What is (our) value?
Value as a noun is the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something; the material or monetary worth of something; principles or standards of behaviour; one’s judgement of what is important. As a verb it is the consideration for someone or something to be beneficial.1
The concept of value is prevalent in our industry as a competitive standard or differentiator with little explanation. Value-added-something. In reality, the actual value is often overlooked or isn’t explained. Here at GrillaTech we consider the value question regularly. We try to measure it and we ensure value is recognised by our partners so they can increase the value offered to their customers. Here are a few areas where we feel we are adding value.
We built our business around assisting channel organisations with Technical Skills in the Cyber Security space, we have built this out to cover a vast majority of the Tier 1 Cyber Security Vendors and deliver these skills into all levels of channel organisations. We help our partners look good across all levels of opportunity from assisting their Pre-Sales conversations, through scoping a deployment, installation and configuration and helping them build out their own post sales support function. We believe that brings real value to their profile when able to assist their customers more proficiently.
In order to deliver successfully and consistently we took the approach to own an in-house technical team. We have all heard the claims of services organisations having access to 7000 or so global engineers, in reality we work with less than 1% of that amount of suitably skilled consultants. Our own technical team deliver a huge proportion of our projects, anyone outside of that team are treated exactly the same as an employee and they see a great value in supplying their capabilities to Grillatech. This means that engineers who assist with pre-sales calls, are often carried through a project lifecycle from scope to support. For our Partners having the ability to assure their clients their engineer is a known entity is of real value to them.
When we talk of our Technical Consultants, we are referring to a team that has decades of experience working with these vendors, keep their technical vendor accreditations valid, and have relationships with the vendor technical departments. In many cases we are used by these Cyber Security vendors to deliver work on their behalf. The engineers take pride in their ability and knowledge with whole solution project delivery experience. We believe there is a value that these guys bring to our partners each and every time they engage.
Our bottom line value is one that we look at from a few different angles, for instance when measuring the value we put back into the channel we estimate that in the past 12 months we enabled approx. £80-100m of projects to run successfully due to our consultants being engaged. Of course, we have our own Revenue and GM number, but the addition to our channel partner numbers actually increase their organisational valuation by a significant multiplier over what the cost of acquisition would be to them. This is a very tangible value that we bring to any channel organisation we work with?
They’re our thoughts, tell us what you think? What values do you offer or want to add to your business.
Steve Turner