New customer acquisition is the holy grail of sales achievement. But while acquiring new customers is essential to growth, no business thrives without strengthening and growing their existing customer relationships. This is especially true when considering annuity revenue streams.

Today, most solution providers focus significant effort on increasing annuity revenue. These revenue streams are service related and include both solution provider and OEM-delivered services that are contracted and sold on a subscription basis. Creating greater customer connection and intimacy is a crucial component of developing and growing annuity offerings.

Solution providers have long recognized the value of annuity revenue and profit that can be realized by selling OEM maintenance and support agreements.

The ability to successfully manage these complexities creates value for customers and a significant opportunity for solution providers. In fact, solution providers who deliver a comprehensive management approach to their customers are already realizing significant improvements in annuity revenue and profit. And by using this approach, solution providers can also gain contract renewals on products sold by other vendors.

The ability to maximize revenue growth of any offering depends on the processes in place to support that offering. For solution providers, this is especially relevant for annuity and contract management. Annuity management is a profitable growth area, however, it can be a chaotic undertaking with increasing complexity as the business grows.

However, annuity agreement management is often approached with little regard to all three of those components. A common approach is to address the challenge with people, but with little regard to process and tools. As the business grows, the volume and complexity of the agreements quickly overwhelm a company’s ability to address the problem solely from a manpower perspective.

Since the advent of the internet economy, IT manufacturers have been redefining the way their products are delivered to the commercial marketplace. As a result, channel organizations responsible for the sale and delivery of these products have had to repeatedly rethink how they create value in the way they service their clients. To identify the cause and effects creating disruptive shifts in the channel market, we must first understand the decisions our customers make and why they make them!