Are You A Master? Take The Quiz and Find Out!

The contracts. After less than two years the monthly revenue from the contracts will equal the monthly revenue of the product sales, and the managed service will generate project revenue on its own.

Not only is the base revenue amount equal, but the profit margin on services is generally far higher than for products, making it much more lucrative to sell contracts.

Don't sell solutions that are out of your core offerings. Even if your tech is able to make it work, he will be the only one in your company who can do it. You lose trust when you sell this way.

Whenever possible, you want to configure systems in your own warehouse.

Small, targeted contracts can make money with little or no effort if built correctly.

Your customers are far more likely to buy a service contract when attached to a project at the time of the sale.

Selling managed services as a standalone product is far more difficult than attaching the contract at the time of a service project sale.

The two are totally different paradigms. Selling services is always about promoting value, and are difficult to "shop around". Product selling is almost always about the best price for a specific item.

Fixed price projects are more profitable and are easier to sell.

Tracking by hours focuses them on a one-to-one ratio and causes friction on the team. Focus on total revenue instead.

You could have the CEO set up a meeting with the customer, but in this case it seems this customer just isn't going to be happy with anything you do, and the complaints are killing morale on your team.

Key to this scenario is that your other customers are generally very happy with your service team and sales rep - this tells you that, on the whole, your team is getting it right.

Some customers just aren't a good fit - it's better to fire the customer and lose his business than keep a customer who isn't a fit and who's complaints can do significant damage to your company's reputation.

Whenever possible, you want to avoid talking about the tools. Focusing on the tools will lock you into a comparison argument, and it will be difficult to change your tools later on down the road if you desire to do so.

It's better to focus on the service you provide instead of the tool you use to provide the service.

Service Utilization is a measure of how effective the service team is. Ideally your service team should be billing 3x the combined salary of the entire service team.

You want to know the amount of revenue service team brings in as a whole.

Tracking by billable hours worked, or service revenue billed per technician is difficult to track accurately, creates friction during "non-billable" work, and affects customer service.

Tracking by billable hours worked by the entire service team is easier to track accurately, and is a good statistic to have for other reasons, but it is too focused on a "one to one" ratio of available billable time to revenue billed, which is limiting.

The best way to track individual utilization is to track total hours worked (of all kinds) by technician

Monitoring systems can look for an incredible amount of events, and opening the system up to look for as many events as you can will quickly overwhelm your staff.

You want to tune your monitoring service as much as possible - only monitor what you'll act upon, and discard the rest.

You want to avoid discussions about reductions in staff - let the customer come to that conclusion on his own.

99% of you will say "your technicians", but in this case the correct answer is a Runbook. The Runbook is the foundation on which your managed services team operates. Without a Runbook, even the best technicians will have a difficult time providing the consistency necessary to run an elite Managed Services operation. A Runbook makes less talented technicians far more effective than they would otherwise be, and it makes your best technicians even better. The others are important, but they are not the most important.

Every service project should have a managed service attached to it.

You don't want your engineers acting as sales reps. Your customer views your engineer as an expert - not a sales rep. If your engineer tries to sell services to customers, then that view will change.

Have your engineer look for services, and work directly with the sales rep to engage the customer.

You can track individual hours worked, but it's difficult to track true billable time due to a large number of factors.

Social Media itself should be an important part of your company's marketing strategy, but unless you have the resources and skill to dedicate to maintaining content on another website, you are better off focusing on your company website and spreading the word through other business-oriented social avenues such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

You don't want your customers contacting your technicians directly. Your technicians want to help their customers, and they'll end up doing "free" work, and working more hours. Worse, calls won't get logged, SLAs will get missed, and the team won't be in the loop with what's going on. Have your customer follow an identical support process that doesn't involve getting in touch with your technicians.

Insight Selling helps you build a reputation as an expert by giving your insights on a specific topic.

Insight Selling is more specific than Social Selling, which is used more broadly as a way to generate a feelings of "know, like, and trust" toward a specific person.

Both concepts are important, and can be used together to form a powerful sales strategy.

The key to this question is "technician".

You want to tell a technician how your service takes care of the mundane and/or difficult activities, and that the technician can use your service as a useful tool.

You do not want to talk about how it will reduce the number of employees - that's his job you're talking about.

Talking about ways your service will help the department run more efficiently would be something to discuss with higher level management - Directors or "C-Level" executives. Individual technicians are generally not concerned about more global benefits.

It is far easier to attach a managed service to a project at the time of sale, therefore your reps should focus on selling service projects first, and attach managed services to those projects.

If it is obvious that a particular opportunity has no service project potential (i.e. straight procurement) then focus can be on the product, ideally with a connected managed service.

Managed Services, while more lucrative in the long run, are typically more difficult to sell on a standalone basis, and are generally outside of the comfort zone of most sales reps.

The key word here is "focus" - your GOAL is to sell managed services, but the focus should be on the easiest way to sell those managed services.