Are you interested in diversifying the types of revenue coming into your company? Are you concerned about your reliance on carrier revenue in this chaotic economic environment? Designing your own products and services can help you:
- further brand your company with your customers
- establish your presence in the marketplace
- potentially increase the value of your company
- create new opportunities and markets
- drive more carrier sales
With the fate for the future of your company in your hands, creating some of your own managed services can help you take the company to a new level of growth and diversification. However, you must consider the risk-reward equation as the carrier revenue may be the bread-and-butter revenue and highly lucrative. Focusing on product design and development, execution, billing and collecting for your own branded services will require time and resources.
Building corporate networks using new 3G networks is an area where my company was able to build branded services. We bill for these services and receive payments directly from our customers to augment the carrier revenues we receive for wireless activations. The wireless WAN space is emerging, so we have been able to establish a foothold based on our knowledge in the space. However, any agent can create managed services around their portfolio whatever it may be. And these can evolve over time. Ours has. Recently a customer who already was purchasing carrier, equipment and our basic managed services package asked us to become their after-hours NOC, responsible for monitoring, troubleshooting and dispatching techs as required in order to maintain the wireless solutions we implemented in their nationwide network of stores.
Sound interesting? Want to get started building your own managed services? Here’s the secret — there isn’t one. But here are some simple steps we have used successfully:
- Listen to your client or prospect. Really listen. Don’t sit there and as they talk, rummage through the files of your mind as quickly as you can, reviewing all the different products and services you are familiar with that can make you money. Don’t lose interest as soon as you understand they are locked into long-term carrier contracts and/or they have incumbent carriers that are unfriendly to the channel or they have no interest in migrating services away from those carriers. Listen to their challenges and pain points. That is where you start in developing a service or offering that can help your client.
