The Cogent Difference: Industry Specific Knowledge 

As your business grows, you gain opportunities to extend the depth and breadth of your service portfolio both by gaining new capabilities through acquisition, and by investing in organic extension of your existing portfolio. Either way, a broader portfolio introduces opportunities to up-sell existing clients and to attract new ones.

Cogent Growth Partners’ Operational Experts have a wide range of experience in portfolio planning with MSPs from five employees to Fortune 50 companies. Through our extensive ongoing activities in the IT Services industry, we see first-hand the trends of what new services are catching on and what services are reaching the end of their life-cycle. Our expertise includes market analysis to determine how particular services are likely to play to your target markets and what additional target markets will appreciate the services you bring to market.  We help you assess what portfolio changes will provide the greatest ROI. We can also help you assess whether a new service should be built organically, added via acquisition, or outsourced to a Master MSP.  

As you contemplate acquisitions, we will help you determine how a given targets’ services align with yours, and how best to integrate their capabilities into your existing portfolio. In cases where you develop new capabilities organically, our operational expertise and best practice knowledge will help you get new services to market more efficiently and with reduced risk.

All of this leads to a higher return on your investments in growth and increases in your firm’s profile and market appeal.

Defining what services you should offer is hard enough. Often, defining the details of those services is just as challenging. Mature IT Services companies clearly articulate exactly what entitlements, SLAs and functions are included in the services they sell. They clearly specify the boundaries of what is in scope and what is not.

As your company grows this becomes increasingly important, because consistency of delivery is a critical success factor in scaling a business. You need to minimize one-offs and be clear and consistent in setting customer expectations. Cogent Growth Partners’ Operational Experts help you with this in two ways.

First, we have proven methodologies, tools and templates for Service Definition. We’ve helped many IT Services companies clearly and concisely define the services in their portfolios. Our methodology includes not just the process of documenting the service definition but also raising the critical issues and decisions points you need to consider in making these decisions.

Secondly, we have expertise in rationalizing Service Definitions. That is, determining how a perspective acquisition target’s Services are different from yours and how they can be made consistent after the acquisition. This is a critical consideration when determining your real cost of delivery for the acquired clients and how to integrate them. We can assess the clarity (or lack thereof) of your target’s contracts and service definitions, and identify potential inconsistencies between your target’s operations and yours. This becomes a critical input to the integration plan, and a key input (and, potentially, a leverage point) in negotiating the terms of your acquisition.

Our expertise in Service Definition helps you scale your business, accelerate organic growth, and reduce risk as you grow.

Perhaps no area of IT Services is more important – or more confusing – than service pricing. Cogent Growth Partners’ Operational Experts help with pricing in three, complimentary ways: 

1.     Best Practice Comparison: Through our past and ongoing work in the IT Services industry, we have a depth of experience in understanding how firms position and price their services. This enables us to provide expert advice to “reality check” your pricing approaches relative to what your market will bear.

2.     Formal Pricing Methodology: We have proven methodologies for evaluating and establishing pricing, using three complimentary techniques:

·         Determining the going rate pricing within your market(s) (tops down approach);

·         Determining your cost of delivery and estimating appropriate margin (bottoms up pricing approach);

·         Calculating how specific pricing scenarios will impact the bottom line (cash flow modeling approach)

Together, these techniques provide you a powerful three-dimensional understanding of how pricing decisions will impact your business.

3.     Acquisition-Related Pricing Rationalization: We help you address a unique pricing issue that emerges as you execute growth by acquisition: rationalizing your pricing with the legacy pricing you inherit with your target’s customer base. It is highly likely that your pricing and your target’s pricing are different in some important ways. That introduces some crucial questions when it comes to pricing:

·         How do you manage pricing for non-contracted services (e.g., professional services) once you assume those customers? 

·         How do you price to those customers at contract renewal? 

·         How do you present additional services to them while staying within those customers’ existing “value parameters”? 

Cogent’s expertise and experience in identifying such questions before the deal closes allows us to put approaches to dealing with these issues into the integration plan. This not only helps smooth the integration and increase retention of acquired customers, it also ensures that the direct and indirect impacts of legacy pricing are taken into account in your offer to the acquisition target.

While acquisitive growth is an excellent strategy for driving dramatic growth, IT Services firms who employ this strategy need to maintain their focus on organic growth as well. Cogent Growth Partners’ Operational Experts bring extensive experience in marketing and solutions sales, bringing a deep library of Best Practices for generating leads.

As the capacity of your delivery operation scales, accelerating organic growth can have a tremendous impact on the profitability of the business. Many small and mid-sized firms who historically relied upon the Principals to drive sales decide to add professional salespeople as they grow. That means establishing a sales methodology and sales management process to ensure the sales team is doing the right things to drive the business.

Cogent Growth Partners’ Operational Experts have years of experience in solutions sales and sales management. Through our years of working with IT Services firms, we understand the unique challenges Principals in those firms face when they hire and manage a sales force for the first time (not the least of these is the fact that many Principals are technical people with minimal formal sales background).

We can help with everything from screening candidates and building compensation plans to identifying the critical measures required to keep the sales team productive. We also provide coaching to Principals who’ve never managed salespeople before on how to manage, motivate and measure their sales team.

We also have experience helping salespeople gain proficiency in the unique art of selling Managed Services. We can help salespeople understand the difference between selling products, Professional Services and Managed Services. We have developed a powerful training program that teaches salespeople how to construct an effective, customer-specific Value Proposition for every prospect they work with. 

Cogent Growth Partners’ Operational Experts have decades of experience managing IT Services businesses. We have compiled an extensive library of Best Practices for a wide variety of service implementation and delivery functions, including:

As IT Services businesses scale, the Professional Services practice can present some especially tricky challenges. At the core of this is the dichotomy between process consistency that is critical to scaling a business and the individual creativity and flexibility each consultant needs to do their job well. 

 

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