Blulogix

Revolutionizing B2B Monetization

Matt Austin

How to Accelerate Growth by Empowering Channels and Increasing Customer Satisfaction

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how to accelerate growth and empower channels

Ensuring quality customer service through a channel sales model can be challenging. The needs of resellers and end customers generate demand for more complex product offerings, pricing models and billing options. Establishing the organizational structure, in terms of both personnel and technology, is critical to taking advantage of emerging opportunities in the marketplace. Once a business has solved those challenges, they can generate exponential growth.

Sales & Pricing

If you’re in sales trying to quickly and accurately provide pricing to prospects and existing clients as a channel partner, you may run into multiple roadblocks. Many of these issues stem from not having the proper infrastructure in place for managing pricing, especially in consumption or usage-based economies. If customers feel that pricing packages are not designed to meet their specific use cases, they’ll move on to the next prospective provider who can offer such a level of personalization.

In an environment where customers expect personalization, channel partners need the ability to remain flexible in their price offerings. Many legacy systems do not offer the level of flexibility required, limiting the potential of channel partners. However, with a platform designed with channel partners and their pricing needs in mind, businesses can enable channels to become a main driver of growth and customer acquisition.

Product Management

Another challenge businesses can run into with channel partners has to do with product management and provisioning. Imagine your company is capable of meeting emerging trends and demands of the market for a product or service, but your catalogue management infrastructure is not capable of delivering such a product or service in a way that is easily reconcilable. Not only can this create inefficiencies in revenue recognition, it may thwart the ability to offer the service entirely. What we have is a recipe for hindering growth. At the very least, the inability to offer dynamic catalogues will decrease customer satisfaction.

On the other hand, if channel partners have the power to manage product catalogues, they become chameleon-like in offering a slew of personalized packages tailored to customer needs. Channel partners are able to adapt with the needs of the market, rarely having to tell their clients, “No.” This autonomy in product management has additional benefits: the feedback generated from channel partners in managing products provides data about market trends. You can begin to offer the same options to in-house accounts, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing churn. 

Billing & Revenue

Billing managers can become frustrated with legacy systems for managing channel partners. Often, they’re left performing financial gymnastics to complete their month end close. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

One of the best ways to empower channel partners is to break down barriers to processes like pricing and product management. In doing so, the lives of billing managers become much easier. In solving challenges related to pricing and product management, channel partners can expedite sales and customer acquisition. This means channel partners can more quickly achieve growth in their accounts. In the end, billing managers realize greater revenue recognition thanks to improved processes that otherwise slowed growth. Ultimately, billing managers will find that financial reconciliation is much more efficient when channel partners are empowered. 

A Platform for Pricing, Products, and Billing

It is critical to have a centralized platform that coordinates product definition, pricing, and order fulfillment through financial reconciliation. For each of the scenarios depicted above, BluLogix can offer a solution. Our BluIQ™ platform is designed to solve complex billing scenarios. We offer a seamless quote-to-cash process, complex mediation, dynamic catalog management, and consumption and usage-based billing.

Solving these challenges will ultimately lead to improved customer satisfaction. In today’s business world, customers demand flexibility. With an increased emphasis on flexibility, businesses need to remain agile in their operations and provisioning. Fast, accurate pricing and dynamic product catalogs are hallmarks of agile business practices. Of course, accurate billing is critical to customer satisfaction. Finally, these capabilities need to be extended to channel partners to maximize their contributions and drive growth. BluIQ™ offers the financial reconciliation capabilities needed to smoothly and accurately address all of these challenges.

Monetizing the Internet-of-Things: Challenges & Opportunities

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With advances in technologies such as 5G, autonomous vehicles, and artificial intelligence, there has been increasing interest in leveraging the Internet-of-Things across the business world. The interest extends far beyond technology organizations, entering multiple silos of business.

