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By Business Solutions magazine

Advanced Microcomputing Concepts (AMC) is no stranger to triple-digit growth. In fact, this VAR, which opened its doors in 2002, has experienced 100% revenue growth for the past two years. Since its inception, AMC has shown high initiative and insight regarding learning about and selling technologies its SMB customers want. For example, the VAR originally focused on reselling data networking solutions (e.g. servers, storage, routers). Within a couple of years of being in business, AMC saw VoIP as an up-and-coming marketing opportunity, so it bought an Allworx IP PBX (private branch exchange) and VoIP phone system (see sidebar on page 26), learned how to set up and configure the system, and within a year doubled its revenue selling VoIP. In early 2007, the VAR started researching managed services platforms and figuring out how to reposition its business to sell managed services. In fact, it was during the middle of its one-year managed services evaluation and business transformation phase, a time when CEO Anthony Chiappetta had temporarily stepped down from his sales role to focus on operations, that AMC's dramatic revenue rise started tapering off. At the time, AMC did 80% of its business with companies in the real estate market — mortgage lenders, escrow firms, real estate firms, and the like. During the last few months of 2007, however, AMC witnessed several of its customers downsizing, and some even went out of business. AMC's ability to quickly market itself and adapt its product and services offering to new vertical markets was key to the VAR's survival. No matter what kind of solutions and services you sell, you can learn a thing or two from this VAR.

After suffering the negative effects of a downturn in the real estate market, AMC could easily have abandoned its pursuit of becoming a managed services reseller. But, Chiappetta knew that services would play an important part of his company's future growth, so he took on the challenge of continuing to evaluate selling managed services while simultaneously figuring out how to win customers in new vertical markets.

An Infonetics Research study shows that the global VoIP managed services market passed the $2 billion mark in 2006, and it's growing at more than 30% each year. Chiappetta can attest, however, that selling managed services is much more difficult than merely attending a two-day seminar and buying some software. "We had to perform a SWOT [strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats] analysis to determine which services we could potentially sell and areas where we needed to improve before we could start selling services," he says. "This entailed investigating managed services platform options, building a managed services sales model, and changing the way we captured and tracked customer requests." One of the biggest weaknesses uncovered during the SWOT analysis was AMC's hiring practices. Out of a desire for quick growth, Chiappetta hired half a dozen entry-level sales reps and technicians with the hope that they could quickly be trained and contribute to the company's growth. Instead, Chiappetta spent most of his time managing their activities, including keeping them on track with their responsibilities and following up requests. "For example, one of the processes that's important with managed services is consistently recording all work performed for the customer," says Chiappetta. "On a regular basis, I found that several techs weren't properly entering information into our ticketing system. On several occasions, I worked until midnight checking their work and fixing their mistakes." Equally as frustrating, Chiappetta never developed enough confidence in some of his reps to allow them to take on more responsibilities. Sadly, he had to let a few people go. Fortunately, he's learned from his past hiring mistakes.

Used with permission from Business Solutions magazine