IT management platform provider Continuum will offer an expanded lineup of sales training courses for its MSP partners in 2018.
The new offerings build on the in-person Sales Academy conference that Boston-based Continuum staged in Pittsburgh last year. That event drew roughly 60 attendees.
“We had to actually turn some people away because the response was so good,” says Chief Revenue Officer Bob Kocis.
Based on that demand, Continuum will host two kinds of Sales Academy events this year. The original conference, now renamed Sales Academy-Advanced, will help approximately 100 experienced MSPs hone their skills in areas like objection handling, sales management, and pitching help desk services. Hosted in Pittsburgh again, Sales Academy-Advanced will take place April 24th and 25th.
In addition, four new in-person training events called Sales Academy-Foundation will help newcomers to selling managed services learn basic skills. The two-day courses will target about 20 attendees each.
“We’re going to keep those relatively small, because we think once you get outside of 20 people in the class the learning environment starts to dwindle,” Kocis says.
Partners must acquire Continuum’s “Selling Managed IT Services” certification, available through its Continuum University program, before attending a Sales Academy-Foundation course.
Continuum plans to invite a targeted list of strategic partners to both its Foundation and Advanced classes. Other partners can register themselves for Foundation events online.
Attendees must pay to attend either class. The fee for Foundation events is $200.
“We want to make sure that people show up,” Kocis says. “It also allows us to bring some outside people to help us deliver really world-class content.”
Also new for 2018 is a custom education offering that allows larger MSPs to develop specialized sales training classes, exclusively for their own employees, in collaboration with Continuum.
Sales training has been a priority for Kocis since he attended his first Continuum Navigate partner event in 2016, shortly after stepping into his current job.
“I had a countless number of partners pull me aside and say ‘look, the one thing that you could do for us that would be impactful is you could help us figure out how to sell and grow our business,'” he recalls.
To help technicians master the fundamentals of using Continuum products, the company will hold five Technical Bootcamp events this year as well.
Education is a point of emphasis for other managed service software makers as well. ConnectWise, for example, acquired Harlan, Ia.-based consulting, coaching, and peer group provider HTG earlier this month in an effort to beef up its best practices instruction capabilities.
