Increase your sales margin with one simple tactic..

Guest post - Accessorise with Westcoast

As anyone in the sector will know, the tech market is a competitive one. While this is obviously good news for the consumer, for the reseller it can present certain problems; the most apparent and pressing being falling margins. Margin on any piece of technical hardware is almost always slim, so how do you generate the profit you need to keep your business not just surviving, but thriving? If you’ve not worked it out already, our secret weapon comes in the form of accessories.

7 things you should know about Twitter Analytics

By Sian Walsh

Back in 2014 twitter launched a game changer for us marketeers by introducing Twitter Analytics. For the first time users were able to see how many times users have viewed and engaged with organic tweets, enabling them to more effectively optimise their content and social strategy.

Two years on Twitter Analytics has developed even further and just knowing the basics, will help you utilise the free tool, which is a must for any small business or individual to help understand how well your social media is performing.

Twitter Analytics is a free tool and can be accessed here: https://analytics.twitter.com

Take a look at the infographic below.

Could virtual reality be your next business opportunity?

Guest Post - HPE

Virtual reality has entered its second coming in a big way, and this new wave is advancing far beyond the early-'90s video game era. Long considered the king of gaming, it's now emerging as a real business and productivity tool, with the potential to reinvent our relationship with data by making it something we experience rather than something we merely observe.

So what does this really mean for your business? Well.. as we've moved on in the world of technology, gone are the days where virtual reality is seen as just a toy for thrill seekers and gamers. Virtual reality has grown up  and is taking over the main stream with the potential of creating huge business opportunities for you business.

Read full article: Game over: Virtual reality hits the real world

No more content brick walls - Content rich ideas to make social media planning easy.

By Jess Tyley

Content planning doesn’t have to be a headache. You can create diverse content across different formats and platforms by starting with a topic and chopping it into different formats and mediums. For example start with a blog. The most interesting and engaging blogs are usually easy to read, so ‘Top 10 ways to’ or ‘5 easy steps to’. This type of blog lets the reader know that the content is short and snappy and they can get to the bits relevant to them quickly.

From there you can start to plan out your content structure. So from your blog content you might make a video which is educational or where you feature customer testimonials. Using your testimonials you could compose some visuals for twitter posts or an infographic explaining the learnings from you video.

With that one piece of content you can end up with more than enough content across a range of content formats for your marketing campaign!

Use our infographic below to easily  plan our your campaign content strategy!

How long can your customers afford to be without a server?

By Lee Prior

Warranty is not enough! Warranty protects hardware but HPE support keeps businesses running.

Think IT support services will break your customer’s budget? Think again. Chances are that you’ll spend more per day on a morning cup of coffee than on HPE Support Services.

Are your customers adequately covered under warranty? Warranty is a limited offering only providing:

• Monday-Friday 8am to 5pm only (No weekend or Bank Holiday cover) 
• Next business day response – Reasonable endeavours 
• No software support 
• Selected options are not covered by server warranty i.e. SATA ATA PATA drives (1 year warranty) 
• If a fault occurs on Friday morning, it may be Monday afternoon before an engineer goes to the site

If your customers require support outside of standard working-hours and are not protected adequately can they really afford to be without a server...?

Read more here

Excuse me robot, could you move that 9am meeting for me please?

Could intelligent robots and Conversations as a Platform (CaaP) be the future of human decisions? Well Microsoft think so. They think bots could be our PA’s, personal shoppers and travel agents - all achievable through digital experiences and intelligent conversations. 

Take a look at this blog by Gurdeep Pall, Corporate VP of Skype, who believes that through Conversations as a Platform and bots, the computing experience we receive today could be radically different over the next two decades.

What if it was possible to access extended credit at no extra cost?

By Alex Tatham

What’s the biggest sales enabler in distribution? Sounds like an easy question, but I would contend it is such a balance of different offerings that there is no silver bullet.

• Great consistent account management
• Good pricing
• Stock levels
• Rebate management
• Quote management and turnaround
• Credit availability
• But one area that sometimes gets ignored is extended payment terms.

Cash management is a vital performance indicator for a distributor and all successful distributors put significant resources into reporting and measuring the ability to turn sales/stock into cash and maintain as balanced a cash flow as possible. Westcoast has a zero tolerance for late payment once terms have been agreed. It is too important for our business. However, we have an exclusive and innovative scheme that allows customers to extend payment and never miss a payment deadline.

Making Cloud Telephony & Unified Communications Simple For You and Your Customers.

By Justin Powell – UC Sales Manager

Hi Westcoast Partners, my name is Justin Powell and I look after Cloud Unified Communications here at Westcoast.

My role is to help and guide you through the Westcoast Cloud UC offerings and getting the right solution for you and your customer. I have over 15 years in the Telephony industry and want to share the exciting things happening in the market place around Cloud Telephony and Unified Communications

                                                      The Cloud Opportunity

ThinkPad P40 Yoga, the first ISV certified multi-mode mobile workstation

Introducing the world's first multi-mode mobile workstation, featuring Yoga's famous 360-degree hinge, the ThinkPad P40 yoga is built to last..

Here at Westcoast we LoveThink. And the below video will show you just a few of the reasons why. Check it out for yourself, we are pretty sure that you will LoveThink too.

                          


  The ThinkPad P40 is available to buy from Westcoast and can be purchased here

The New Fujitsu fi-7030 - The Perfect Cure For Medical Professionals

Product Review

Constantly under heavy scrutiny over costs and proficiency, healthcare organisations such as hospitals, GP surgeries, dental practices and physiotherapies now, more than ever, require effective document digitising solutions to manage the vast amounts of content that flows through the enterprise. And we think that the Fujitsu fi-7030; which is designed for super-fast, high quality document replication, is one such solution.

Revolution Driving Evolution - The IT channel is changing

By Lee Prior

If history has taught us anything it’s that those that feel comfortable standing still, those that are not stretching themselves and seeking to advance to the next level are in fact already moving backwards. That has never been truer than right now for IT Resellers.

Technology is now so woven into the fabric of business that most companies would be unable to function without it, and yet the level of knowledge and understanding of this vital thread is remarkably low within the UK SMB sector, a sector that makes up almost 80% of the available market. There are literally tens of thousands of small to medium businesses, who’s very existence is reliant on technology that they don’t understand…instead they expect us, their IT guru’s and modern day alchemists to understand it on their behalf and advise them on how to best wield this powerful weapon.

WPC 2016 Wrap-Up

By Mark Davies

So another great WPC came to a close and we all caught our breath. These events are a whirlwind of activity, meetings, sessions and fun with over 800 UK attendees this year making it one of their biggest events ever. Even though there wasn't any major announcements there is a flurry of activities going on at Microsoft and how these proliferate down to the channel. The message around cloud and CSP was louder than ever and the transition away from other traditional licensing business models such as open and EA was very clear.