Top 5 IT Business Growth Opportunities for VARs, SPs, and MSPs in 2012
Ready or not, 2012 is here, and it promises to be quite an exciting time for VARs, SPs, and MSPs looking to grow their businesses.
What are the biggest growth opportunities?
While there will be at least a handful of very hot technology needs driving demand, including cloud computing, mobile computing, security, storage, and virtualization, VARs, SPs, and MSPs pursuing the small business segment must continue to focus on the fundamentals.
Even though it’s sometimes very tempting to get sidetracked into a well-marketed channel program launch, product and platform knowledge alone won’t keep your QuickBooks P&L statement and accountant smiling.
So what are the most important IT business basics to focus on in 2012?
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Prioritize IT Marketing and Targeted Lead Generation – While some VARs, SPs, and MSPs will continue to believe that marketing is a one-time event that you do when things slow down, smart technology providers will continue to invest regularly and aggressively in targeted lead generation campaigns that grow their client lists. And if selling managed services factors largely into your 2012 plans, make sure that you double-down on campaigns that differentiate your firm from others selling similar, commoditized managed services offerings.
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Get Good at Selling IT Services and Lead Nurturing – If your average customer’s lifetime value is embarrassingly low, you probably don’t have much of a sales cycle to contend with. But if your firm wants to attract small- and medium-sized business clients (SMBs) with more substantial five- and six-figure annual budgets for outsourced IT services, then you will have a sales cycle. And the better you know the length of and key milestones for your sales cycle, the better off you’ll be. To do this more effectively, make 2012 about lead nurturing—a highly-underutilized process that helps transform your leads from highly-targeted marketing activities to new paying customers who are primed to become your steady, high-paying clients.
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Build Recurring Revenue with IT Service Contracts – While small business VARs, SPs, and MSPs tend to each approach IT service contracts a little differently, the key point is that your business will have a hard time surviving, let alone thriving, if you’re starting from scratch each month with your service revenue projections. For 2012, you need to stop wasting time on one-shot-deal customers and invest long-term in building an IT service contract program that your most desirable small business prospects will salivate over.
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Use Managed Computer Consulting to Enjoy the Best of Both Worlds—Even though channel program managers at the big managed services vendors don’t really want to hear this, it is entirely possible and a lot more profitable to cherry-pick the parts of managed services that work best for your business and ignore the parts that don’t. A few years back, many big managed services vendors began mounting aggressive marketing campaigns demanding that you pick sides. However, the reality is there are a lot of great managed services tools and platforms that can benefit SMB clients to whom you already provide outsourced IT services. Embrace managed computer consulting in 2012, so your firm can enjoy the best of both worlds with traditional, high-margin, outsourced IT services and more progressive, but more commoditized, managed services.
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Participate in Select IT Channel Programs, but Stay in the Driver’s Seat—Small business VARs, SPs, and MSPs can get a lot of great benefits from selectively participating in certain IT reseller channel partner programs. However, the caution for 2012 is that you must have a strong-sense of what your company’s value proposition is all about and who your target market is, so you don’t get seduced by, or swept away in, the excitement of a bet-the-business product launch. So do your homework, join a few channel programs that make sense for your business model, participate in a meaningful way that drives measurable business results, but always make sure that you stay in the driver’s seat.
So again, 2012 promises to be a very exciting year for small business VARs, SPs, and MSPs. However, it’s critically important that your IT business focus on the basics with regards to IT marketing, lead generation, selling IT services, lead nurturing, recurring revenue, IT service contracts, managed computer consulting, and IT channel programs.
What are your biggest aspirations for 2012? Where will you be focusing most of your company’s resources? Please share your thoughts in the comments area below.
Creative Commons Image Source: flickr Between a Rock