Introduction:
As resellers grow they face complex challenges: Quoting, reselling and renewing a complex collection of products and software.
Traditionally, resellers have expanded admin teams, invested in costly CRM tools, or cobbled together a patchwork of spreadsheets and manual processes to solve these problems.
Reid Smith-Vaniz, founder of Reliant Technology, shares how Owlytica emerged to tackle these challenges and create a brighter future for his company.
Our Journey:
In 2007, I co-founded Reliant Technology, initially selling refurbished IT equipment, from companies like Dell, EMC, Cisco and NetApp.
As our business expanded, so did our customer demands, leading us to provide third-party maintenance for servers, storage and network equipment. Over the years we served over 2000 customers across 5 continents.
Selling, renewing and serving these maintenance agreements became the core of our business, but there was a problem: our internal systems couldn’t keep pace, and on top of it, our data was a mess.
This challenge birthed the dream of creating a system to simplify our operation to track all assets, contracts, and warranties. This dream became Owlytica.
The Challenges:
Problem #1: We lacked visibility – We simply could not predict and forecast our business with any level of proactive accuracy. Without robust reporting, we struggled to gauge business performance, particularly in renewals and net new business. This led to a lot of heated meetings, a reactive posture and just an undercurrent of second-guessing.
Problem #2: Deficient asset and contract tracking – Our initial attempt to use Salesforce for tracking just didn’t work. Half-baked development, misentries and manual workarounds led to inaccuracies. We tried creating custom objects, but in the end they didn’t solve our problems and cost us a bit of time and money.
Problem #3: We lacked a customer portal – Customers wanted to view assets, contracts and SLAs. We explored Salesforce Communities for a customer portal, but it was costly and needed more customer development – it wasn’t tailored for us.
Problem #4: Data Quality – Variations in data frustrated our team and our customers. Asset models, such as servers, network or storage systems would be missing or exist in many different formats. We simply did not have clean data at the source.
Problem #5: Quoting, Renewals and Pricing – Relying on spreadsheets for quoting presented multiple issues, including disorganized data, inconsistent templates and pricing history buried in laptops. Renewals took days to build and process.
Problem #6: Lack of an integrated Ticketing System – Establishing a ticketing process was necessary but the problem was our customers were calling our service partners directly. We needed a ticketing system that could scale to provide and route tickets to the right partners with us being the helpdesk.
Problem #7: Commissions – Shifting focus from renewals to net new business required restructuring compensation plans, and we didn’t have the data to make the shift. We couldn’t accurately pay reps based on the data coming out of our existing systems
Discovery of Owlytica:
Building Owlytica was a journey filled with many trials, issues, and valuable lessons. We tried various tools to solve our systems issues, but none were tailored to our unique needs as resellers and support providers.
So we made a decision to start building our own software.
Owlytica started as a contract and asset repository but quickly evolved into a comprehensive reseller management system.
Implementation and Results:
The Owlytica journey involved numerous steps, including developing a customer portal, ticketing and quoting modules, a renewals team, and robust reporting. Over time, we realized immediate and long-term benefits:
Immediate Impact:
– Customers liked the portal and they would visit day and night
– This helped customer retention with our best customers
– The meetings about systems not “talking” slowly started to fade
– Streamlined processes led to increased margins and lower costs
– Improved efficiency, even during remote work due to COVID.
Long-Term Value:
– Visibility, we finally could see and predict our business
– Clean data allowed for better service, pricing and margin management.
– Predictive capabilities aided in planning and growth – like who to hire and when
– Improved compensation structure helped drive the right behavior.
– Enhanced profitability, culminating in the successful sale of Reliant Technology to a major competitor.
Key Features and Benefits:
“Owlytica’s power was it was one connected system, which gave us the visibility and tools to run our business” – Reid Smith-Vaniz CEO Reliant Technology
Owlytica’s modules helped us in a few different ways:
– Reporting provided the visibility we needed to make proactive decisions
– Quoting streamlined pricing, building quotes and quote accuracy.
– Contracts simplified contract generation and consistency.
– The Rest-API facilitated integrations and data flow to Salesforce
– Ticketing allowed us to own the service experience
– Renewals reduced renewal quote times to just a few minutes.
Product Overview
We shifted from using multiple systems: Salesforce, Fishbowl, Excel, Quickbooks, Dropbox, Email to a unified system to run our sales and service operations.
By having one unified system we simplified our process and our systems. Over time it looked something like this:
Conclusion:
Building Reliant Technology was a 15 year journey, but one of the most painful limiters over time was our systems.
I have a soft spot in my heart for people who are building and leading technology companies. It’s hard work! You should have systems and software that helps you grow and serve your customers.
You can certainly piece together software and spreadsheets to run your business, but for us Owlytica offered a singular system that allows us to grow, improve profitability and focus on delivering great customer experience.
In 2022 Reliant Technology was acquired by a major competitor and the buyer noted it was the smoothest transition in the history of their business. Owlytica and the integrity of the data was a big piece of that puzzle.
Whether you are scaling your business or acquiring other resellers, Owlytica is a system designed to streamline service and grow your business.
“We could not have built what we built without Owlytica”
– Reid Smith-Vaniz CEO Reliant Technology
To learn more about Owlytica and its beta program, please visit www.Owlytica.com