Here's How 20 Solution Providers Plan To Find Success In 2020

Solution provider executives from across the country share their strategies for building strong relationships with customers.

Solution provider executives honored on CRN's 2020 Women of the Channel list were asked to share what they felt would be the keys to success in 2020.

While their answers were given before the coronavirus pandemic brought the U.S. economy down, they offer best practices and universal truths that are relevant regardless of the economic climate.

Here's a look at what some of them had to say.

Renée Lawrence

Director, Sales, Marketing, Cloud Services

Burwood Group

Chicago

"Managed services is a relationship business, and the success of every customer deployment is really determined at the very beginning of our relationship with our customers. It is important for us to set expectations upfront and to maintain a regular cadence with our customers to make sure that we understand what's working well and where there can be improvement or better focus. Our goal is to be direct, personal, timely and have empathy in every situation. This is something that we strive for with every customer interaction."

Shauna Hassett

VP, Marketing

Carousel Industries

Exeter, R.I.

"In 2019 Carousel unveiled its 'Customer Success Obsessed' (CSO) philosophy, which is the strategic foundation of all that we do at the company. This CSO mission goes beyond any one function. It's a mindset, a mantra, and a company-wide initiative to bring extreme technology value to Carousel customers—so they can bring unmatched value to theirs. Now in year two, CSO, becomes even more powerful, more important and more critical to our overall business growth and success."

Kelly Ireland

CEO

CB Technologies

Orange, Calif.

"The key to CBT's success in 2020 is to stay the course we started years ago and continue to delve deeper into discovering more and more ways to help customers achieve strong business outcomes with the engineered solutions we are building. Extending deeper into partnering with both OT & IT OEMs, ISVs and appropriate service companies is also a must as the solutions require a broader base than can be provided by a single company, no matter what their size is."

Beth Burnside

Owner

CMIT Solutions of Erie

Erie, Pa.

"The key to our success in 2020 will come from having repeated educational conversations with clients as relates to cyber-security. Many of our clients are naive about their vulnerabilities and need to be coached to take a risk assessment approach to better define and document their unique risk landscape. Only then can proper policies, procedures, and technical solutions be employed. The education must come first."

Lori Koch

Director, Digital Marketing

Comport

Ramsey, N.J.

"I believe we need to continue to expand our managed services business as well as our partner ecosystem to provide our clients with solutions that solve their business issues. We are evolving to a world that is defined by data, analytics, applications and the cloud. Our industry has changed from product focused to solution and services focused, and if we don't evolve and continue to do so we will be left behind."

Haley Montgomery

Director, Marketing

Corsica Technologies

Centreville, Md.

"Generating quality sales leads for the sales team as well and establishing our brand in our regions. With so many recent acquisitions, establishing who we are and what we can do to solve business challenges through IT will be a key factor to our success."

Tera Davis

Managing Director

Critical Start

Plano, Texas

"Brand awareness, training opportunities, and demand generation for our [Managed Detection and Response] solutions in both new and existing markets will be keys to our solution provider business in 2020."

Jeanne Michele Miller

President

Ener Systems

Covington, La.

"The key to our success in 2020 will be consistency. Consistency in customer service, in relentless cyber security, in marketing and in treating our team members as stars."

Susan Bullwinkle

Regional VP

Evotek

San Diego

"As a solution provider, my key to success is honesty, integrity, and transparency, in all things. I believe in having my team in the boat with me rowing, and that includes my employees, the manufacturer's team, and all the channel people in between supporting us. We have to all want to win together to make this work!"

Brenda Hudson

VP, Sales, Sales Enablement, Learning, Development

Insight Enterprises

Tempe, Ariz.

"First and foremost, listen. Too often solution providers are too quick to assume and inject their 'answer' before truly understanding the problem. Our success at Insight is grounded in genuine listening, understanding and collaboration. We always want our client to be a part of the journey because a true partnership is necessary for organization's to successfully land and adopt new IT innovations and processes. Having an insatiable curiosity about our clients' business and our industry is essential so that we can listen, learn and share our expertise and proven solutions to create successful outcomes for our partners and clients."

