Channels of the Future - Using Next Generation Tools to Manage Partnerships

Presenter: Mike Dubrall, Practice Director
Date: Wed., Sept. 19, 2007
Time: 1:00PM (EDT)

This webinar will provide you with some of the latest insights into how you can improve the performance of your channel operations by:

• Understanding the communication shift and what your company should be doing to protect its interests
• Taking advantage of new opportunities with small customers who are more comfortable with buying online than dealing with live people
• Meeting the changing needs of your reseller sales people before your competition

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InfoMentis and James F. King & Partners Form Strategic Partnership to Bolster EMEA Presence

Alpharetta, Georgia, July 11, 2007 – InfoMentis and James F. King & Partners Form Strategic Partnership to Bolster EMEA Presence Atlanta, Georgia - InfoMentis, Inc., a global consulting and performance improvement company announced its strategic partnership with UK-based James F. King & Partners, Ltd. Under the terms of this agreement James F. King & Partners will become an authorized reseller licensed to distribute and deliver InfoMentis consulting and performance improvement offerings in the EMEA region. "The industry expertise of James and his team will add enormous value to InfoMentis' European presence and countless new opportunities for helping clients improve performance throughout EMEA," commented Steve Maul, EVP and Chief Learning and Strategy Officer at InfoMentis. "James and co-founder, Peter MacNaughtan have built an organization that is very aligned to InfoMentis' way of doing business – through the Eye of the Buyer – and this makes us very excited about the relationship."

James King and co-founder, Peter MacNaughtan said that InfoMentis' proven success in enabling performance improvement was a key factor for seeking to become an Authorized Distributor for InfoMentis in EMEA. "The clear and uncomplicated way in which strategic planning and practical execution skills are combined to deliver better bottom-line results for our clients was a major attraction for us," said James. "It was very encouraging to work with a company such as InfoMentis which had such an impressive record in delivering results for companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, HP, and SAP among others."

About InfoMentis
InfoMentis is a global consulting and performance improvement company providing configurable programs that help our clients enable cultural change. We teach our clients how to more effectively get, keep and satisfy their customers and help them achieve bottom-line results. Our configurable courseware, e-Learning modules, consulting services, and collaborative productivity tools are designed to be adapted for role-based behavioral change for those in marketing, sales, services, support and management around the entire customer lifecycle. Headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, InfoMentis has helped industry leaders around the world understand and embrace the value of determining predictable revenue streams. Through InfoMentis' unique offerings, clients are able to recognize that an opportunity for growth is significant among organizations eager to differentiate. Founded in 1996, InfoMentis has provided performance improvement strategy, consulting and coaching to over 30,000 professionals, in 46 countries and six continents.

About James F. King & Partners
Headquartered in London, England, James F. King & Partners have delivered client programs and services in the UK, Ireland, Europe and the Middle East since 2006. We help our clients to improve the customer-facing skills necessary to develop long-term relationships, guarantee repeat business and ultimately drive more predictable and sustainable revenue. Areas of focus include management, sales, pre-sales, business development and channels.

For more information on InfoMentis, please visit www.infomentis.com.
For more information on James F. King and Partners Ltd, please visit www.jfkandpartners.com

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InfoMentis Included on 2007 Inc. 5000 List
First-Ever List of the 5,000 Fastest-Growing Businesses Reports Total Revenue of $194.5 Billion

NEW YORK/ ATLANTA, August 23, 2007 - Inc. today ranked InfoMentis, Inc. on its first-ever Inc. 5,000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the country. The Inc. 5,000, an extension of Inc. magazine's annual Inc. 500 list, catches many businesses that are too big to grow at the pace required to make the Inc. 500, as well as a host of smaller firms. Taken as a whole, these companies represent the backbone of the U.S. economy.

"The Inc. 5,000 provides the most comprehensive look ever at the most important part of the economy - the entrepreneurial part," said Inc. 5,000 Project Manager Jim Melloan. "The expansion of the list has allowed us to tell the stories of larger companies, older companies and a wealth of companies in industries like Manufacturing and Construction that are underreported in the business media."

The 2007 Inc. 5,000, as revealed online at www.inc.com, reported median revenue of $9.4 million and median three-year growth of 140 percent. The list features a profile for each company, almost all of them written as a result of Inc. interviews with management. In addition, the list is searchable according to numerous criteria, including industry, city, state, region, and year founded.

Hottest Regions for Fastest-Growing Companies
Leading the list of the fastest-growing companies in the nation is the Midwest region with 1,046 of the fastest-growing companies, followed by the West with 884 companies. The Southeast comes in a close third, with 872 companies, followed by the Northeast with 782 companies, and the Mid-Atlantic region with 606 companies.

