Subscription Selling Is More Than A Monthly Bill

The move by many businesses across many different industries to engage with their customers on a subscription or recurring revenue basis, rather than perpetual, has had a profound effect on the overall customer sales engagement model, not just the billing model of monthly subscriptions. In this article we look at the differences between the traditional … Continued

Reassessing Sales Incentives for MRR

We’ve recently worked with a number of companies who needed help redesigning their sales incentive programs to drive sales of Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) through XaaS, Cloud and Managed Services, rather than traditional CapEx IT. While there may not be a single perfect incentive model for all organisations, there are certainly some valuable lessons you … Continued

Lessons For MSPs From a “Free” Phone App

I’m fascinated by some of the games available on phones nowadays (which is kind of interesting given that I don’t play them). But what I find interesting is not the game itself, but rather the business model behind how it makes money for its developers. One of my favourites is Candy Crush – a “free” … Continued

Why Your Services Business Might Shrink

It’s interesting that a marketing concept introduced 30 years ago can have implications for an IT industry transitioning to an “as a Service” model today, but that is exactly what is happening. In 1986, Regis McKenna presented the concept of the Whole Product in his book “The Regis Touch”, which was later popularised by Geoffrey … Continued

Moving to the Cloud? … Change your Comp Plan

Over the years, I’ve had several sales managers tell me their sales people are “coin-operated”. In other words, they are motivated purely by their pay packet. So all you need to do is give reps a sales target, give them a commission plan, and set them loose (and the good ones will deliver the results). … Continued

Rethinking Partner Enablement For Cloud

Author: Cam Wayland We are working with a vendor that is transitioning its portfolio of products and partners to be more annuity or XaaS orientated. This includes evaluating their partner enablement material and approach so either existing or new partners could successfully sell the Cloud or XaaS solutions. Our findings suggest that using the same … Continued

Rethinking The Value Of Customers In A Cloudy World

Recently we have been working with a number of service providers building out their channel and XaaS offerings. The first part of the process is helping them to clearly define their target customer, and as a result what will be the best type of partner to acquire and service this customer. The second thing we … Continued

Are Service Providers Partners Or Customers?

I often conduct strategy discussions with vendors who sell through Service Providers, and at some point during the meeting, I’ll ask the question – are Service Providers (ie. Managed Service Providers, Telcos, Cloud providers, etc) your Customer or your Partner? The answer is usually something like “well sometimes they’re customers and sometimes they’re partners but … Continued

Customer Life Cycle Management and The Cloud

Customer life cycle management is an important issue for every business selling cloud services. Where there was once traditional solution selling around a large capital item followed by install and management, we are now seeing the consumption of IT as a service driven by cloud technologies. Cloud services are usually billed monthly over a fixed … Continued