After attending the Managed Services & Hosting Summit UK 2018, I thought it would be useful to share some of the most interesting points raised and truly innovative providers that are making a real difference to this world!
My takeaway was the importance of service providers helping clients with the buying experience and hence the need to enable your people to do it, something Vendira are passionate about.
Mark Paine from Gartner delivered a great session on “What It Takes To Sell Digital Business Solution” here are some great takeaways.
· Delivering client service is not just about operational service excellence its about “helping the client buy”. If this experience is poor, it will lead to clients sourcing from other providers that recognise that the buying cycle is as important as the operating cycle.
· Successful providers will be those that know their portfolio of products and services, are current with industry, have time to deeply engage, understand, advise and innovate solutions that meet their Client’s needs ultimately helping them better perform.
· Speed, expertise and quality of service are all key in the buying cycle, providers must qualify
· 65% of buying process is completed once the buyer contacts the seller, buyers are spending more time researching including online interaction with sales people.
· Be clear on who you serve, what problems you solve, what you do, why you and how clients get value
· 35% slowdown in the industry over next 2-3 years, so now is the time to get innovative
· Create guides not just trials, materials for security reviews, technical reviews and business case reviews, provide access to post sales expertise
Robert Belgrave from https://www.wirehive.com/ managed services & Jim Bowes https://manifesto.co.uk/ digital agency. High energy guys with heaps of passion for what they do, demonstrating the need for focus. Appears that managed services space is a crowded market and differentiation by client focus can provide a lot of value. Robert Belgrave gave a great show of this and how his managed services business is doing great things in the digital agency space.
Ron Argent from http://cognitionfoundry.com/, INSPIRING STUFF, you rarely meet such passion and enthusiasm in making big differences in this world, cognition foundry is certainly one to watch. Bringing mainframe compute and blockchain on IBM mainframe to change the world. Ron has an amazing vision in helping bring visionary ideas to life, providing the most secure and powerful compute platform in the world to start-ups, sometimes for free. Check out plastic bank solving two great problems in one go https://www.plasticbank.org.
David Groves from http://www.maintel.co.uk/ gave further insight as to how he is making strides in operational efficiency in his business, and in particular the recognition of business, operational and support services and how https://highlight.net/ has helped Maintel better monitor, manage and provide visibility of these three levels of services.
Brian Dunleavy from https://www.viadex.com/ also gave a good session on “building value and differentiation through micro alliances” enabling viadex to serve globally diverse businesses in supply, consulting & professional services along with managed services. Bringing many vendors and partner suppliers together for one throat to choke.
Jonathan Simnett from https://hampletonpartners.com gave a great presentation on mergers and acquisitions and getting your business ready for sale along with the intricate process of a sale and its negotiation. If you’re thinking about selling, here are some useful slides from his session