Hottest Industries for Fastest-Growing Businesses
The largest business category is Construction, with 561 of the fastest-growing companies in this category, followed by Manufacturing with 515 companies, IT services in third with 466 companies, Business Services with 377 companies and Advertising & Marketing with 349 companies round out the top five industries ranked on the 2007 Inc. 5,000.

Industries reporting the highest total revenue in 2006 are Construction ($27.1billion), Manufacturing ($18.6 billion), Health ($13.1 billion), Computers & Electronics ($12.7 billion), and Financial Services ($11.8 billion).

Methodology
The 2007 Inc. 5000 list measures revenue growth from 2003 through 2006. To qualify, companies had to be U.S.-based and privately held, independent - not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies - as of December 31, 2006, and have had at least $200,000 in revenue in 2003, and $2 million in 2006.

Companies can apply for next year's Inc. 500 and Inc. 5,000 by registering with IncBizNet, the new social network for private companies that will launch this fall on Inc.com.

About Inc.com
Inc.com, the Daily Resource for Entrepreneurs, delivers advice, tools, breaking news, and rich multi-media to help business owners and CEOs start, run, and grow their businesses more successfully. Information and advice covering virtually every business and management task, including marketing, sales, finding capital, managing people can be found at http://www.inc.com.

About InfoMentis
InfoMentis is a global consulting and performance improvement company providing configurable programs that help our clients enable cultural change. We teach our clients how to more effectively get, keep and satisfy their customers and help them achieve bottom-line results. Our configurable courseware, e-Learning modules, consulting services, and collaborative productivity tools are designed to be adapted for role-based behavioral change for those in marketing, sales, services, support and management around the entire customer lifecycle.

Headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, InfoMentis has helped industry leaders around the world understand and embrace the value of determining predictable revenue streams. Through our unique offerings, they are able to recognize that an opportunity for growth is significant among organizations eager to differentiate.

Founded in 1996, InfoMentis has provided performance improvement strategy, consulting and coaching to over 30,000 professionals, in 46 countries and six continents.

For more information on InfoMentis, please visit www.infomentis.com

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Innovation: Lessons from the Leaders
By Julie Perino

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower"
Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple, Inc.

In today's increasingly global and fiercely competitive business environment, innovation is a key to market leadership. Leaders foster a strong culture of innovation. It has become a part of their DNA. It is always top-of-mind and a foundation of their strategy.

We have even seen the "Dawn of the Idea Czar," as evidenced by BusinessWeek's April 2006 article carrying that very title. Increasingly, organizations are naming an executive owner accountable for innovation.

Titles such as Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Creative Officer and Chief Creatologist are becoming more commonplace. Microsoft has taken it even one step further by naming an executive owner of their "Unlimited Potential" organization and program which fosters innovation on a global basis.

Innovation. Just the word itself brings to mind many business leaders, both past and present, who are also true innovators. Much is to be learned by examining those who put aside their fear of failure and doubts of naysayers to focus on their passion for innovation.

Dave Packard & Bill Hewlett
One of the original Silicon Valley innovators is Hewlett-Packard, a company that sowed its roots in a Palo Alto garage in 1938. The dynamic duo of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett set the tone for core management practices of today's technology companies a long time ago.

They recognized the value of each employee's contribution by offering the first all-company profit-sharing plan. They also were among the first to introduce flex-time and job sharing. To encourage creative thinking, employees worked in open cubicles versus closed-off offices.

They clearly understood the value of fostering a culture of innovation and practiced what they preached. Even today, with the current company tagline of simply "Invent", the legacy of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett's culture of innovation lives on.

Steve Jobs
Who knew that Steve Jobs' start in the technology industry would be at age 12 with an internship at Hewlett-Packard? It was clearly destiny for Jobs to build his life's work around technology.

From the minute that he and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1976, innovation was always their guiding light. From the Apple II to the iMac to the iPod to the recently introduced iPhone, Apple has always led by innovation.

Jobs certainly had his challenging days as well when the original Mac failed to thrive in the market. He left Apple in 1985 and started the ill-fated computer company, NeXT. However, true to his innovative spirit, he did not let that stop him.

Shortly after Apple purchased NeXT in 1996, Jobs was back at the helm of Apple. The iMac made its debut shortly thereafter and once again, innovation breathed new life into Apple.

Leadership by innovation is a Jobs hallmark. He has taught us all to never be afraid to "think different".

