I love to sail. If you aren't an avid sailor, you may not be familiar with the term "tack." In sailing, we tack to change direction due to shifts in the wind direction or to get somewhere other than where we’re currently headed.  In business, we are constantly faced with market pressures that require us to tack.

April 2^nd was an exciting day in Orlando as we welcomed more than 300 partners to the largest SAS Global Partner Forum ever.  Our keynote speaker, Mike Harvath, talked about transforming your business to double profits and crush the competition.  Following Mike, I charted a course on how to grow your business and your profits leveraging SAS Channel Program.  Here are 3 ways you can tack to grow your business leveraging the SAS reseller program.

1. Focus on a vertical and solution area - Customers are increasingly looking for experts who understand their business, yet many Partners still take a generalist approach and chase every opportunity regardless of industry. Without any differentiation in the market, price becomes the only way to compete. As a SAS reseller, you’ll add more value to your customers by focusing on a specific vertical or line of business.   Focusing on specific SAS products can also help you gain more credibility and expertise.   How do you decide where to focus?   Look at your engagements where you offered the greatest value and have already developed some industry and/or solution expertise.
2. Drive more service engagements - How can the resell program help you drive more service engagements? Partners often do one-and-done service engagements where they install, integrate, and then move on to look for the next assignment. When you resell a SAS solution, you can attach your services to the software to the installation and implementation work. After landing that first sale, look for opportunities to expand with other SAS products to meet additional needs of the customer. You can also use your experience to win new customers by communicating the value of the expertise that you’ve developed by sharing “use cases” (customer scenarios) that prospects can instantly relate to because it solves problems they are having.
3. Build a predictable recurring revenue stream - The third way to leverage the resell program is to build a profitable recurring revenue stream. Many software companies have a perpetual license model with a maintenance fee each year.   These vendors typically offer a much lower discount to partners on these maintenance fees. The great thing with the SAS resell program is that you get the same discount on annual renewal fees as you do on the first year fee.   With our subscription licensing model, you can quickly generate a predictable, high margin, recurring revenue stream.   By adding managed services, you can increase your recurring revenue even further.   In several years, you can see a large portion of your revenue coming from repeat business.   That helps your bottom line, and it helps your company’s valuation if you ever look to sell your business.

If you missed the Global Partner Forum, check out the videos of all the presentations at https://blogs.sas.com/content/partners/2017/04/07/missed-partner-forum-watch-the-replay/