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Maintenance
REPORTS
Maintenance & Services Ratios
(2007)
Revenue and cost benchmarks based on 100 individual public
companies, updated annually, plus expert advice on revenue
recognition, services accounting, and other financial issues.
Maintenance Renewal Rates
(2005)
Benchmarks for maintenance renewal rates and data on the impact
of key variables like product price and sales channels.
Support Pricing & Negotiating
Strategies
(2003)
Ten key variables to manage the contract pricing and negotiation
process.
Trends in Fee-Based Support
(2002)
Data on pricing and features for maintenance, premium support,
training, consulting, and other paid support services.
EXPERTS
 Indicates
complimentary Open House hours
Françoise
Tourniaire, principal, FT Works
LIBRARY
How to Make Money on
Maintenance (Rich Kline)
Ideas on how to improve renewal rates on maintenance
contracts.
Understanding Customer
Retention (Joe Cardosi)
How to translate customer satisfaction into dollars and
cents metrics and improve renewal rates.
Debit Cards: A New Way to Sell
Fee-Based Support (David Aune)
How to convince low-end users to pay for premium support
services.
FORUM POSTINGS
Selling Maintenance Contracts
Overseas
"We've been very successful at selling maintenance contracts
to our U.S. customers, but we're getting a lot of pushback from
our efforts to sell the same offering in Europe. Our sales reps
say that customers there don't expect to pay extra for any kind
of services—services are supposed to be part of the purchase
price. Any advice?"
The Legacy Product
Problem
"We have a dozen or so 'legacy' products that still generate
some income from maintenance and parts sales, but they're a
nuisance. We'd even be happy to give them to a third-party
vendor for free, just for the good will we'd get from our
users. Has anyone tried this approach?"
Code Maintenance vs.
Support
"We have a customer who just bought several bundled modules
from us but doesn't plan to deploy them until next year.
They're willing to pay a maintenance fee for upgrades and
patches until then but don't want to pay for support until the
software is actually in use. How should we price this deal?"
Sarbanes-Oxley
certification
"Some of our bigger clients are beginning to ask for
Sarbanes-Oxley 'certification' for patches and upgrades. This
is beginning to feel like Y2K all over again. What are other
software companies doing about these requests?"
Mandatory Support?
"We're considering making the first year of support mandatory
for anyone who buys our products. We're also considering making
our support contracts 'evergreen'-that is, automatically
self-renewing."
USEFUL LINKS
[Recommendations welcome]
AttachPoint,
Agoura Hills, CA 91301; 818/865-9355.
Web: www.attachpoint.com.
Outsource service for maintenance renewals.
Encover,
Mt. View, CA 94043; 650/417-9000.
Web: www.encover.com. Outsource
service for maintenance renewals.
ServiceSource,
San Francisco, CA 94111; 415/901-6030.
Web: www.servicesource.com.
Outsource service for maintenance renewals.
License Technologies
Group,
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089; 800/883-8573.
Web: www.licensetechnologies.com.
Maintenance renewal automation software.
SLA Information Zone,
Theale, UK.
Web: www.sla-zone.co.uk.
Templates and other tools for service level agreements.
Softrax,
Canton, MA 02021; 781/830-9200.
Web: www.softrax.com. Maintenance
renewal automation software.
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