Circa 2002: Tech Pac flew over 400 people to Bangkok for their annual event. This year’s event was particularly significant, as the event had to be scrapped last year due to the poor performance of the industry. There was an imperative need to communicate Tech Pac’s new directions to its partners, which it had been charting to accelerate growth. These directions—a significant departure from the past—envisioned the need to highlight the gain to the customer as against the earlier focus on resellers, generating sales through demand creation as against the push factor, and account management as against account development.

However, the bigger message was its increased focus on upcountry markets and helping box-movers grow up the value chain through solutions and services. The company itself would expand its presence into smaller towns and provide training for partners to provide move value to its customers. The distributor’s focus on upcountry markets is not surprising as the market experiences natural expansion into smaller towns and cities. "It is an opportunity which we have not yet tapped completely," feels Jaishankar. For instance, resellers from smaller towns still come to the metros to do their buying.

The endeavor now would be to service the needs of these partners through increased presence and better information dissemination. "We plan to upgrade the office in Guwahati to a full scale branch this month. The sales from that center amount to more than two crore rupees per month which is not a small amount," says Jaishankar. During the last couple of months, the company has added around six branch offices, which are in the interiors. Tech Pacific will now expand from B and C category towns to even smaller towns where the computer boom is about to begin. The company has set up a full-fledged e-commerce site from where partners can order inventory and track its shipment. This has been done as a measure to move closer to partners in far-off places.

But won’t increased presence in the smaller towns eat into the business of bigger players? Sure it would, though not intentionally. But there are ways to counter the changing business environment. The distributor therefore plans to urge regional players to focus more on providing value through solutions to its customer base where margins are much higher.

The strategy to enable partners to provide more value added services had been initiated over the last year and a half, when the company started its value added services division. In addition to training its partners, Tech Pac has also set up a Tech Center that would provide guidance to partners. It also plans to set up a call center to help partners with their day-to-day problems. Explaining the imperative for partners to focus on solutions, Jaishankar said, "While the solutions domain till now has been dominated by the likes of Wipro, and Tata Infotech, the channel community has till now been restricting its activities to box pushing where margins are small. In tough times, this takes a toll on the partners. Besides, in many cases the distributor itself ends up competing with some partners when smaller players source products from the distributor directly."

The dynamics of the channel community is fast evolving and it is important that they constantly upgrade skills and move into more and more complex solutions. Another compelling reason for partners to focus on solutions is the huge potential in the SMB segment who are now in their networking phase. "There is a huge untapped need for solutions in the SMB segment which I think our partners can rightly tap," added Jaishankar. Having made public the intention of the organization to move into newer locales to spruce up business opportunities it remains to be seen whether the latest Tech Pac strategy will make business boom for Jaishankar and the partners he is wooing!

Balaka Baruah Aggarwal/CNS in Bangkok