It is becoming clear that the global economy is indeed going into a painful recession. Even though we have not seen the Wall Street turmoil and the resultant credit crunch affect our business so far, we are well aware that it would be a matter of time. We still expect our business to grow though at a much reduced pace. But we are well prepared to even face a negative growth for a few quarters. I am not a fan of Donald Trump but I seem to apply his investing philosophy in the way we run our business – which is “If you take care of the downside, the upside will take care of itself. In other words, if you have a contingency plan for everything that can go wrong, you can’t help but succeed.â€
As I said in my blog post why our business will survive and thrive in this environment, we are going to continue to invest in what we believe are strategic investment for the long term. And that includes not just R&D to innovate around our product, StoreGrid, to make it more and more compelling for our partners and customers.
Going forward, we are going to use this opportunity to improve our business across all fronts which matter to our partners as they get impacted by the imminent slow down. This is the time every business is going to be extremely choosy about its spending and who they partner with for their IT solution needs. In order to increase the chances of our succeeding we simply have to raise the bar in what all we do. I strongly believe what we plan to do is applicable to all of our partners who are IT solution providers (MSPs&, VARs and Web Hosting Providers too) as they try to differentiate themselves to improve their chance of succeeding. The theme of what we plan to do is based on “Do More with Less”. These are efforts to ensure we are ahead of our competition when it comes to sheer breadth of our offerings and we are sure we have what it takes to standout from the crowd.
Firstly we are accelerating our efforts to put together premium support options for our partners. These plans will cover 24/7 customer support with guaranteed email response times, IM support, phone support, remote trouble shooting sessions etc. This will enable our partners in turn to offer better support and services to their customers thus improving customer satisfaction. This improved customer satisfaction, we believe, will build trust and get the SMB customers to stick with our partners during these tough times.
Secondly, we are also working on better marketing collateral, sales tools, demo videos etc. to ensure our partners are better equipped to win customers. These are efforts to enable our partners to really “Do More with Less”. If we help them with more tools, collateral, processes etc. they should be able to focus better on winning customers and retaining them.
I will talk about our R&D and other initiatives in more detail on separate blog posts as we make progress in each of those initiatives. Do keep checking for some interesting announcements in the next few weeks.
