Use business intelligence to create the best IT business you can with the new educational materials from CompTIA, available this week at the IT industry association’s Annual Member Meeting in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
“These pieces are unique because they’re separate from technology — they’re really about developing some of the soft skills that will make a solution provider successful,” said Stephanie Morgan, CompTIA’s director of member education. “This can be anything from being strategic about sales to being deliberate about accounting, to being conscientious about when and how you need to change.”
These sophisticated competencies that are hard to come by, particularly for newer businesses, she said. “They get wrapped up in customers and providing good services and forget about the infrastructure, but it’s the infrastructure that supports all of that. It’s keeping your own house in order so you can better serve your neighbor,” Morgan said.
Quick Start Guide to Managing a Managed Services Sales Organization
Despite its lengthy name, CompTIA’s Quick Start Guide to Managing a Managed Services Sales Organization is a crash course in building a managed print services sales business. It lays out differences between onsite work and whole-scale solutions, including a holistic approach to clients and ways to incentivize a sales staff used to working on commission — not a recurring revenue model.
“Selling manages services with recurring revenue is completely different than selling on-premise equipment and maintenance,” Morgan said. “The sales team needs to be different, the approach to sales compensation needs to be different, and the MSP must really embody the ‘trusted adviser’ philosophy.”
A trusted adviser must be able to look at a client holistically and find a solution that fits, even if they’re not ready for a whole new solution, she said.
“The sales personnel who are good at being trusted advisors aren’t always the same people who are good at selling copiers or computers,” she said. “It’s a different skillset, one that’s more technically demanding.”
Quick Start Guide to Business Agility
The Quick Start Guide to Business Agility is a short guide to making a big change, said Morgan, from assessing your appetite for evolution to understanding how you leverage the strengths of your current business.
“This is essentially ‘How do you turn the battleship?’ It’s so much easier to keep going the way you’re going, but that’s when you run aground,” Morgan said. The guide is a condensed version of CompTIA’s Business Agility Workshop and might prove particularly useful to those small businesses with a desire to remain relevant — even if it means embracing a managed services approach.
“There are people who may already be aware that their business probably should change, but they don’t have the appetite to do it. That’s a really important thing to acknowledge. On the other hand, there are folks who want to change but aren’t positioned to,” Morgan said. “One of the things the Quick Start Guide to Business Agility does is give an overview and let you take your temperature on what it will take to make a significant change.”
Executive Certificate to Financial Management (Workshop Version)
On the heels of the ChannelCon-exclusive Executive Certificate to Building Financial Strength, CompTIA’s Executive Certificate in Financial Management takes a deeper, wider look at managing the current and future financial status of a small IT business. The workshop can be booked as a face-to-face event or as a series of live webinars. For information, contact Blythe Girnus, CompTIA’s senior manager for member programs, events and conferences. Premier Members have the opportunity to take part in the pilot version of the new workshop. Not a premier member? Consider an upgrade.
“This is a great workshop for folks who really know their equipment and their systems, but they’re not business-minded,” Morgan said. This workshop helps build that competency. Vendors who are CompTIA Premier Members can extend this benefit to their partners, helping them become savvier about financial forecasting, accounting, P&L and invoicing. Solution providers can ask their vendor partners about it, too.
Pick up your copy of any of the new resources and the Spring 2015 edition of CompTIA’s IT Channel Training Catalog, which includes all the quick start sessions, executive certificates, playbooks and workshops. Printed versions of all are available in the Member Lounge at AMM. Downloadable versions are available from our Insight & Tools page.
Michelle Peterson is a communications specialist for CompTIA.
