5 Ways the Channel Can Accelerate SMB Growth

Interconnects, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Carriers are playing a major role in accelerating the growth of their small and medium sized business (SMB) customers. These channel partners are solving SMB challenges and finding new ways to make their businesses more efficient and successful.  

The growing number of cloud and hosted services has helped position channel partners as trusted advisors for SMBs as they adopt new services. The expertise and skill of the channel partner can directly help to accelerate SMB growth.

Here are five ways the channel is helping to accelerate SMB growth:

Finding the Right Solutions:

Channel partners can help to accelerate SMB growth by finding solutions that can increase their business agility and productivity. Instead of investing time and resource into procuring these solutions, their channel partners can help them to make sense of the IT solutions available to them and can advise them on the best solutions to support business growth. They can be the expert they turn to when looking for better ways of doing business and have a big impact on how an SMB operates.

Removing Friction and Complexity:

Channel partners are well positioned to remove friction from their customer’s business process. They can review and analyze how the SMB functions and create a suite of solutions or recommendations that will help them to improve the efficiency of their operations. The cloud services in particular can quick to deploy and enable an SMB to remove complexity from their IT systems as they require minimal on going support and on-premises maintenance.

Facilitating Change:

Channel partners facilitate change for an SMB by continually offering them new solutions and ways of operating that match their current market environment and business focus. For example, as the workforce becomes more mobile, the channel partner can be an enabler for mobile working and new ways of operating.

Future-Proofing:

In the past, SMBs have been challenged by capex-intensive IT infrastructure and long-term contracts. As cloud adoption grows, channel partners can help to future-proof their customer’s operation with flexible cloud services. Services like unified communications as a service (UCaaS) or other hosted services are capex-light and ready to scale up as the business grows. SMBs cannot have their IT operations fail to scale over time as this can hinder growth.

Partners for Life:

In order for a SMB to grow, they need reliable support from subject matter experts. Channel partners that have proven expertise and demonstrated value help the SMBs to focus on their businesses with the assurance that IT operations is taken care of. A strong channel partner allows a SMB to focus its time and resources on growing its business rather than IT operations.

The channel partners that are close to their SMB customers and truly understand their needs are going to see a lot of success in 2015. They will play an important role in how their SMB customers grow and develop and have tremendous role to play in their success.