Techco Technology Solutions

Kathrine Garcia slaps her head in frustration as she listens to the sales manager review the pipeline during the company’s Monday morning sales meeting. The room is full of quiet groans and grumbles as the manager reminds everyone that they need to be bringing in at least $200,000 in new opportunities a week and they need to be adding to their new account base. Kathrine doesn’t understand where management expects all these new accounts and sales opportunities to come from. A seasoned sales representative, she has a strong pipeline for the year, but is worried that the company’s plan to increase revenue from $26 million to $40 million in one year by bringing in new, larger clients is not plausible. Kathrine has set a meeting with the VP of Sales and Marketing to hopefully better understand the strategy behind this new plan.

A History of TechCo Technology Solutions

TechCo Technology Solutions was founded in 1997 as a technology solution provider. They provide three areas of product and service offerings: professional services making 20% of revenue, technology and hardware/software resale accounting for 70% of revenue, and managed services accounting for 10% of revenue. TechCo defined their business by selling these solutions to mostly small to medium businesses in the New Hampshire and Massachusetts region. Their revenue by 2012 was $20 million and $26 million by 2013, and they had added larger commercial and enterprise accounts to their client portfolio. They currently have 3000 accounts listed, 220 of whom are actively being “managed” by account managers.

An Ambitious Goal

TechCo has seen consistent revenue increases in the past two years, from $20 Million to $26 Million. At the annual sales kickoff the executive team and the CEO stated that they would reach $40 Million by the end of 2014 and $100 Million over the next 3 years. The executive team informed the sales group that this would be done by bringing on larger accounts.

In New England, TechCo has built a reputation as an expert in virtualization and storage consulting and deployment. They are known for highly skilled technical engineers, but have only recently begun to tie themselves to learning skillsets around specific vendors and their offerings. TechCo has historically worked with smaller clients and has done well by offering them pretty much any technology they requested. Most of their 3000 accounts are in this SMB market.

By TechCoing their expertise, TechCo hopes to provide the high-level resources required for enterprise accounts. TechCo is relying mostly on the sales team to generate these new sales. There is no outbound marketing or calling, aside from events for clients to attend. The Marketing team is mostly incented to keep the events funded by outside vendors, and free to the company, therefore, the events are often not tied to the technologies that TechCo has made its investments in. Several sales representatives have boycotted inviting their clients to events from marketing, questioning why the events are for products the engineers cannot deploy and TechCo does not generally sell. This has led to more reps entertaining clients privately at the expense of the company.

TechCo in the New England Market

There are approximately 70,000 Technology Solution Providers in the United States and 100 or more of them in New England Market. An industry standard ranking by Computer Reseller Network places TechCo in the Tech Elite top 250 resellers, and in the top 10 in their region. While this limits their market, they have historically made their sales revenue by selling into commercial clients in the small-to medium sized business segment, meaning companies with less than 500 employees or $50Million in revenue. There are over 40,000 of these businesses in the Northern New