Frederick W. Smith
Many of us wonder how we would successfully conduct business without our cell phones, Blackberrys, email and express mail. Over 35 years ago, when Frederick W. Smith founded Federal Express, he was already paving the way for today's "I need it yesterday" economy.

It actually started over 40 years ago when Smith was attending Yale University. He wrote a term paper focused on the express delivery concept - truly innovative at the time. During these college years, he was also a charter pilot and along with flying passengers, he frequently carried spare parts for IBM, who could not rely on passenger airlines to get these components to customers in a timely fashion.

Six years later, he launched the first express service. When the postal service corner on document delivery ended in the late 1970's, FedEx rose to forefront of the express delivery market.

Clearly, Smith's vision and innovative approach to moving documents and products globally at the speed of business has truly changed the face of commerce.

Soichiro Honda
Taking on the Detroit automotive powerhouses took some courage - and innovative thinking. Soichiro Honda did just that by founding Honda Motor Company in 1948.

Honda's company first made its mark with a motorcycle, the first to be introduced on a large scale in Japan. He next set his sights on building a car that would surpass current models on the market at the time by Nissan and Toyota, and introduced its first model in 1957.

Refusing to bow to pressure in the early days by the Japanese government to merge Honda with larger Japanese automakers, he continued to focus on engineering innovation and quality.

Honda's breakthrough into the U.S. market was with the introduction of the CVCC (Compound Vortex-Controlled Combustion) engine in its 1975 Civic. With the early 70's energy crisis and the American car makers slow to market with small, fuel-efficient cars, the Civic was a timely innovation.

Soichiro Honda's mantra of "Do Not Imitate" continues to drive the spirit of innovation at Honda Motor Company today.

In closing, I offer these words... Carpe diem!

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Channels of the Future - Using Next Generation Tools to Manage Partnerships
By Mike Dubrall

Channels are always changing, and the best channel managers are flexible, reactive opportunistic and accommodating. These survival skills, however, are increasingly being tested as the full impact of the Web 2.0, with all its communication and collaboration capabilities, breaks upon the channel like a silent tsunami. And unfortunately, most vendors are unaware of the storm clouds gathering in their partner ecosystems.

Whether you are reading Wikinomics or The Clue Train Manifesto–or any of the other 100 books on this subject–its obvious to even the most casual observer that new ways of partnering are now being tested. In one way or another, all these books talk about the power of information sharing, communication and collaboration. By implication, they also describe how channels can use the new Internet tools to work together in different ways to solve technical problems, build better solutions, and close more business.

What is Channels 2.0?
Modeled on the concepts in Web 2.0,** the term Channels 2.0 describes the shift in channel collaboration driven by new tools available online. It's not an exact (or even especially accurate) correlation, but most channel managers have some idea of what Channels 2.0 is supposed to mean. (It might be just as meaningful to call it Channels 3.0, 4.0 or even Channels 7.0 considering all the changes we have gone through during the past five years.)

The biggest impact of Channels 2.0 is the way that web-powered partners can solve complex customer problems faster and more efficiently. On the positive side, this drives prices down for large customers, opens new markets among smaller customers, and forces vendors to higher standards for product development and customer service. Moreover, new kinds of resellers can now be successful (one person with a web site, blog, and a small managed-services business) providing personalized services to the smallest of niches.

Channel 2.0 Tools
Here are just a few examples of tools that are driving the changes.

Blogs: Web blogs are everywhere. In fact, there are more than 71 million of them. Resellers use them to share information and ideas with end users. Vendors use them to communicate with their partners.

Wikis: The most flexible of the new communication tools is a wiki, which is a collaborative website that can be edited by anyone. The world's largest wiki is Wikipedia, which has two million articles and many of them are about technology vendors. Vendors set them up for projects, new departments, events, and programs – inviting all readers to add their own insights.

Second Life: This virtual world is most known for users who create alter-egos (Avatars) and build a make-believe world. Companies like IBM, Cisco, and Sun have purchased virtual property and are experimenting with all kinds of product research, reseller communications, branding, and rudimentary product demonstrations.

Social/Business Networking: MySpace and FaceBook get all the publicity, and large companies use them constantly to introducer new employees to each other (virtual support groups) and communicate company information. However, there are dozens of smaller networking sites serving vertical markets or even large companies. LinkedIn is popular for business networking.

Video File Sharing: YouTube, Yahoo, and other popular sites allow users to post videos on almost any subject, including product reviews and anti-vendor diatribes. (175,000 people have already watched "Punish Your Microsoft Programmer.")

