Channel leaders take stock of H1, look ahead to H2

This month we share insights from channel leaders who have been especially proactive in their responses to industry challenges and opportunities during H1 2023. Progress has been visible across many areas, from culture to contact centre development, providing a strong baseline for a continuation of strategic advances in H2.

MATT DYKES

ABZORB

In H2 we will be formalising training and development for managers, improving how we communicate with each other. We have simplified our hosting proposition, making it more efficient for resellers to sell, manage and operate. We are encouraging people to meet face to face and have proper conversations, making communication clear and empathetic. The speed of change and introduction of disruptive tech is a challenge, but we see it as an opportunity. We have been working hard to maintain strong growth in the business after the pandemic, spending time reviewing our strategy for the next three years.

JAY BALL

FLOTEK

Our investment in developing a learning platform so far this year has allowed our customers to self-educate and utilise our service offering fully. This is the first step towards bringing our customers on a journey to start using AI technology. Our growth strategy is underway with eight acquisitions completed and the ninth target identified for completion in H2. Integrating all eight businesses so we operate as one team with clearly defined goals comes with many challenges. Our focus for H2 is promoting the Flotek values internally and taking everyone through a transformation journey.

JOHN HAYES-WARREN

AGILITAS

We recently finalised our three year roadmap which focuses on customer experience as our client base grows. We are continually investing in our sustainability initiatives to underpin our circular economy credentials and support our partners with a trusted supply chain. We plan to increase our investment into attracting and retaining talent, strengthening our system integration and bolstering digital access to our services. When moving forward with a new leadership team, challenges are to be expected. Our leadership team, however, has outlined a clear vision and roadmap, continuing our investment into the channel and focusing on partnerships that allow our customers to expand globally.

KEITH JACKSON

8x8

In the last six months we have added conversational AI to our contact service offering with the launch of the 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant and evolved our channel partner programme, Elevate. Long term, our mission is to continue to deliver this customer-obsessed experience through tools and services that meet organisational needs. This way, we can demonstrate our heritage in the contact centre space. There will be challenges. In the current economic landscape we're seeing customer budgets tighten, which will continue throughout 2023. However, by working with partners and continuing to be at the cutting edge we are confident in the future.

RUSSELL HORTON

FLUIDONE

Our IT-managed services and cybersecurity projects have driven our highest sales growth, particularly those involving Cyber SOC services over Microsoft Sentinel. Our focus is on achieving organic growth through cross-sales, high service, and acquiring businesses that complement our solutions, broadening our relationships with existing customers. Our goal is to increase our workforce to 1,200 by 2030. Challenges we'll face as we grow lie in maintaining a great culture, having a clear vision that our people can buy into, and designing and running a management operating model that puts the customer first. The transformation from SME to a mid-sized company is well underway with a structure that enables decision making close to the customer.

TONY MARTINO

TOLLRING

We have made advances in strategic alignment across departments and systems to achieve our business goals. This will continue to be a priority alongside strengthening our partnerships and staying close to our customers for product evolution driven by demand. We are strengthening our core strategies across process, people, product and pricing to support our longer-term growth plans. Talented people are essential to this. In our industry change is normal. Technology moves fast and we not only need to keep up but rather be one step ahead. Slick internal communication is critical, talented people empowered by good management drive internal processes and knowledge, strong strategic direction provides stability and consistency across the brand creates customer satisfaction.

JAMIE HUGHES

EVOLVE IP

Developing productive channel partnerships remains the cornerstone of our business. Our focus is on enhancing the customer experience and making it easier for resellers to do business with us and developed our Anywhere Portal to this end. Looking further ahead we are planning to launch a full contact centre solution as we are seeing a lot of demand in this sector, especially around displacing older technologies. Maintaining and recruiting high calibre staff is vital for any growing business. For us our leadership focus on simplifying how the business operates. This is all being built on service and support and a more advanced and wider solutions portfolio.

HARRY MCKEEVER

TEKTON BILLING

At the heart of our internal strategy has been a focus on human capital. With the normality of hybrid working, maintaining a strong, positive and collaborative culture is crucial, and we have made changes to employee benefits and flexibility of working hours and location. There has also been a focus on embracing digital technologies and automation, evaluating all our internal systems, and ensuring we have scalable and sustainable technology to provide that foundation for continued growth. Our external strategy has emphasised the value of our product. During economic uncertainty, clarity of communication in the benefits we can provide is imperative.

RICHARD THOMPSON

ANS

ANS' remit is to drive growth across SMB, enterprise, and public sector through our new channel partner routes to market. We are making cloud, security and digital solutions simple for our partners and their customers. We've put a marker in the sand that we want to grow this area significantly. We're investing in our systems and capability because being easy to do business with is critical. We're building on the integration of recently acquired Preact, focusing on our people, investing in talent and capability for scale. Our strategy is to keep things simple and focus on our strength areas.

STEVE HACKLEY

SKY BUSINESS

A key objective of ours is around innovation. That means we need to increase our technology solutions' relevance across more channels and technology sets, bringing the right products and services to market for our partners. Culture matters in being able to deliver on our marketplace promises and we have worked to develop a set of operating principles built with extensive input from all levels across our employee base. By having these operating principles in place they help us to be crisp about how what we want to do and how we want to get it done.