TrainingIndustry.com Names InfoMentis to its 2008 Top Training Companies List
Atlanta, Georgia – January 28, 2008 – InfoMentis, Inc., a global consulting and performance improvement company has been named a “2008 Top Sales Training Company” by TrainingIndustry.com.
With over 100 companies competing, TrainingIndustry.com asked panel industry experts to select the 2008 honorees using selection process criteria including experience in sales training, geographic reach for training delivery, market visibility, analytics and evaluation criteria applied to sales training, talent of sales training practices and programs, strength of clients, strategic alignment of training, breadth of services and thought leadership.
“This award represents another significant milestone for InfoMentis, and we are honored to be a part of TrainingIndustry.com’s distinguished list of Top Sales Training Companies,” said Steve Maul, chief learning and strategy officer at InfoMentis. “Receiving this recognition is a testament to our commitment and dedication to delivering the highest quality of training and consulting services to our clients.”
About InfoMentis
InfoMentis is a global consulting and performance improvement company providing configurable programs to help our clients enable cultural change. We teach our clients how to more effectively get, keep and satisfy their customers and partners, while at the same time helping them to 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.
About TrainingIndustry.com
TrainingIndustry.com is an internet portal operated by Training Industry, Inc. — providing best-in-class business strategies, research, best practices and other resources to help facilitate mutually beneficial partnerships between leading training providers, corporations and government agencies. Through these capabilities and many more, we help our tens of thousands of users, clients and sponsors deliver exemplary employee and customer education.
For more information on InfoMentis, please visit www.infomentis.com
For more information on TrainingIndustry.com, please visit www.trainingindustry.com
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The American Business Women’s Association Express Network Recognizes
Wendy Reed as a 2008 Phenomenal Woman of North Fulton
Atlanta, Georgia – March 5, 2008 – InfoMentis, Inc., a global consulting and performance improvement company, announced that CEO Wendy Reed has been recognized as one of North Fulton’s 2008 Phenomenal Women by the American Business Woman’s Association Express Network.
On March 5, 2008, the North Fulton Express Chapter of the American Business Women's Association honored 10 extraordinary women for their business excellence and community contributions. Honorees included: Kay Brown, Cheryl Greenway, Gayle Horton, Lynn McIntyre, Annelies McMorran, Wendy Reed, Kim Renner, Debby Stone, Dana Tanner and Margi Urquhart.
“It is a great honor to receive this award,” said Wendy Reed, CEO of InfoMentis, Inc. “It recognizes our years of hard work and acknowledges our passion for business and dedication to our community.”
About InfoMentis
InfoMentis is a global consulting and performance improvement company providing configurable programs to help our clients enable cultural change. We teach our clients how to more effectively get, keep and satisfy their customers and partners, while at the same time helping them to 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.
About American Business Women’s Association
The American Business Women’s Association mission is to bring together businesswomen of diverse occupations and to provide opportunities for them to help themselves and others grow personally and professionally through leadership, education, networking support and national recognition.
About North Fulton Express Network
The North Fulton Express Networks mission is to provide a convenient time and place for businesswomen of diverse occupations from North Fulton and surrounding areas to meet and help themselves and others grow personally and professionally through leadership, education, networking and affiliation with the national ABWA organization.
For more information about InfoMentis, please visit www.infomentis.com
For more information about ABWA, please visit www.abwa.org
For more information about NFEN, please visit www.nfen.org
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Is Your Maintenance and Support Business “Acquisition Ready”?
By Gerard Frey
It’s no secret that consolidation within the software industry is continuing at an accelerated rate. In fact, one of the main criteria for acquiring companies is the health of the target company’s maintenance stream. If your company has an appetite for acquisitions, you should make sure these must-do activities are at the top of your list to minimize any disruption to your most critical revenue stream:
- Get your own maintenance house in order before the acquisition.
If the roof of your house has ever leaked, you likely didn’t wait until the next big storm before fixing it. Using the same logic, you don’t wait until you acquire another company before trying to shore up your own maintenance business. Due to the confidential nature of acquisitions, you may not be privy to exactly when an acquisition will take place, so advance preparation is the key. Take the time to fine tune your renewal process, systems, packaging, tracking or anything else that needs to be addressed. This will enable a much smoother, less painful integration of acquired customers and give you time to focus on what’s most important.
- Don’t make your value story your company’s best kept secret.
