With over 6,000 IT and Telecoms suppliers within the UK, find the right supplier can be time consuming and complex. As a result, businesses tend to stay with their current suppliers, renewing each year to save the challenge of migrating services to a new, unknown entity.

However with technology changing at such a pace, new entrants to the market are frequent and can add significant value to a business’s IT function. Incumbent IT providers, who sometimes have not invested in the latest skills and technologies, find it difficult to independently advise a client to work with new suppliers as it could damage their revenues and relationships.

Embedded IT have significant experience in both the business alignment to IT suppliers, but also the latest technology trends and drivers. In this context, Embedded can offer a fully independent view of your business’s IT supply chain and can make recommendations on how suppliers could form part of the business strategy based on skills and culture. Through a series of interviews and reviews of documentation, Embedded will determine:

• Inventory of all suppliers showing what services they provide
• Service quality / contract positions for each supplier as a Red/Amber/Green
• Proposals for changes in the IT Supply Chain, if required
• Potential new IT Suppliers to consider in the context of business strategy

The core deliverable will be an audit report with prioritised recommendations on current IT and Telecoms supply chain, with potential benefits and actions to realise these benefits.

With 6,000 IT and Telecoms suppliers, the UK market is a busy and fragmented one. Brand development, marketing and client engagement is the key differentiator to getting noticed, ensuring your business stands out from the crowd when you most need it.
Alongside this, technology and propositions are changing every day. Understanding how to align your brand to the right solutions and key messages for your target market is a complex task. Staying abreast of developments in your core sector without “chasing the shiny ball” of new and interesting technology, for an industry that is attracted to new and shiny things, is nigh on impossible.

Embedded IT have significant and practical experience in the development of marketing messaging for IT and Telecoms companies. We will independently work with your core business stakeholders to identify the direction you want to take, and align marketing activity and messaging to this direction to help keep you in the forefront of your target clients minds for all the right reasons. Embedded can:

• Perform an initial audit of marketing team, collateral, web and social media, campaign plans and comment on the suitability for target market
• Evaluate brand and identity to align to target market goals and business objectives
• Look at Lead to Cash Sales process to identify bottleneck / under-performant processes and propose remedial actions

This relatively short piece of work can help with direction setting for business and marketing / sales teams, and can provoke appropriate debate to ensure core business messages are consistently adopted across all business teams.

The IT and Telecoms supply chain is undergoing significant change, with massive consolidation through mergers and acquisitions activity, as well as technological change and adoption of new business models, such as cloud. IT suppliers are therefore prone to risk of change, and frequently businesses do not hear about these changes until it is too late.

As a parallel activity, technology procurement is changing at a rapid pace. With changes in buying behaviour, different commercial and financial models for products and services, and the aforementioned supply chain turmoil, buying IT services can be a complex and time consuming task. Without appropriate domain expertise, the risk of buying the wrong thing from the wrong supplier is high, with unquantifiable commercial and operational impact.

Embedded IT have significant experience in managing procurement activities for clients of all sizes and sectors. Leveraging our experience of working on both sides of the procurement fence (Client / Supplier), we understand the key drivers for client and suppliers and navigate the best path between these agendas to secure the best result for both. This can take the form of a managed Request For Proposal (RFP) process, or more commonly, a process of simple dialogue to ascertain the best approach to a specific business requirement. Embedded can provide:

• Initial requirements gathering
• Supplier long and short list selection
• Evaluation Criteria development, in conjunction with business requirements
• Contract negotiation support (in conjunction with professional legal advice)

Embedded can provide support for Procurement processes, from initial strategy definition to supplier recommendation, to ensure all parties achieve the optimum outcome, with minimal effort.

IT and Telecoms are not short of opportunity to create interesting propositions. With new technologies being developed each day, and new business problems being identified even faster, aligning technology to business benefits can be a time consuming but high volume business.

Many IT and Telecoms suppliers however struggle with developing appropriate propositions to their target markets. With too much onus on technical speeds and feeds, and less understanding of core and tangible business benefits, IT and Telecoms Proposition Marketing can be more “byte” than “bite”, to the detriment of marketing conversion and performance metrics.

Embedded IT advise clients on their IT procurement processes, and as a result understand the language by which clients buy technology. The key to proposition marketing in this context is to create a number of different messages that match buyer persona, and industry, aligning non-technical messaging to specific job role or business based benefit. We take your core propositions and create content that supports messaging for your typical target market, delivering copy and suggested media to deliver the message to your prospects and clients in the most consumable form.
Embedded can:

• Review existing collateral to identify appropriateness to the stated target audience
• Develop new business level propositions to support sales and marketing objectives
• Create content, copy, sales training materials, and other supporting detail to enable propositions to be delivered to internal and external audiences

Dependent on the complexity of proposition and the volume of work to support each one, this engagement can be a short or longer term project, tailored to work hand in hand with in-house marketing teams to meet budgetary expectations.