The beauty of these new tools is that they are cheap, easy to use, and fast. Anyone with an afternoon and a computer can write something on their blog, post a video, update a wiki, and post a message on someone's wall in MySpace. And whatever they say (good or bad) can spread across the partner ecosystem in a nano-second.

Vendors are going to be surprised at the damage that can be inflicted overnight and they should start thinking about contingency plans. On the other hand, success stories and creative marketing messages can be spread just as quickly.

**What is Web 2.0?
This term came into our vernacular about five years ago, and despite some controversy over its use and even its definition, it has fallen into common usage (more than 9.5 million citations in Google.) If you want more background about Web 2.0, read the excellent article by Tim O'Reilly.

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Using Maintenance to Drive EPS
By Gerard Frey

These are just a few quotes we have heard from technology executives about the importance of maintenance revenue to their companies. Since forming our Maintenance Retention practice seven years ago, we have had numerous discussions with technology executives concerning the health of their maintenance businesses. From these conversations, we have noticed two clear trends emerging:

• Maintenance revenues are becoming a larger percentage of total company revenue and, as such, technology companies rely more and more on maintenance to fund support, R&D and, basically, to run the company.
• Customers continue to question the value of maintenance and are pushing back on the required annual commitment.

How important is maintenance? Just do the math...
A quick look at the numbers will tell you why maintenance deserves more attention than it gets. Representing the most profitable product line in most technology companies, even a modest increase in maintenance can have a dramatic impact on EPS. Consider the example below. For this company, a mere 3.7% increase in maintenance revenue would mean an increase in EPS of 6%:

We have found that today's most successful software companies are taking a more proactive approach to managing their maintenance annuity stream. What many of these companies have in common is they:

1. Manage maintenance as a distinct line of business
2. Adopt an "offensive" approach to promoting maintenance
3. Have spent time refining their "value for maintenance" story and making sure that everyone in the company call tell it
4. Arm every customer-facing employee with tools and skills to sell the value of maintenance to their prospects and customers
5. Tighten up their maintenance renewal process

In addition, they're using in-house and third-party resources to develop strategies which are constantly being evaluated and re-evaluated in order to ensure all efforts are being maximized.

What are you doing to ensure the ongoing health of your maintenance business?
As you busily prepare for the end of this calendar year, make sure that your maintenance is getting the attention it deserves.

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The Benefits of Reviewing Your Call Center Database
By Scott Fletcher

Is your management complaining about increasing call center costs? Would you like to know what drives the number of calls and how to reduce the number of unnecessary calls? These and similar questions haunt call center managers on a daily basis.

Most call center managers are completely occupied with the operational details of managing their call center or team. This leaves little time to embrace the processes of:

• Cost reduction
• Process improvement
• Product improvement
• Output costing

Traditional management tools were developed well before there were call centers. Many of the improvements possible for call centers are invisible with these tools. Traditional management techniques focus on call center productivity and not on what causes increased call volume.

Whether small or large, a company's ability to conduct ongoing reviews of their call center database is a critical component to improved performance. While doing a review of our customer service database at a small software company I worked at several years ago, I noticed that in addition to the customary issues one could expect to find–such as limited management visibility and poor reporting tools–there was also a large number of calls that were wasting both the call center and the customer's time.

Customers were frustrated with the fact that they had high volumes of "how to" questions that could have been averted with sufficient training and focused service offerings. In addition, the call center staff was becoming worn out by the volume and nature of the questions.

We instituted new call center software that resolved the reporting and visibility issues immediately, and then focused our efforts on the volume of calls. By launching a series of improvements to the education, documentation, and professional services offerings, we were able to provide adequate information to our customers, which reduced the need for repetitive call-ins.

Our call volume dropped by 50% on average and we were able to more than double the number of customers while our call center staff remained the same size. Morale within the call center improved as the staff no longer felt that they were wasting their time on repetitive tasks.

Our customer satisfaction rate increased dramatically as they became better equipped to address any issues that arose. Subsequently, our revenues also increased as customers purchased the additional "packaged services" that Professional Services was now able to offer.

Note: For similar tips, please check out PSVillage's new book "Tips from the Trenches – The Collective Wisdom of over 100 Professional Services Leaders."

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Professional Services Compensation Survey

InfoMentis has partnered with PSVillage to put together a comprehensive compensation survey for various Professional Services positions. The survey will be offered at no charge bi-annually to those who are interested in staying abreast of the latest compensation trends in the industry. The results of the survey will be kept strictly confidential, with individual results being sent to participants.

Please contact Scott Fletcher at sfletcher@infomentis.com or 678-336-0474 to receive a copy of the survey questionnaire.