Your most vulnerable time is right after the announcement. Don’t underestimate how quickly your competitors will mobilize their version of your story. While you are scrambling to settle employees, customers, prospects, partners and vendors, your competitors are already scheming how to win over your prospects and customers. Make sure all of your customer-facing employees—especially your support team who speak to hundreds of customers on a daily basis—have the talking points down. It also helps to have an escalation process ready for important customers that need extra attention.
- Look for hidden treasures.
So you think that just because your company acquired another company, your company must surely have the corner on maintenance best practices. Chances are the company you just acquired has been working on improving the health of their maintenance business, too. Some of the most successful acquisitions are those that use the best practices of both companies, not just one. Approach it with an open mind and you won’t be disappointed.
- Win back lost customers.
One of the best times to approach the lapsed customers of an acquired company is soon after the acquisition. Former customers that are still using the product may be willing to give the acquiring company a chance at their business. In fact, your new value proposition is likely stronger than the value story of the company you recently acquired. Make the most of it!
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Don’t let the speed bumps turn into mountains.
The party is now over. The acquisition has been announced, the excitement has died down and now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work. The problem, however, is that as you begin to examine the maintenance business of your new acquisition, you are finding that everything is not quite as rosy as you first thought. But don’t worry—this happens with every acquisition. All the due diligence and planning in the world won’t uncover every detail in advance, so make sure to have a process for catching, escalating and resolving unforeseen issues. Using this practical approach will help you minimize the impact of surprises.
Mergers and acquisitions are quickly becoming the norm. Taking these proactive steps can enable smoother, more painless acquisitions, saving your company’s time and money—both of which can be focused on your next acquisition
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Acquiring Channel Sales Resources
By Mike Dubrall
Every vendor in the world wants revenue growth through their channel. Yet few really understand how to make that happen in a rational and predictable manner. As a result, lots of resellers are signed up every year, and typically less than 10% of them deliver the revenue that was expected. The basics of channel growth are pretty simple. Channel revenue growth can only happen if a vendor can increase one or more of the following variables: the price of the product, the number of potential customers, the number of resellers, or the productivity of their current resellers (or some combination). All have their risks and difficulties, but of the four, increasing the number of resellers is the most common initiative when revenue growth falls behind plan, perhaps because recruiting is seen as the most straight-forward program to implement.
However, there is one major (and growing) impediment to recruiting success. The unfortunate reality is that the number of new products and services being introduced into the channel is increasing while the number of potential partners available to sell them is declining.
Therefore, channel managers must continually improve their ability to acquire new channel sales resources just to maintain, much less increase, their revenue. As competition increases, the channel’s tolerance for failed vendor relationships decreases. The channel is creating its own barriers to entry, and recruiting efforts that used to be “good enough” just aren’t acceptable any longer.
Differentiating themselves during recruitment is critical for vendors, but differentiation is getting harder and harder as products and programs mature and competitors enter the market with cheaper alternatives. Given today’s competitive environment, acquiring new resellers (or growing the resources allocated to your brand) requires a well-conceived plan, properly funded and with dedicated corporate resources. Any kind of channel development effort based on acquiring new resellers should rigorously adhere to the “best practices” described below:
BEST PRACTICES FOR ACQUIRING NEW CHANNEL SALES RESOURCES- Agree on the market or segment you wish to address with the new resellers. Start with the basics. To whom will a new reseller sell your products, and how much competition will there be from current partners? Don't recruit redundant partners!
- Document the profile of the "perfect" reseller. Develop a quantifiable system to measure potential reseller performance in each of the following areas: marketing, sales, technical and administrative. Be specific. For instance, how many sales people should they have, and what percentage of their sales time do you need to be successful? A scorecard can be developed and potential new resellers that do not earn enough points should be rejected. The more rigorous the screening, the healthier the channel!
- Define a recruitment process and identify who is responsible for each step After the potential partner is engaged, there are obvious and quantifiable steps in any process to acquire channel sales resources. For example:
- Step one: review their organizational structure.
- Step two: meet with their sales management.
- Step three: present a relevant value proposition.
- Step four: meet with technical management, etc.
This process might be simple or complex depending upon the potential of the relationship, but every process benefits from formal project management discipline.
- Decide on your partnering strategy for each potential reseller after evaluating them. Remember that the partner probably already sells similar, even competitive, products. Potential partnering strategies include:
- Frontal Assault – You intend to get the reseller to stop selling what they currently sell and switch that business to you.
