Selling Service Agreements to Anyone

	Selling Service Agreements to Anyone How do you do it, exactly? by Gary Kayye, CTS

	I must admit, I was overwhelmed by the positive response I received to my last editorial -- "Service Contracts are Easy to Sell: Sell Job Security." It is obvious that most of you see the value proposition of selling service contracts as well as the margin potential. Many of you asked how to do it, exactly, and I have set up a link to a White Paper our firm wrote last year describing the concept of Proactive Service Agreements and how to integrate and sell them, profitably! If you're interested in downloading a copy of it (in Adobe Acrobat's PDF format) simply go to http://www.kayye.com/whitepapers/psa.pdf and you'll be able to download a copy of it. There is no question, as you will see once you've successfully set-up a proactive service agreement sales team or approach, selling service or preventative maintenance contracts that are proactive are a lot more profitable than selling equipment. And, as such, commissions for selling such services should be higher than those for selling products. This will encourage systems sales people to not only sell service contracts up-front, but also to attempt to sell service contracts for legacy systems (systems installed either by your company a long time ago or sold and installed by one of your local competitors who don't have a service department). [an error occurred while processing this directive] And, of course, this is all assuming that you are taking advantage of the new "proactive monitoring" tools available from virtually any IP-addressable ProAV equipment, or, better yet, equipment integrated using a full-fledged Ethernet-based control system such as Crestron's new MP2 system -- the one I talked about in our last issue. This applies to both your current systems as well as the legacy systems I mentioned above. Simply by adding an Ethernet card to the current control system in that legacy system will allow you to proactively monitor and control the system. And, don't forget, this won't just crack the door for you to be the in-house AV company of choice for upgrading and adding on to the client's current system, but will basically kick open the door for you to be adopted as their ProAV partner of choice. Our AVInsider, Gary Kayye, CTS, is founder of the KNews newsletter and Principal of Kayye Consulting, a firm that provides marketing consulting and training development to the professional audiovisual industry. Gary can be reached via e-mail at gkayye@kayye.com or through his Web site at www.kayye.com. Source: Kayye Consulting, Inc.