Friday, August 07, 2015

Mining for Opportunities - MAX 2015 Australia - Day Two

Day two of the MAXfocus partner conference in Melbourne focused very heavily on building your managed service business. As I mentioned earlier, Day One covered a great deal on data mining with the MAX products. Day Two focused a great deal on using the tools at our disposal to grow your business.

Some of the presentations were from MAX employees, of course. Iam Trump talked about using the security angle to sell new services to existing clients. I was grateful that he avoided the easiest - scaring clients. Instead, he spent a good deal of time talking about the simple things we can do to delivery a significantly more secure network. Some of these things are built into MAX products, of course, but not all of them. Over and over again, the little things kept coming up - like locking down the firewall.

Jerry Koutavas from ASCII gave a great demonstration of digging down into LinkedIn and other products to find out an amazing amount of data on prospective clients. He picked a business owner at random from the local area and showed how he discovered who the current I.T. service provider is, the rate he's paying for services, and even the platform used to build the prospect's web site. It was entertaining and impressive. You don't have to hire an agency to do a major background check on prospects - just know a few tricks and tools.

Josh Liberman's Presentation
Finally, Josh Liberman, President, Net Sciences Inc., talked about dealing with prostpecs who are new to outsourced IT services. In addition to some great stories, Josh gave excellent insights into the mindset of people who aren't used to professional technology services.

The challenge starts with the pain the client knows they have. But as an IT pro, you can see the pain they don't realize they have - or the paint they're about to experience! Josh talked about strategies for getting clients used to the mentality of preventive maintenance. And also about the reality that some people will never come around to that point of view. But if you're lucky, he provided some great tips on gradually transforming these folks into the "ideal client."

As I mentioned before, I really appreciate the fact that LogicNow (MAX) puts on an event that is heavily focused on the realities of running a business. Yes, there was lots of great "roadmap" information about their product, and technical training. But when folks take two days away from their business and family, it's nice to get some solid information on improving the business side of the business!

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I look forward to a bigger, bolder agenda in Washington, DC next month!

Join me there.

Details for DC are at http://conferences.maxfocus.com/us-2015/. Josh will be speaking again, as well as my brother Manuel - one of the more popular speakers from last year!

:-)

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