In this vlog, James Bent, Project Delivery Manager at iasset.com, provides a practical overview of how you can implement the LIPS sales strategy using the iasset.com platform.
Video Transcript:
In this video, I’m going walk you through how to put your LIPS sales strategy - which we created for IT vendors, distributors, resellers and service providers - into action using the iasset.com platform to manage the four key product lifecycle stages of Land, Invest, Protect & Surrender. The LIPS strategy provides a guide for how you can retain and grow your existing customer base through proactive management of your installed base, as you work through each stage of the asset lifecycle.
And today, I’ll be giving you a practical overview on how to use the iasset.com platform to manage each of these stages.
To start with – the Land stage.
When you Land a deal, the customer journey is only just beginning. Using iasset.com, you can either use our CPQ capabilities to manage net new sales or use uploads & integrations to feed details of landed sales from your current quoting & finance solutions. In either case, iasset.com ensures those landed sales – whether for hardware with maintenance & support, software & security licenses, IOT & OT device deployments, or subscription & consumption products & services – are converted automatically into installed asset records, powering future stage product lifecycle workflows in the platform.
Within iasset.com’s installed asset records, all details are recorded including the products & services sold, the channel entities involved, term dates for contract items and unique identifiers such as serial numbers and license keys. And because it’s in our dedicated installed asset lifecycle management platform, you can move away from having to rely on spreadsheets or accessing data in CRMs or finance systems (even though iasset.com integrates with those platforms seamlessly) which were never made for managing the product lifecycle from “cradle to grave”.
Through managing the Land stage with iasset.com, you achieve 2 main goals:
- Ensure customer adoption & satisfaction with their investment by tracking installations and deployments
- Being prepared to extend that investment by building a dynamic installed base, to help amplify the return through the subsequent lifecycle stages.
And so we move on to the 2nd stage: Invest.
Invest is the most important aspect of the LIPS strategy, representing growth. Invest enables you to proactively manage your customers’ IT investment strategy. Using iasset.com’s Sales Campaign capability to mine your customer installed asset data, you can automate the creation of unsolicited proposals ready to send with customer pricing calculated, helping put your customer in a better economic position.
Through this discovery of previously unseen opportunities – whether for upsell and cross-sell for assets or contracts e.g. increasing a service level or selling add-ons for hardware, or for co-sell opportunities e.g. for solution-based selling using reference architectures to promote related products & services, maximising the investment from your customer base in ways that also directly benefits your customer. The result being that you become part of your customer’s IT strategy, rather than just another IT supplier, continuing the journey along the product lifecycle.
Next is the Protect stage.
Having maximised investment using iasset.com, the key is to protect your recurring revenue, ensuring you action all license, maintenance and tech renewals to keep the original investment sold to your customer alive, current and useful over its workable life.
With iasset.com, you can run a fully automated renewals workflow – and not just automated reminders/notifications to take a manual action, but rather using expiring installed assets to automatically identify and create opportunities & renewal quotes, inclusive of pre-configured items to be quoted, as well as channel pricing capabilities – including vendor and product-based partner program discounts & margins, exchange rates, uplifts and co-termination logic for example.
The benefit of such automation is your representatives spend less time on manual administration to generate customer ready quotes and more time ensuring customers have adopted products & services. At the same time, reps also have the opportunity to add value through up-sell, cross-sell or co-sell to otherwise transactional renewals, further protecting your customer base. Given the current climate, the importance of these benefits make it imperative for technology provides to deploy an installed asset lifecycle management platform, such as iasset.com.
The customer and product lifecycle journey doesn’t stop at the renewal however. All assets will reach the end of their useful life. And this is not limited to hardware asset environments – it includes software-based assets as well. Surrender therefore is the final stage to LIPS, ensuring a forward-thinking obsolescence strategy.
Whether assets are marked as end of life or end or service, or whether a customer no longer finds the asset useful or wants to replace with something better, surrender is a compelling event. With iasset.com’s sales campaign capability, you can mine the installed asset records, identifying all assets going EOL or EOS, or using trends to identify other areas of your customer base that might choose to otherwise upgrade or replace. iasset.com then uses the outputs of the installed asset data mining to again create unsolicited proposals ready to send with pricing to the customer, this time focused on promoting upgrades or tech refresh. The key benefit being to have the opportunity to introduce new technology at the appropriate point in time, ensuring your customers’ digital strategy is enhanced and amplified, not hindered and brought to a halt.
So where to from here? No matter what type of technology provider you are – vendor, distributor or reseller/VAR – there is no better time than now to focus on customer retention and growth using the iasset.com platform in conjunction with the LIPS strategy.
If you’d like to know more, all you need to do is reach out to your regional sales office to organise a demo and discussion on how to get started.
Case Study
Blog
Blog
Comments