May 9th, 2012 by Amy Thomas
We continue our spotlight on Managed Services with guest blogger Dan Timmer from GreatAmerica Leasing Corporation. Dan’s article is a good read prior to next week’s CorsPro-GreatAmerica webinar “Managed Services – A win win for you and your customers”, Wednesday May 16, 2:30 PM EDT
By Dan Timmer, GreatAmerica Leasing
Managed services come in a variety of flavors for technology resellers, including Managed IT Services (normally just referred to as Managed Services), Managed Print Services (MPS) and Managed Voice Services. The general philosophy behind a managed services approach is leveraging your expertise to help your customers maximize the capabilities and benefits of their technology solutions, while allowing them to do what they do best, which is focus on their core business.
There are several monetary advantages to adopting a managed services approach, but quite possibly the most important benefit is the ability to earn a large number of fiercely loyal customers. These loyal customers will look to you as their trusted advisor, someone that they are willing to pay a premium to do business with for the long term. Why would managed service customers be more likely to become fiercely loyal you ask? Let’s start by comparing traditional sales versus managed services sales. Read the rest of this entry »
May 3rd, 2012 by Amy Thomas
On May 16, 2012, we are hosting a Managed Services webinar led by GreatAmerica Leasing Corporation. The webinar will focus on why Managed Service solutions not only make sense for your business and your customers but also why it is becoming a ‘must’ in your solution portfolio to effectively compete in the marketplace.
Leading up to the webinar we will be posting a few blog articles that will talk about Managed Services for your business – both telephony as well as IT focused. The intent is to Read the rest of this entry »
April 4th, 2012 by Amy Thomas
Many vendor partners (resellers) have available MDF or Coop funds through their vendors. In fact these funds are typically ranked as one of the most popular for vendors, but are they as popular among the resellers?
In the past, these funds have primarily been used for training and traditional marketing activities for partners, with the “approved” use of the funds being somewhat limited. In addition, partners are not often aware of the MDF programs the vendors offer or what funds they have available for use. This has resulted in funds going unused or programs being unsuccessful.
According to a recent blog posting by Channel Champion, the 5 most effective reimbursable activities from MDF have been training, demo equipment, events, trade shows and incentive programs. If an MDF program is carried out effectively, these funded activities have proven to be successful in the past. They key factor for continued success however is flexibility – being open to new uses of the funds for activities that have proven to add value to vendor partners.
Read the rest of this entry »
February 16th, 2012 by Amy Thomas
Are there certain proposals you want to make sure get manager approval before they’re sent to clients? We have several clients who have implemented a workflow feature in SalesDoc Architect that prevents proposals from going out the door with too low of a margin or too high of a discount. Whatever the criteria may be, there is a very easy way to implement this feature within SalesDoc Architect. This is a brief overview of how easy it is to add management approval to your SalesDoc Architect setup:
1) Go to your “raw” MiscProd tab in your CorsPro/Tabs folder and go to any cell in the “hidden section” at the bottom. Once in that cell go up to the Name Box and name that cell range “OutputStatus”.
2) Next, insert an IF/THEN formula into that cell that is similar to the following (highlighted areas should be based on the criteria you would like to use).
Read the rest of this entry »
January 25th, 2012 by Amy Thomas
I have been a PC user for the majority of my working life. I have become increasingly familiar with all the usuals – Outlook, Excel, and Word. I could not have done the majority of work in my career without having a PC. Or so I thought…
Once I converted to the iPhone, though, I started to become more and more of an Apple “convert”. The Mac Book Pros were looking better and better to me for everything that we would want to do at home with our children and personal life. So we bit the bullet, dug into our wallets and got a Mac. My first thought was this is crazy, how am I supposed to do work at home with a Mac? My software program, SalesDoc Architect, is completely run on a Windows platform.
But it was such a nice computer and custom built that it was now ours. For six months it sat in my office, used only for occasional internet surfing and downloading pictures. I continued to stick with what I knew and kept using my slow, somewhat archaic Lenovo Thinkpad…until the day that we all dread finally happened. I went to log in from home to do some work on Thinkpad and…nothing. Dead as can be. So now what??? Read the rest of this entry »
