Partner Financial Benchmarking

Your Partner CEOs have three primary goals: drive revenue, reduce costs and reduce risk. Help your partners by giving them the tools to compare their firm to Best-in-Class in their specific business model.

The Service Leadership Fundamentals Diagnostic Report^™ (FDR^™) examines 17 critical profitability metrics including Gross Margin by line of business, Sales, Marketing, General and Administrative costs, and adjusted for fair market owner compensation. The FDR also includes an Operational Maturity Level^™ assessment and recommendations.

Leveraging the objective findings of the Fundamentals Diagnostic Report, Service Leadership senior advisors are available to conduct an exclusive, Vendor partner-only webinar for confidential review of the aggregate results. Additionally, Service Leadership senior advisors facilitate independent and Vendor sponsored Operational Maturity Level^™ Progression Peer Groups or can assist other Peer Group facilitators in using the Service Leadership Index^® Quarterly Benchmark Report to drive OML Progression and bottom line profit.

Partner Transformation

For the past 30 years, Service Leadership’s executives have built, run and matured a significant number of multi-site Solution Providers. Our team has worked with literally hundreds of Solution Providers over the past decade to improve their operational and financial performance. Several years ago we took everything we knew and put it into a web application called SLIQ.

SLIQ is an Operational Maturity Level^™ (OML) progression tool that provides IT Solution Providers with individualized, highly prescriptive, step-by-step plans to increase growth, profit margin and service quality. SLIQ not only shows how the partner’s operational methods today compare to Top (Best-in-Class) performers in their business model, but maps the fastest route to maximum profitability. SLIQ provides the partner with a detailed plan to become progressively more operationally mature in each Trait, prioritized to produce the most benefit in the least time with the least risk. Each OML Trait is important to increasing the likelihood that the partner will successfully attain the services-led business model.

Many of our Vendor clients subsidize and often require SLIQ^™ for their partners. These Vendors recognize that by helping partners accelerate their skills in solution selling, value propositions, client satisfaction, target customer profile, and other Traits which define operational maturity, they will become far better partners for the Vendor.

Additionally, Vendors can engage Service Leadership to build additional OML Traits specific to the sales and service capabilities you need partners to execute to be Best-in-Class in delivering your solution-specific best practices with an end-goal to embed these practices into partner operations and help them succeed in implementing them.

Vendor branding of SLIQ can be accomplished through logo visibility when using the Traits within the tool.

Speaking & Education

The decisions Vendors need their most important Solution Providers to make, in order to drive optimal results, are “C-level” decisions. If your Solution Providers' C-level decision-makers won’t respond to your email, and aren’t typically available when you’re engaging with your contact at their firm, the best, and frankly often the only way, is to get the C-level “in the room.” Service Leadership has perfected the art of getting Solution Provider owners and decision-makers in the room to have the conversation that drives toward their decision supporting the Vendor’s goals.

Service Leadership delivers between 60-70 speaking engagements worldwide each year for partner and Vendor audiences of between 20 and 1000, in the form of keynotes, breakout sessions, panel participation and facilitation, webcasts and podcasts. Learning experiences can be customized to meet organizational needs and conference speaking guidelines. Each session includes a licensed copy of the presentation materials used during the workshop for the exclusive use of each attendee.

Service Leadership is the draw for the Solution Provider decision-maker to take time to show up and engage. Service Leadership senior advisors can share analysis and insight from our on-going benchmarking of the industry, as well as other topics that we track as a firm (such as M&A or the largest, longest running industry compensation study). However, we often tailor our remarks to provide a natural segue for how a given Vendor’s offers will benefit the financial and operational performance of the Solution Provider in the audience. This positions the Vendor away from talking about “feeds & speeds,” but instead to how committed they are to helping their Solution Providers drive their own financial and operational performance. This is a far more effective way to solicit and secure C-level engagement towards a decision benefiting the Vendor.

Library

Once you’ve attracted new channel partners, you need to empower them to sell and deliver your service or product. With Service Leadership’s ever-expanding resources, channel managers can simply and quickly provide channel partners the help they need to generate revenue in the early phases of the program when results are crucial to the long-term success of the partnership.