of the technology you sell, and not just the impact on the bottom line.
I do hope you find the issue useful.

As the last issue of the year, I’d also like to wish you all a happy and prosperous 2016.

Happy reading

Adrian Hinchcliffe
Editor
adrian@itweb.co.za