Get Into Management Services Now, TechSelect Members Advised

The Best Practices session at Tech Data's TechSelect Partner Conferences usually garner the most interest from members, and this week's show in San Antonio was no exception.

TechSelect members heard three of their peers Friday morning describe how they found success selling managed services and by applying personality profiles to employees to best determine their roles in the organization.

Rory Sanchez, president of SL Powers, a West Palm Beach, Fla.-based solution provider, now receives $60,000 a month in revenue from 36 customers in exchange for managing the customers' IT departments.

SL Powers started that business in 1999 after a customer requested a monthly service charge rather than a per-incident bill, Sanchez told about 200 TechSelect members. It took a couple of years to fine-tune the model, but SL Powers now garners more profits with the customers and they are also more loyal, Sanchez said.

Solution providers interested in adapting a managed services model should do so quickly, Sanchez said.

"I always say get started now, buy stuff later. The processes and procedures outweigh whatever software or automation you have to get. You can fill in the gaps later. I've found that most people that went that route were more successful," Sanchez said.

Jean Julien, president of Expr@com Technologies, a Montreal-based solution provider, told the crowd how he started a managed services practice last October and is already managing more than 300 seats on behalf of customers.

"Don't be afraid to find new ways to implement ideas. Use your people, your in-house expertise," Julien said.

Expr@acom targets managed services at companies with fewer than 10 employees because the loss of a PC can have a bigger impact, Julien said.

Among the services Expr@acom offers is automatic backup for laptops. Julien found that 90 percent of customers hadn't backed up their documents for at least six months. He uses a product called iFolder that hooks itself to an Expr@com server and backs up modified documents for as low as $9.95 a month for 100 Mbytes of data.

"It's cheaper than a Zip drive, and you don't have to do it yourself. Clients love it. Almost no laptop leaves our office without that being sold," Julien said.

Finally, Tim Story, senior vice president of customer relations at Saratoga Technologies, Johnson City, Tenn., explained how he implemented a personality testing program that helped match employees to jobs. For example, technicians who liked being around people were moved from in-house to the field, while technicians who didn't like being in the field were moved in-house. The moves increased morale and productivity, said Story, who was moved from COO to customer relations after taking the DiSC personality test.

"Employees are your best assets, and you need to find ways make them more happy. One problem we had was everybody was doing a good job, but not a great job. We wanted to see how we get them used to going above and beyond," Story said.

The test results showed that nearly half of Saratoga's employees were not in a job suited to their personality, Story said. "We would have done it sooner if we had known," Story said.

Employees were initially hesitant to take the test, but Saratoga guaranteed them they would not lose their jobs as a result nor would they be demoted, Story said.

The three agreed to share their stories with the TechSelect membership because they had all gained solid business tips.

"Most of the value happens outside the vendor boardrooms [at TechSelect]," Sanchez said. "It's talking to other people. A couple years ago, we had a roundtable discussion talking about how to pay your salespeople. Everybody walked out of there with new ideas. We got a lot of value and we redid the way we did comp plans going forward."