A solution that supports business growth in sector verticals

Futurist and best-selling South African author of Foresight, John Sanei, believes that the most successful businesses in the world are technology-led.

Traditionally, businesses were sector-led. You understood everything about your industry, perfected how you took your product or service to market, and kept up with any new trends or innovations.

While this is all still important, becoming tech-led means you are embracing the technology that will help you deliver a smarter, more efficient and more productive solution.

The danger is that if you are only focused on becoming tech-led, you could downplay the importance of the sector you’re working within – because every sector has different challenges.

There has been a monumental shift in what clients have come to expect from advertising and marketing businesses, for instance. Businesses must undergo rapid transformation to meet these needs, particularly if they want to keep up with emerging trends and provide the transparency clients have come to expect with their investments.

So, what does this all mean? To begin with, no solution should ever be one-size-fits-all. In our experience, the first step to a successful technology partnership is really understanding each of our clients’ businesses – not just who they are, what they offer and how many users will be on the system, but which industry they operate within.

Matching solutions to the right problems

B2B buyers are drawn to industry-specific content and case studies. Why? Because they want to understand what other businesses in their sector are doing with a particular product – not what they could potentially achieve.

Harvard Business School lecturer Frank Cespedes discovered this when he researched the 34 million interactions that occurred between customers and content on DocSend’s website. Based on the data, case studies have an 83% completion rate. That means eight out of ten people will read a case study from start to finish – because it’s relevant to them.

There’s a deeper lesson here, though – if a solution doesn’t match the business’s core needs, it isn’t a solution at all.

At Oracle, we work across multiple verticals and industries, which is why we’ve always needed to begin with the question: What problem are we solving?

We understand that while Oracle’s NetSuite cloud solution is an ERP system, the needs of our manufacturing clients are vastly different from the needs of our clients in the professional services industry. The functionality we offer will remain the same – as will the benefits of migrating to the cloud – but how the entire platform is used will shift based on very specific client needs.

Solutions that work for you – not against you

When you implement an ERP system or migrate to the cloud, it integrates into your existing operations. The objective is to enhance processes, drive innovation and boost productivity to support business growth in the future. To achieve all of this, technology solution providers should have a very clear understanding of the industry, business and environment they are dealing with.

A recent Forrester Research Forrsights survey found that the top four reasons that businesses move to the cloud are:

• Improved business agility.
  
• Speed of implementation and deployment.
  
• Faster delivery of new features and functions.
  
• To support business innovation with new capabilities.

Couple this with a team that intimately understands your sector and your specific needs and challenges – as well as how Oracle Netsuite has been successfully deployed in businesses just like yours, facing the same challenges you’re grappling with, and you will have a solution that creates new cross-functional workflows and reporting processes, adds sales channels, enables you to enter new markets and improves connectedness between internal and external systems.

To find out more about how Oracle’s NetSuite cloud-based solutions can save on your IT costs while boosting your business’s ability to grow and scale, download your white paper here.