Maximizing revenue from maintenance and support service renewals
At one of our recent webinars, we spoke about the fact that maintenance and support contracts make up 38% of technology companies’ total revenues, but how without effective management, this revenue will naturally erode over time.
As a Polycom partner, maximizing revenues from your maintenance and support service renewals can make a big difference to your top and bottom line - whereas failing to can result in missed opportunities and lost income. Polycom’s Channel Services team can help you with this by:
- Improving the mix of maintenance and support services in your portfolio - to help meet new market requirements, and increase customer satisfaction, adoption and ‘stickiness’.
- Optimizing your recurring service renewals - by increasing on-time renewals, and driving upsell, co-term and multi-year deals.
Broadening your services portfolio to meet evolving customer needs
The more sophisticated the services you offer, the better you will be at supporting improved customer outcomes. The Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) has identified four increasingly sophisticated service categories offered by the industry:
- Product services include implementation services (e.g. Polycom Strategy and Planning, Implementation etc.), training (such as Polycom University), and break/fix support (e.g. Polycom Premier and Partner Premier).
- Operational services include capacity planning, remote monitoring, risk audits and system administration. These can be packaged (e.g. Polycom Managed Services) or included in ‘premium’ or ‘platinum’ maintenance and support (such as Polycom Elite, Advantage and Partner Advantage).
- Adoption services (e.g. Polycom Adoption Services), which help customers increase ROI by maximizing use of their solution’s technical capabilities and its adoption.
- Information services, such as data analytics which help customers accelerate insights from their own data (e.g. Polycom RealAccess Analytics).
The more sophisticated the support you offer, the ‘stickier’ your customers will also be. TSIA says 46% of technology companies get higher satisfaction and 39% higher retention from customers on premium or platinum support plans (like Polycom Elite, Advantage and Partner Advantage).
Improving your internal processes to more proactively manage renewals
While most annual service revenue streams naturally erode each year, you can control much of this erosion by getting ahead of the renewal sales cycle, and managing your process so every renewal is closed prior to expiration.
- Contacting customers 120 days before expiration yields the best results
- Once a contract hits 30 days past expiration, renewal rates are typically cut in half
To help drive on-time renewals:
- Ensure your customer data is kept clean and up-to-date
- Segment customers based on renewal opportunities
- Pay particular attention to upsell opportunities at customers who could require higher levels of service and support
- Manage service renewals as you would any other sales process
- Be clear about the benefits of each of your support and service offerings, to minimize cancellations and maximize customer satisfaction
- Maintain ongoing customer contact
How Polycom’s Channel Services team can help
The Channel Services team can help you drive your renewals business by increasing renewal rates, improving on-time renewal performance, and assisting you with incremental upsell opportunities.
- As customers are looking to move to more comprehensive support solutions, renewals give you an opportunity to talk to the customer about their specific needs, match these to the correct service level, and upsell support to meet their evolving requirements.
- To help you identify upsell opportunities, Polycom can show you where you have multi-site customers, and the kinds of customer profiles that may be suitable for higher levels of service such as Elite or Advantage.
- Multi-year support and maintenance contracts let you offer customers contracts that lock them into your business and keep competitors at bay.
- Co-term agreements make life easier for you and your customers, by enabling all support and maintenance contracts to work towards the same expiry date.
- You can also use renewals to uncover new business opportunities (e.g. by augmenting a renewal with adoption services, benchmarking or utilization reports) or product opportunities (e.g. equipment refreshes).
- The Channel Services team has created a range of programs and collateral to help you position these services and benefits, and drive increased renewal business.
To find out more, download our whitepaper ‘How to maximize revenue from maintenance and support service renewals’ today.
Helen Grimmett (hgrimmett)
on:
Partner Revenue Opportunities with Polycom Technol...