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What's Included...
 ASPonline.com  >  The Art of Fee-Based Support
The Speaker
  • Workbook with slides, notes, checklists, charts, and other useful backup material.
  • Six in-depth ASP reports that will give you additional benchmarks and hands-on tactics:

- Maintenance &
Services Ratios

- Trends in Fee-Based Support

- Maintenance
Renewal Rates

- Support Pricing &
Negotiating Strategies

- A Guide to Packaged
Services

- How to Grow Professional
Services

  • Breakfast and lunch.
  • ...and most importantly, a limited-attendance workshop setting, so you can ask lots of questions and share ideas with your colleagues.

 

WORKSHOP OUTLINE

  1. Are customers willing to pay for support?
  2. Where do we start?
  3. How do we get the quickest payback?
  4. How do we draw a line between free and paid support?
  5. What's the best way to design a maintenance plan?
  6. What features should we include?
  7. How should we price our offerings?
  8. What premium services should we offer?
  9. How can we maximize our services revenue?
  10. How can we predict our fee-based revenues?
  11. How do we get buy-in from our customers?
  12. How do we get buy-in from our support reps?
  13. How do we get buy-in from the sales force?
  14. How do we get buy-in from management?

COMMENTS BY ATTENDEES

"A great value...I really enjoyed the content and camaraderie. Excellent ideas and examples for creating a compelling value proposition."
- Rubee Taylor,
group product marketing manager, Sybase

"Great topics! The biggest value was the opportunity to meet with my peers and talk about challenges and solutions."
- Lorelie Kaid,
principal, Tatum LLC

"Terrific!"
 - Jeanne Urich,
management consultant, Jurich.biz  

EXECUTIVE ADVISORY SERVICE

If you'd like personalized help with designing a fee-based transition plan and presenting it to senior management, please contact ASP executive director Jeffrey Tarter. The Executive Advisory Service includes an initial assessment and review, recommendations, and a day of on-site meetings and presentations for $2,500 (plus travel).

 

 

BOSTON • March 12, 2010

Dear colleague,

Are you looking for ways to turn tech support into an important profit center?

If so, you already know that the migration from free to paid support can be complicated and risky. You can lose customers. Spend a fortune on new systems. Get into fights with your sales reps and support agents. And maybe end up with a program that makes everyone unhappy.

That's why the ASP has created a new workshop to help you "cross the chasm" to the new world of fee-based support and services.

We're launching this new workshop, The Art of Fee-Based Support, on March 12 in Boston. And you're invited to attend.

The goal of this one-day event is to provide a detailed road map for successfully migrating your customers from free support to a fee-based model. We've drawn on our own research and the extensive experience of ASP members and clients to identify the questions you need to ask, the best practices you should follow, and the pitfalls you should avoid.

Here's a brief overview of what we'll discuss during this one-day workshop:

First, we'll talk about how you move beyond basic "break-fix" support (which customers rarely value) to focus on critical pain issues and success strategies—the core value propositions that underlie any good fee-based offering.

Then we'll look at how you can lay a strong economic foundation for your plan: How you can move routine "junk" questions to self-service channels, how you can reduce service delivery costs, and how you can define a bright line between free and fee-based services.

Next, we'll explore the six most popular ways to structure fee-based maintenance plans (and we'll talk about why the familiar "bronze-silver-gold" approach is very often not your best choice). We'll check out a method for identifying high-impact plan features that will drive sales, renewals, and upgrades. And we'll discuss pricing levels and tactics for protecting your profit margin during tough sales negotiations.

Then we'll turn our attention to how you can create and market a portfolio of add-on services—customization, assessments, tuneups, training and skills development, 7x24 coverage, expert advice, high-value content, managed services, and a wealth of other ideas that address customer pain points.

Finally, we'll consider the critical internal problems of implementing fee-based support. Though these problems are often overlooked in the planning process, getting buy-in from key stakeholders—including the support team, the sales organization, and senior management—has to be handled properly or the whole effort will probably fizzle out.

Within this broad framework, you'll hear a wealth of hands-on advice. Examples of good (and bad) migration campaigns, metrics, proprietary research, best practices, and war stories—all chosen to guide you as you implement your own fee-based support and services programs.

Best of all, you'll have a chance to kick around ideas and questions among a small group of support professionals who are wrestling with exactly the same issues you are. The Art of Fee-Based Support is not an academic lecture—it's a highly interactive workshop where everyone gets a chance to ask questions and share personal experiences. We've reserved a small, comfortable meeting room that accommodates no more than 15 attendees. And when we fill those 15 seats, that's it. (Fair warning: ASP workshops usually sell out quickly, and this is a very hot topic.)

If you're planning to make the transition from free to fee-based support, or if you'd like to expand your current fee-based programs, please join us on March 12. I'm looking forward to a stimulating and idea-filled conversation, and I hope you'll be part of it.


