4 Ways VARs Can Nurture Client Relationships

Take Quality Associates, a solution provider specializing in document management, imaging and archiving. The Columbia, Md., VAR recently hired Michael Roerty to the position of business development executive. Roerty, an industry veteran with nearly 20 years of sales and management experience, will seek out new opportunities for Quality Associates to grow its business and will be responsible for building and maintaining relationships with the company's network of distributors, software manufacturers, and resellers in the electronic document management industry.

Roerty recently took time to answer a few questions for VARBusiness readers.

VARBusiness: What types of new business do you hope to target for Quality Associates?
Roerty: Business development executives often focus on what they know. In that respect, I've worked closely with law firms and government agencies, and see continued growth in those markets and in the service sector overall. We're looking at increasing the work with local and state governments, where employees are constantly manually entering data and handling paperwork.

We're also seeing a big push to Check 21 [the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act]. While it was originally intended for the financial industry, other industries can clearly learn and benefit from the best practices established by the regulation. Many companies receive the majority of their payments in the form of hard-copy checks, and all the manual processing causes delays. With electronic checks and payments, this cycle can be shortened dramatically.

VB: What trends do you see your customers dealing with? How will your company address those needs?
Roerty: Taking an enterprise approach is one major trend. As technology becomes more cost-effective, organizations are considering enterprise approaches to document management that go well beyond their current departmental and siloed approaches. This is a major portion of the work that Quality Associates does every day, so the challenge for us is determining, among all of the new technology that hits the market, what solutions are best-in-class, getting up to speed in their use, and applying them to meet each client's own unique needs.

Another trend is shared workspaces and shared portals that come together to provide collaboration, such as MS SharePoint. Interest is growing as companies continue to seek ways to increase collaboration among a widely distributed employee base. Everyone at Quality Associates is constantly taking courses and expanding our knowledge to ensure that we most effectively implement these tools within the client's environment.

I've also seen throughout many industries that organizations desire an OCR engine that can better ensure the accuracy of captured information. They are also looking for cleaner, more legible scanned images. To that end, we've been seeing tremendous interest and success for our clients with Kofax's Ascent Capture for OCR and Virtual ReScan (VRS).

Our customers also want their documents handled on-shore, not halfway around the world. It's reassuring for our customers to know that Quality Associates handles all aspects of the data capture and management process on shore.

VB: Heading up new business development means dealing with many different types of customers. What are some tips you can offer fellow VARs on nurturing customer relationships?
Roerty: First of all, never be pushy. Being in business is about growing relationships, not about the quick sale. The customer must be ready for a solution.

Always have the tools and the answers. It goes without saying that you must know your product inside and out so you'll be able to provide your customers with immediate answers.

Listen, [really] listen to your customers. Some VARs don't really hear what their customers and prospects are telling them, and try to push a prepackaged solution that worked for another customer. It's about recognizing and meeting current customer's specific needs for a certain situation.

Educate customers throughout every step in the process. Guide them and give them the best options. Many of the solutions we put in pace dramatically change our customer's processes and affect the way they do business, so we get them involved right from the start. After all, they are the ones making the decision in the end.