In transportation and logistics, we see autonomous vehicles and freight, delivery with unmanned vehicles, and advanced traffic control. Healthcare firms are utilizing remote health monitoring and diagnostics to treat patients through telemedicine. Industrial robots, factory automation,and data-leveraged maintenance and inspection increase the efficiency of manufacturing facilities.  Security has become stronger with intelligent surveillance, faster emergency response, and smart cities.

These example industries are just scratching the surface. There are a plethora of other business types that have yet to fully embrace the Internet-of-Things. But using IoT devices to improve efficiency and capabilities is only the start. What organizations really need to understand is how to monetize IoT devices and infrastructures to create additional streams of revenue. 

Challenges

Before these sectors can monetize an IoT stack, they must first identify, plan for and overcome challenges. There are a host of operational challenges that must be accounted for, including the following:

  • Multiple platforms: Businesses that deliver multiple platforms or services must design a system of data collection that accurately tracks and unifies the data. This allows the data to be analyzed in the bigger picture instead of only as individual business units. 
  • Disconnected services: For organizations offering multiple services as mentioned above, it can be beneficial to merge those under a single package for clients utilizing more than one service. This requires complex planning and execution. 
  • Control over devices: In many cases, deploying IoT devices means handing the technology over to clients. Organizations doing so need to be able to maintain a level of control over those devices so they cannot be altered or hacked to disrupt tracking. Businesses also need control over devices to protect against unlicensed use. 
  • Tracking and provisioning: If an organization is to charge for usage of IoT devices and data, there must be an advanced system in place to track that usage. The system must be able to identify each unique user and their license ID, which  devices their license has access to, what level of speed, bandwidth and data volume they have access to, and more. 
  • Data Quality: IoT clients expect highly accurate data, so data quality and integrity is a must to ensure customer trust.

In many sectors, managing all of this information is too large of a lift. Designing an IoT data infrastructure in-house can be costly and inefficient. This is because such an undertaking can  draw attention away from primary business pursuits. As a result, team members end up ignoring the areas where they bring the most value to instead work on a project in an area which they are not experienced. What many businesses need is a solution to monetize data from an experienced data monetization partner. 

At BluLogix, we serve as that experienced partner. Utilizing over a decade’s worth of experience in data management, we partner with companies across various industries to design systems for data monetization. From transportation management to drone zoning to billboard advertising, we help companies monetize vast networks of IoT devices. 

Now that we’ve identified some challenges in deploying IoT devices and networks, we can move on to the benefits. As we discuss these opportunities and benefits, keep in mind that ultimately, each seeks to increase revenue by either producing additional streams revenue or reducing expenditures or the cost of operations.

Benefits

Innovation and Improvement

Every organization is constantly seeking to improve their products and value proposition to gain a competitive advantage in their industry. With the data mined from IoT devices connected to products and services, companies are able to understand exactly how customers interact with their services. In turn, they can then modify and innovate products to more accurately serve their clients’ needs.

Operational Efficiency

One of the main benefits of utilizing IoT devices and data is the increased efficiency they offer. With devices deployed throughout the field for businesses such as energy providers or transportation and logistics, these businesses can capture usage down to minute detail. With this level of insight in hand, businesses can refine how they operate machinery or equipment to reduce wasted resources. 

Proactive Maintenance

Connected IoT devices mean real-time monitoring of remote equipment, vehicles, and infrastructures. Instead of the laborious and often too late process of inspecting and servicing equipment periodically, organizations can stay on top of maintenance needs and address them before more severe intervention is required. This can eliminate down time and preserve the lifetime of expensive equipment. 

Monetization of Data

Modern times are often referred to as the Information Age. That’s because the amount of data available and the power of that data allow for significant advances in technology and efficiency. This is what makes data so valuable and it is why not monetizing data is a serious missed opportunity in terms of revenue. 

The data a business can mine from IoT devices is not only internally beneficial. There are countless firms that are willing to pay top dollar for highly accurate, highly informative data. If a business is not harnessing the power of its own data, they are passing up a lucrative stream of revenue.

Let’s dig in even more! Check out our webinar on How to Monetize Your IoT Service Offerings in 2021.