If you're a sales professional calling on High Tech, most likely more than you think...
The Dell buyout announcement, whether it goes through or not, is a bold confirmation that the PC and High Tech industries are in transition and the players in these industries are facing identity and strategy challenges that may ultimately determine their long-term survival. Michael Dell is taking his company back to the tune of a $24 billion leveraged buyout, including $500 million of his own personal cash. According to a recent article in USA Today, Dell plans on taking his company back in order to transform it from a PC-based tech firm to a player in the higher margin software, services, mobile, cloud and data center based businesses.
Whatever the end goal, the common theme is positioning to compete and grow in a changing market. And there’s no question Dell is not alone in their need to change. Per the article, "Runaway consumer attention on touch-based computers has sidelined interest in PC makers in recent years." This runaway attention resulted in PC sales slipping worldwide 6.7% while tablet sales grew 75%. But even if your client isn’t a PC maker with “Apple envy”, as the article’s author calls it, reemerging and transforming to take over higher margin service based business is the name of the game now in High Tech. More players in the cloud solution, higher margin service space will continue to create increased competition, pricing pressure, and competitive advantage around innovation and experimentation in mobile products.
Are your High Tech clients ready for this? With additional players in the higher margin cloud solution and services space, how can your solutions help them improve time to market? Help them manage new product development and very short product life cycles? Or, help them become more efficient through better management of supply chain or third party manufactures?
Get them thinking about it if you haven’t already...increased competition is on the horizon! Click here to read the article in full: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/02/05/dell-apple-microsoft-buyout-ipad-iphone-hewlett-packard/1893577/
