Who You Work with is More Important Than What You Are Working With
Every NFL team has top-of-the-line equipment and facilities. These are vitally important factors to get right. However, the team that does the best job working together is the team that lifts the Lombardi trophy at the end of the year.
The same principle is true in the POS industry. Finding that critical partner can make all the difference.
If you are a reseller who wants to grow your business and you are reviewing your product line card, there are some key features you will want to seek out in a potential partner. Find a partner with these three crucial criteria for a business partner and you will find a championship teammate that shares your values and gives you a proven solution to provide to your customers.
Product and Support
Your top priority is working with the best equipment that can meet your end user’s needs. Your customers need proven solutions that solve their biggest problems.
Go beyond standard checkout, inventory, and reporting. Instead, offer a checkout solution that is simple and gets their customers in and out with ease.
Line-busting technology like self-service kiosks and mobile POS systems can help your customers save money on labor and keep their customers happy by offering fast, convenient checkouts.
Your customers are starved for time. Look for a reseller whose solutions help them save time on product tracking. Inventory management doesn’t have to be a labor-intensive task. The right solution can track items from the moment they come in the back door, to the time a customer takes it out the front.
An excellent POS solution will make it easy for your customers to see a holistic view of their business, from start to finish. Whether they want to see alerts for re-orders, stock-outs, or reports with custom parameters, the solution you offer your customer should make it easy for them to access that information.
Integrations and Payments Solutions
You should also check if your potential partner has established third-party integrations. Many potential customers will reject POS solutions outright if they cannot integrate with other key solutions. The inconvenience of stove-piped systems is too great.
You will also want to work with a partner who is a payments-agnostic solution, so you are not stiff-armed in a particular processor.
Assistance and Warranty
In the early days of your partnership especially, you will need excellent support from your partner. Find out ahead of time if they offer pre- and post-sale support. Ask how installation, training, and “go-lives” are handled. Gain an understanding of what kind of technical support is offered. Get a clear understanding of what is the responsibility of the ISV and what is the responsibility of the reseller.
Proven Industry Expertise
As you begin your research, make sure you get these questions answered:
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How long have they been in business?
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How many installations do they have in your industry or niche?
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Do they have industry-specific customer references and testimonials?
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Do they have features that address the most important pain points for the businesses in your niche, or do they shoehorn generic “one-size-fits-all” software into all industries?
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Is the company well known and does it have a good reputation?
Don’t just take their word for it. See who their other partners are and what their experience has been. Talk to one of their customers and ask about the solution and the service.
Learn all you can about a company before you partner with them to reduce any aggravation down the road.
Margins that Benefit Your Business
A good partnership has to work for both sides. You deserve to reap the reward of your labor with attractive margins and recurring revenues. A helpful tool some partners put in place are reseller territories or regions. This may seem like a limitation at first but in the end it ensures that you are the only reseller of those specific products and services in your region so you aren’t competing against the same products from a different reseller.
A Business Partnership for the Books
It is important to know what you are getting into before you start a new partnership. If you stay in this business long enough, you will hear horror stories from people who have been burned by bad partnership decisions. If you follow this guide, you will be able to make sure you will never again be the one telling those scary stories.
Why not begin your search by taking a look at Osprey as your potential future business partner?
For over 30 years, Osprey Retail has provided channel partners with reliable income and secure, industry-proven POS software designed to help customers efficiently and profitably run their operations.
