Continuum, Growth Achievement Partners Forge Alliance to Help with Managed Services Transition

Continuum, and Growth Achievement Partners (GAP), a major provider of sales and operational consulting in the office technology marketplace, announced their strategic alliance to establish a new Managed Services Business Model specifically for office technology dealerships. The model provides a blueprint for a seamless transition into this adjacent opportunity, so dealers can capitalize on lucrative trends toward off-site management, HaaS (hardware as a service) and cloud-based offerings. This transition will help deliver recurring revenues and customer growth to dealers through an expanded solutions and network services offering, resulting in accelerated financial performance.

Both Continuum and GAP will provide support for dealers adopting the new model through additional educational opportunities, such as ongoing managed services workshops hosted by GAP through the Business Technology Association (BTA).  

According to Forrester Research, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) spend among SMBs is forecasted to be $406 billion in the U.S. by 2013, representing a considerable opportunity for office technology dealers. A paradigm shift toward managed services could optimize financial performance for dealers, who can build incremental revenues by offering cost-effective, secure, off-premises management to their existing customers, in addition to proliferating new business through this new platform.  

According to a press release issued this morning by Continuum, the new Managed Services Model provides demonstrated key metrics that dealers can follow to create a successful and sustainable managed services practice, including:

·    Revenue: The appropriate targets, mixes and types, and how those should change over time.
·    Contracts and Account Expansion: Seats under man­agement, revenue per seat and growth expectations via additional products and services.
·    Activity and Pipeline: Sales cycle duration, pipeline metrics and activity targets to achieve business model rev­enue targets.
·    Head Count: Productivity mea­sures for sales and vCIO personnel, target head-count lev­els based on seats managed and cus­tomers under con­tract, and the personnel mix between sales and operations.
·    Compensation: Who to pay, how to pay and when to pay, as well as target compensation levels as they relate to gross profit and revenue.
·    Profitability: Target contribution level and opera­tional levers to enhance performance.

The Managed Services Business Model will be distributed at the ITEX National Conference session entitled “Catapult Your Profits with Unified Managed IT and Cloud Services” on Thursday April 18, 2013. The document can also be downloaded at www.growthachievementpartners.com or www.continuum.net/businessmodel.