Jeffrey Tarter, executive director
The Association of Support Professionals
 
Workshop Registration

Yes, please reserve a seat for me at the following session of The Art of Fee-Based Support:
March 12, 8:30am - 3:30pm
(Boston-Waltham)          (SOLD OUT!)
 Forefront Conference Center

Wait list information.

 $475.00
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All orders are payable in U.S. dollars drawn on a U.S. bank.

Registrations will not be confirmed or held without advance payment. Registration may be cancelled without penalty until 14 days before each session; thereafter, no refunds will be made. All cancellations must be submitted in writing.

In order to maintain audience diversity, the number of attendees from one company is limited to three per session.

Jeff Tarter

Jeffrey Tarter is executive director of the Association of Support Professionals, which he founded in 1995. He was also the founding editor and publisher of Softletter, a widely-respected software industry newsletter. An award-winning analyst and commentator, he is frequently quoted by the business and trade press.

"...Intelligent and compassionate interest in our industry and its participants, diligent research into the facts of everyday life, and all accompanied by an ironic wit to keep the whole thing in perspective."
 - Geoffrey Moore, president, Chasm Group

"Jeff Tarter's depth of perspective is unparalleled in the software industry. Not only is he on top of all the latest trends, but his historical knowledge of past successes and failures helps temper vendor hype with customer realities."
- Heather Clancy, editor, Computer Reseller News

"When Jeff Tarter speaks, the software industry listens - and listens hard. Why? Because nobody else has Jeff's incredible depth of knowledge, his wide range of contacts, and his unique perspective. He's simply the best."
- Ivan Levison, principal, Ivan Levison & Associates

"Jeff gets the trend right before it happens."
- Mitch Russo, founder, TimeSlips Corp.

"A little software thinktank that's consistently ahead of the curves in the marketplace. While other luminaries speculate, dodge, and wish, Jeff dishes up the facts."
- John Brodeur,
chief executive officer, Brodeur Worldwide

"Pertinent, real-time information and trends."
- Paul Vaillancourt,
call center director, Intuit

"Practical, real-world stuff that I can use."
- Dave Galloway, director of technical support, Seagate Software

"Incredibly valuable."
- Char LaBounty, president, LaBounty Associates

"Jeff Tarter is knowledgeable, smart, and very on point. Jeff's an industry insider who has great instincts and even better contacts."
- Amy D. Wohl, president, Wohl Associates

"An uncanny ability to deliver information that is timely and insightful, month after month."
- Doug Strohm,
vice president of product planning and marketing, Attachmate Corp.

"Jeff Tarter is truly plugged in. If there's a new trend in the industry you need to know about, he's the one to get you that information long before it hits the rest of the press."
- Adam Grossman, president, Atlantic Media

"A source of industry insights and practical day-to-day practices that has influenced positively thousands of software marketers and product developers."
- Joseph W. Jennings, senior vice president of marketing, InterTrust Technology Corp.

"If you want to know what's about to happen in software, Tarter's the man to call."
- Tom Steinert-Trelkeld
editor-in-chief, Inter@ctive Week

"...Incredibly insightful on the key issues in the software business."
- Vinod Khosla,
general partner, Kleiner,
Perkins, Caufield & Byers

"...Consistently reports on the latest trends in the software industry."
- Bruce Chizen,
CEO, Adobe Systems

"Shared experiences from software companies condensed into powerful insights."
- Dave Tarrant,
president, Servicesoft
Technologies

"Forward-thinking, insightful & data-driven."
- Rory Cowan,
president, LionBridge
Technologies

"Jeffrey Tarter is a rock-solid analyst and interpreter of important software trends."
- Jesse Berst,
editorial director, ZDNet AnchorDesk

"An excellent balance of strategy and tactics. Just enough high-level guidance with plenty of hands-on, how-to advice."
- Dave Brown,
president, Service
Management
International

"Jeffrey Tarter puts out one of the finest newsletters in all of IT. He knows his segment like few others, and for that reason has consistently shown up on our annual list of the most influential technology journalists."
- Jeffrey O'Brien,
editor in chief,
Marketing Computers

"Jeff never actually tells you what to do, but he generally makes sure you go in the right direction."
- Pat Bitton,
director of marketing, Perpetual Systems

"The best computer industry intelligence."
- Thomas H Friedman,
president, Retail
Systems Alert Group

"Great analysis, good data, and a sense of humor. I am glad Jeff is a part of the software industry."
- Michael Troy, president, KnowledgePoint

"Jeff Tarter is one of the smartest people in the software business."
- Katherine Grayson, editor, Customer Support Management
 

 
Wait List Information

We sometimes have last-minute cancellations for sold-out sessions. If you'd like to be notified of an opening (no obligation to attend, of course), send a note to Jane Farber at jfarber@asponline.com.

©2010 The Association of Support Professionals, 122 Barnard Ave., Watertown, MA. 02472-3414 USA -- phone: 617/924-3944, fax: 617/924-7288, jfarber@asponline.com.