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Why customer retention and growth is priority for VARs/SPs

Jim Stockwell
Jim Stockwell

We all know that acquiring a new customer can take a lot of resources and time for resellers and service providers. And now this is further amplified with the current economic uncertainty across the world, where new IT projects or spending within businesses are put on hold. That’s why it has never been more important for resellers to focus on retaining and growing their existing customer base.

Protecting and retaining

As mentioned in many of my past blogs, I cannot stress the importance of protecting and staying on top of your recurring revenue enough. You need to ensure that you action all license, maintenance and tech renewals to (at the very least), keep the original investment sold to your customer alive, current and useful over its workable life. It simply isn’t an option – it is mandatory, because not only could you be leaving revenue behind, but also adding risk when unsupported/redundant assets are still being used by your customers. 

Managing this entire process should be as automated as possible. And by automated, we are not referring to automatic reminders/notifications to then take manual action. Rather, the entire renewal process should be fully automated – except for your larger accounts that require a little bit more engagement and TLC. Automation is particularly mandatory for subscription or consumption-based models, where churn can be monthly, weekly or even hourly.

Driving adoption of your products/services, especially at the reseller level is also essential. Your offering might be fantastic, but if your end users are not actively adopting or using it, then you are at risk. Which is why you must have an adoption strategy in place, that will not only protect your existing revenue, but help provide opportunities to add more licenses or users in future as well.

Growth and extending value

Growth is all about investing in your installed base data, to uncover potential growth opportunities. By proactively pursuing these opportunities, you will increase customer lifetime value and enable incremental revenue growth. This can be achieved in a number of ways, including upgrades to the initial investment to cover feature enhancements (upsell). You can also maximize value through an ecosystem programme, that includes reference architectures which give the customer greater revenue-generating opportunities and cost reduction strategies - far beyond their standalone investment (cross-sell).

But in order to do all of the above effectively, you cannot lean on legacy systems or additional resources, because all that will do is impact your operational efficiency and costs. Which is why leveraging automation to help execute all of the above – at scale, is a must.

We have countless success stories amongst our reseller and service provider customers, where they have grown their initial customer value by tenfold simply by executing the above with the help of the iasset.com platform. Not only are they able to demonstrate further value to their end customers, but also to their vendors/distributors. It’s a proven formula which we know works. If you are concerned about the potential cost, the good news is that we are offering small to medium resellers and service providers with free access to the iasset.com platform during these uncertain times.

 

Contact me to find out more about how you can sign up to this offer.

 

 

 

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