Support marketing is more than pretty brochures

Now don’t get me wrong: I love pretty brochures — but surely there’s more to support marketing than glossy datasheets! Support marketing, to me, covers the entire business development side of support: analyzing the customer base, creating support offerings and organizing them into a coherent portfolio, pricing, marketing (ok, here come the pretty brochures), training the sales force, handling objections, managing discounts and changes to terms and conditions, and of course renewing.

Which means that if you put a brochure-writer in charge of support marketing it simply will not work.

[end of rant]

Support is big business

ASP, the Association for Support Professionals, just published its annual survey of support revenue. ASP reviewed the financial reports of 100 public software companies in August and found that services as a whole (support, consulting, training) provided more than half (56.9%) of total company revenues, across the board. And this is good, profitable revenue since margins are close to 60% (56.8%), with both revenue and margin percentages up since last year.

If we just look at support the survey found that it constitutes a very respectable 38.9% of total revenue with a remarkable margin of over 83.2%, so much higher than for other services such as consulting and training.

If you find that your executive team still looks down on support as an afterthought or worse, perhaps sharing these numbers would help?

For more information about the survey go here.

Accuracy vs. Simplicity

You are supporting two slightly different versions of the same product, maybe running on different hardware or against different databases. Based on experience, Version B is a little more complex than Version A to support, requires a slightly more skilled support engineer perhaps, takes a little more troubleshooting time, or tends to be used by customers who need more handholding.

It makes sense to price support for Version B a little higher than for Version A then, right?

Quick, what do you think?

For me, it’s a big maybe. Yes, it makes logical sense to price higher, but who said pricing was a science? If you already have multiple levels of pricing, perhaps because you offer multiple levels of support, adding yet another differentials may push your pricing in the complicated category, hence less appealing to customers, not to mention more vulnerable to errors. So perhaps you are better off with a consistent price, for simplicity’s sake.