Drive Unified Communications Sales

There's no denying the professional and managed services trend happening in the channel. After all, what better way for a VAR to differentiate itself from its competitors. Research group Ovum forecasts managed services to grow at approximately 20% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) and reach $7 billion in revenue by 2009. The upside of selling services is that you don't have any physical inventory to manage, you don't need to worry about licenses and warranties, and you can earn profit margins that are many times higher than typical hardware margins (some VARs report 30% to 40% profit margins from services compared with single-digit profit margins from selling hardware and software). There are two basic strategies for selling services. Some VARs focus on the hardware and software they're currently reselling and determine which services they can bundle with their products. Others take the opposite approach. They gain expertise in selling services, then determine the key technologies to resell. Tim Acker, COO of Evolve Partners, believes his company's success can be attributed to taking the latter approach. The VAR experienced 56% sales revenue growth in 2007, and it's projecting 69% growth in 2008.