- Flanking – You work with the reseller to set up a separate sales group to focus on your products.
- Fragmentation – You add your products to the reseller's line card and work to get them included on proposals when appropriate.
- Identify a growth strategy in conjunction with each high-potential partner. Gather information about the reseller's installed base. How many customers are there, what have they purchased, what are they likely to purchase in the future? Each potential strategy, as described below by mathematician and professor Igor Ansoff, has its risks and requirements for success. Pick the one that fits most closely with your market coverage and partnering strategies. Understand that recruiting a reseller who plans to take your new products to customers with whom they have no relationship is a risky and expensive proposition that fails more often than it succeeds.
According to Professor Igor Ansoff, there are four basic ways to grow revenue as described in his Product-Market Growth Matrix. Vendors (direct or through resellers) can:- Sell their current products to current customers. The potential for growth is low but so is the risk.
- Sell their current products to new customers by developing new relationships and sales strategies.
- Sell new products to current customers by adding services or features to their current products.
- Sell new products to new customers to diversify their revenue stream
- Build a Value Proposition and sell the reseller on making a commitment. This is usually the most difficult stage of acquiring new channel sales resources. If vendors do not require commitments to training and sales activities, it's easy for the partner to continue doing what they were doing before, i.e. selling their established products. However, the vendor must describe why the reseller benefits from making the change by delivering relevant value statements.
- Ensure immediate success through qualified leads or co-selling. New resellers must sell something almost immediately in order for them to justify the continued investment in a new product. Therefore, vendors must do whatever it takes to make the new reseller successful quickly if they want to see continued interest by the partner.
Recruitment is one area where “the slow way is really the fast way.” It takes time and resources to separate the high-potential resellers from those that will likely never sell anything – or to convince current partners to invest more in the relationship. Many vendors, for good reasons, move too quickly in trying to develop their channels. As a result they are constantly retrenching as their partnerships and their channels struggle and churn. This is a frustrating experience for everyone.
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Post Acquisition of Professional Services
By Scott Fletcher
Mergers and acquisitions are commonplace. According to IDC, there were 550 mergers and acquisitions totaling $74 billion in the enterprise software market alone from 2004 to 2006. Predictions are that this consolidation within the software industry will continue at an accelerated rate. Once the dust settles, professional services leaders find themselves charged with the daunting task of integrating people, processes and cultures while improving overall performance. The organizational effects can be monumental.
Research shows that the most successful acquisitions are those that promptly integrate and deliver value to the market. Recently, InfoMentis assembled a panel of professional services experts to discuss best practices for the first 100 days of integrating merged professional services organizations. Below are the best practices categorized by the four areas of importance to focus on during the post-acquisition phase of integrating professional services organization.
Customer
- Create communication plan. Once the merger is announced, communication needs to be swift or rumors will spread. Staff in the field will be interacting with the client, so it is important that they have concise and accurate information on day one to dispel any misinformation.
Personnel
- Reassure staff. The motivating force must come from professional services line management and not just human resources. When staff is not properly informed, they tend to expect the worst.
- Develop professional services cross-training opportunities. Staff cross-training can be as simple as general awareness sessions to in-depth product and skills training. If the merged groups will not be fully integrated and cross trained, a basic awareness of each company's products and services should be provided.
- Focus on knowledge preservation. Identify the key employees at all levels in the organization. They are the driving force for the success of the organization.
- Create employee retention strategy with Human Resources. It is common for headhunters to attempt to recruit employees following an acquisition. This makes it important to be very focused on retaining your staff.
Product and Technology
- Develop clear definition of product strategy. Product management needs to create a clear definition of the product strategy. This strategy needs to be developed to include both customers and employees.
Operations
- Execute project reviews. It is important to review all projects as soon as possible to minimize any unpleasant surprises and ensure that projects are properly resourced and forecasted.
Manage invoicing and collections. Verification of invoicing and outstanding receivables must be a top priority. Maintaining a consistent revenue stream while aligning and integrating two operations requires focus on the details.
Mergers and acquisition are perhaps the most skill- and knowledge-intensive activities undertaken by a company. Professional services is human capital intensive with staff that are highly trained, valued in the job market and predominately managed remotely. Combined with the revenue generation and customer-facing responsibilities of professional services, the issues can be monumental. For more information and additional insight to the above list of best practices, please use the following link to watch a replay of InfoMentis’ recent webinar discussing Post Acquisition Integration of Professional Service Organizations.