The IT channel spends a lot of time talking about growth.
New logos, new pipelines, new partners and new routes to market dominate strategic conversations across vendors, distributors and channel partners alike. When revenue targets come under pressure, the instinctive response is often to generate more demand, and recruit more partners or drive additional activity into the top of the funnel.
Yet after working with organisations across the channel for more than three decades, I’ve come to a different conclusion. The industry’s biggest challenge isn’t finding new opportunities but, rather, executing on the opportunity it already has.
In many cases, the channel is sitting on vast amounts of untapped revenue potential. Existing customers need renewals, upgrades, refreshes, support contracts and expansion into additional products and services, while end-of-life and end-of-support events create natural opportunities for replacement and migration.
The opportunity is there. The problem is that too many organisations struggle to identify, manage and act on it effectively. As a result, revenue doesn’t disappear because customers stop buying. More often, it disappears because the right actions never happen at the right time. A renewal is identified too late. An upgrade opportunity is missed. A support contract expires unnoticed. A customer remains on ageing infrastructure for years despite a clear business case for refresh.
Valuable installed base information exists somewhere within the organisation but isn’t available to the people who need it when they need it.
Sales isn’t the issue here – these are all execution failures.
Fixing the execution gap
CRM, ERP, CPQ, and PRM platforms all play important roles, but they tend to solve one part of the commercial process. None of those systems, on their own, ensures that the right lifecycle opportunity is identified early enough, routed to the right person and acted on consistently.
That is where the execution gap sits.
Better execution starts with a reliable view of the installed base: what a customer owns, when it renews or reaches end-of-support, which partner is responsible, what commercial rules apply and what should happen next.
But visibility alone is not enough. The information has to trigger action.
An approaching renewal should create a workflow before it becomes urgent. An end-of-life date should identify affected customers and initiate a refresh motion. A gap in a customer’s environment should surface a relevant expansion opportunity. The goal is to move from reporting on opportunity to systematically executing it.
We have seen what happens when organisations get this right. For example, one small distributor generated more than $5.6m in revenue within six months after automating lifecycle processes, with around 65% of renewal quotes validated automatically.
Connecting the channel data puzzle
Even when organisations improve their own internal processes, execution doesn’t stop at company boundaries. The IT channel is an ecosystem, and every participant sees only part of the customer journey.
Vendors hold product, pricing and lifecycle information, distributors see transactions and partner activity, and partners understand the customer environment. If those data sets remain isolated, each organisation is operating with only part of the picture.
Information needs to flow more effectively in both directions.
Vendors should make current product, pricing, end-of-life and end-of-support data easier for distributors and partners to consume, ideally through consistent data feeds rather than more portals and manual downloads. In return, better point-of-sale, installed-base and lifecycle information needs to flow back up the channel so vendors can understand where opportunity, risk and revenue leakage sit.
That sounds simple, but the channel has spent years building processes around fragmented data and manual hand-offs. Fixing execution therefore means removing those hand-offs wherever possible.
For years, the channel has treated installed-base data as an operational by-product of doing business. However, it’s a strategic asset in its own right. The organisations that can identify what customers own, when contracts expire, what reaches end-of-life next and which partners are best positioned to act will have a significant commercial advantage over those still relying on spreadsheets, disconnected systems and manual processes.
AI will make this even more important. Used properly, AI can help, but it cannot compensate for missing, inaccurate or disconnected operational data. If the underlying systems do not know what is installed, who owns the opportunity, when something expires or which partner should act, AI does not solve the problem. It simply gets you to the wrong answer faster.
The next phase of channel growth will come from becoming much better at recognising, prioritising and executing the opportunities already sitting inside the channel and the customer base.
The industry does not need to stop investing in demand generation or new-logo growth. But it does need to stop assuming that more opportunity at the top of the funnel will compensate for poor execution further down.
It’s time to execute better.
This article was produced in association with iasset and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
Scott Frew
Scott Frew is founder and CEO of iasset
