Taking the analogy of a vending machine – where you put in the money and choose the item you want and it is delivered to you. If you were to offer all the things which are needed – before, during and after your product or service is deployed – by your customer , then you could become the center of the universe for the technology product or service that you are marketing.

I was thinking of taking this analogy a little further.

Suppose you were to think in terms of who else would be selling to the same customer to whom I am wanting to sell my product or service. I have written about how you can use this method to get a quicker access into the market.

Now however I am going reverse.

Lets say you are in city A and you have a customer in city A for your products or services. You want to get into city B. You have identified a company who has customers to whom you want to sell. You want to partner with this company.

Now in the spirit of giving first that I keep ranting about, you could bring this company to sell its services to your customers in city A. This way you become a reliable supplier to your existing customers.

You now emphasize the same logic to this partner for city B where she takes you to their customers. You could take this further jointly into other cities.

There are so many possibilities to take this vending machine concept and grow your business rapidly. As a matter of fact all the biggest IT OEMs like IBM, Oracle etc. have the concept of eco-systems precisely for this reason so that they get quicker access to the markets as well as to the latest technologies.

While we do partnerships in our company, I think this concept of a vending machine is something which I have to work deeper.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!