An HP Marketing Plan to Make the Most of What You’ve Got

For some resellers, their HP marketing plan is their business plan, and vice versa. With the recent turbulence in the vendor’s business, the question for some is how to ride out those ups and downs while Hewlett-Packard figures out how to come to grips with the rapid developments in the tablet and smartphone markets.

The IT Vendor Beauty Contest

The vendor has just introduced a new tablet offering, the HP Slate 7. But how does HP stack up in the rest of the computing categories?

• Mobile devices. The tablet will ship from April onwards, but a smartphone is yet to come, apparently.

• Personal computers. HP is number one in many of the PC sectors. However, worldwide sales of tablets (for all vendors) are forecast to rise above PC sales in the near future.
  
   

• Networking. It offers its OpenFlow solutions, which give it potentially interesting positioning against the likes of Cisco, currently.

• Printing. Still the boss, although once again, tablets may change the need for printing and therefore the customer demand.

• Enterprise computing. Entry-level to mid-solution level, HP is a contender. At the high end, vendors like IBM are stronger.

Working with What You’ve Got, Rather than Wish Lists

As a reseller, your HP marketing plan may need to take rankings like these into account in order to better assess your chances of winning deals. How much those chances change in the future will probably depend on how much progress the vendor can make in the race to provide the latest generation mobile devices and high-end IT integration solutions. 

What difference would it make to your business if you offered say Dell’s or Apple’s solutions instead of HP’s? Tell us your feelings on the matter by using the Comments space that follows this post. 

And to follow-through on the tips introduced in this short article, be sure to download your free copy of the special report on the Top 10 IT Marketing Strategies For Consistently Attracting New Business Clients to Your Small IT Business. 

Creative Commons Image Source: flickr miniyo73