Sammi Ellman

Director, Strategic Alliances

IPM

New York

"Success for IPM in 2020 will hinge on growing our managed services portfolio and making the transition seamless for our customers. Continuing to solve our customers' business challenges with excellent service and leading-edge technologies will remain a focus, with an added concentration on moving our customers to a managed model. The industry has shifted significantly from the traditional VAR business of point-product solutions to managed services and subscription offerings, and without evolving, solution providers risk getting left behind."

Michelle Andreas

VP, Marketing

Logicalis U.S.

New York

"In 2020, our success will be measured in our ability to focus on the customer while embracing the constant change within the channel. To do so, we will need to be even more quick and nimble, which means that each of us—myself included—needs to hold ourselves accountable. We can never say, 'It's not my job!' because, in the grand scheme of things, ensuring Logicalis remains an 'Architect of Change' requires all of us. It's all of our jobs."

Diane Bierman

VP, Strategic Partnerships, Sourcing

MNJ Technologies

Buffalo Grove, Ill.

"MNJ will continue to focus on building recurring revenue with our SD-WAN practice. We are refining our SD-WAN demo lab to demonstrate how to handle security, latency, jitter, WAN optimization, failover, or any combination by continuing to better the customer experiences and eliminate troubleshooting that is common with other MSPs, especially those that haven't been able to identify potential problems with a customer's deployment ahead of time. MNJ can realize there is a problem with a customer's network and start taking action to resolve it before the customer even knows there is a problem."

Janice Newlon

COO

Novacoast

Santa Barbara, Calif.

"Managed security services are probably the most important part of driving revenue growth at Novacoast, as they have proven to be the most sustainable, repeatable and reliable growth over the past few years."

Lynn Brading

Director, Digital Experience Alliances

Perficient

St. Louis, Mo.

"I believe an organization, especially a solution provider, is only as good as the people it employs. My colleagues are incredibly talented at what they do, and they have the best work ethic I have ever experienced. They amaze me every day with not just their quality of work, but their willingness to roll up their sleeves and burn the midnight oil if needed. When our clients see the solutions our team creates, it's clear to them that a lot of care went into the process. That's something that has real impact and extends beyond the client to end users."

Amy Williams

CEO

Pier Group

Jasper, Ind.

"The key to our success is to expand our channel relationships to additional key vendors and partners that help fulfill our future technology mission, to increase our technical certification resources providing our team with unique technical value to the customers we serve, and to grow our current employee base to help broaden our reach and drive additional channel revenue. Additionally, the key to our success in 2020 is the expansion of current resources and certification requirements allowing superior delivery of next-generation IT solutions to the research community we serve."

Felise Katz

CEO

PKA Technologies

Suffern, N.Y.

"Being customer-obsessed! Just showing up to have conversations and building and developing relationships with your prospects and customers and listening is the most imperative part of the business, along with aligning with the best OEMs and solutions."

Heather Gonzalez

VP, Marketing, Strategic Alliances

Technologent

Irvine, Calif.

"The key to success is to be a technology partner that is relevant, valued and trusted by your customer. You also have to have a true customer-centric approach to your business, focusing on relationships, reputation and resources, which all lead to revenue."

Jackie Groark

Director, Security/CISO

Veristor

Duluth, Ga.

"Listening and acting with passion. Every organization faces unique challenges when it comes to their cybersecurity risk and security priorities. By listening carefully to our customers, we can develop the best security framework for their specific needs and company governance requirements. We extend this customer-closeness with both passion and expertise. By employing our years of field-proven knowledge, we can better enable our customers with the security framework that will prevent the unwanted and prepare for the unexpected."

Abbey Renee Colville

VP, Operations

Vision Computer Solutions

Northville, Mich.

"For Vision Computer Solutions, the key to [our] solution provider business in 2020 is adaptability. Our clients' needs are rapidly changing, especially in the security space. We are must be able to adapt quickly and be proactive in addressing client needs. We've added solution providers to our solution stack in 2019, such as Arctic Wolf, to help solve those needs. We plan to continue that trend in 2020."