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Do cows need to take 10,000 steps daily? Finding new opportunities for growth, in the most unlikely places.

During our recent ISV Summit in Mississauga, I had a chance to share a story about cows. Or more aptly, Japanese connected cows. For those of you who couldn’t catch the presentation in person, I’ll retell the story here in this post because it’s an example of the paradigm shift that’s defining our industry and may offer some insights into new ways to grow your business.

Turns out that getting cows pregnant is a lot trickier than you might think. Cows are most likely to get pregnant when “in heat” (estrus), but that only happens for 12-18 hours every 21 days and apparently, those hours occur between 10pm and 8am. Naturally, not all of the cows go into heat at the same time so farmers who want to grow their herd face a considerable logistical challenge: How to figure out the best time to try to artificially inseminate them.

The good news is Mother Nature helps a bit by prompting cows to “walk around furiously” when they’re in heat. And technology can now help too. The GYUHO system by Japanese Microsoft Partner Fujitsu uses wearable technology—not entirely dissimilar to fitness trackers like Microsoft Band—to monitor and report on the number of steps the cows take.

How does it work? A pedometer is attached to each cow’s leg and transmits network data on the number of steps it takes in real-time. That data is analyzed in the cloud using Azure. And when the time is right, the farmer gets a head’s up on their smartphone and PC.

Since introducing the GYUHO solution, farmers are able to improve pregnancy rates by 66%. Moreover, they can actually apply the analytics to identify the best possible time to inseminate a cow based on whether they want a male or female calf. For farmers, this predictive solution is a huge boon as it gives them the immediate means to improve their productivity and profitability.

For us, the GYUHO story provides a powerful precedent about the role partners can play in helping their customers—in virtually any industry and even in the most unlikely scenarios—to solve business challenges by applying their technical smarts and creativity. As the IoT and cloud transform our industry, the partners who find new ways to leverage off-the-shelf technology and combine it with their own intellectual property are destined to thrive.

Two strategies come to mind. We’ll call them: going deep and being proactive.

Going deep is about really understanding your customer’s business, not just their current technology mix. If you can invest the time to analyze their business workflows and find pain points and gaps, you may be able to come up with an entirely new solution—a solution that has nothing to do with their current technology mix at all.

One easy way to do that is to invite your customer to grab a coffee. Don’t pitch them any products or services. Instead, ask them to describe the three biggest issues they have in their business. Forget the technology—ask them to share the business issues that keep them up at night. This basic discovery process can reveal incredible opportunities. And while you may not be able to solve all three of their problems, you might be able to tackle one.

The second strategy, being proactive, is about what you do next. Instead of waiting on a customer to request a service and/or ask for a quote, what if you put together a new plan to tackle one of the problems they described using the cloud and IoT? With this new plan in hand, you may be able to secure a new contract and find the funding to develop your own, branded IP that you can resell to other companies facing the same or similar issues.

Even if you’re not able to sell the solution to your customer, you will at least have advanced the relationship, built some trust and developed a better understanding of their needs and wants. And perhaps, just as importantly, this discovery-to-development approach may spark your creativity and lead your team into new areas of unforeseen growth.

Now this may all seem obvious to you and you may do it already with great success. If so, I applaud you. But if not, then why not try it out? The reality is that this type of strategic problem-solving approach is consistently inspiring the apps, solutions and companies that are disrupting one industry after another, from logistics and packaged goods to, yes, farming.