In a year where sport is sadly scarce, PAV are on course for a unique double!
Following our record breaking success last year, PAV I.T. Services have been shortlisted for the Best Sales Team and Best New Business Win awards at this year’s CRN Sales and Marketing Awards.
Best Sales Team
Led by Managing Director Jason Fry, Sales and Marketing Director Nathan Collins, and Director of Technical Services Pete Clements, the PAV sales teams are based in Sussex and Leeds, and are comprised of a formidable mix of youthful vigour and experienced hands!
In the autumn of 2018 PAV acquired Datanics, which led to the busiest start to the 2019 financial year with many moving parts affecting sales, engineering and the service desk.
With the changes now complete, the group is now entering a period of organisation / uniformity and expansion. We have been proud to observe some unbelievable team and individual efforts to get this thing to integrate and to ensure our customers are satisfied.
The personalities!
Jason Fry is a widely-respected sales leader, having last year made an appearance on the lead panel of the Managed Services and Hosting Summit in Manchester, and with a forthcoming interview in Computer Weekly around Datto’s partnership with PAV.
Nathan Collins brings his energetic personality from backup and recovery vendors Commvault and Druva to the team, and his proven track record of creative and fresh approaches to sales and marketing is really bearing fruit with PAV. You’ll shortly be able to see Nathan being interviewed with Compare the Cloud on Disruptive TV and social media. Pete Clements is well known in the industry having presented at Commvault Go in Denver in September, and taken part in the lively RANT Respite panel discussion in London in June.
Nathan heads up a team of 11 skilled sales people from a range of IT backgrounds, with the team being comprised of account managers, new business managers, and technical account managers set up around our customers’ needs.
YoY growth
With all of these changes the group has continued on the track of solid growth with a mighty 340% in the last 4 years, and in 2019 PAV delivered about 25% growth versus the previous year. This obviously represented a fabulous result and will result in the creation of many new and interesting roles and promotions for people to grow into in the near term, and the creation of several new jobs in Leeds and Sussex.
The biggest achievements
2019 also included a record Q4 for the business (quarter ending March 31st), and the second largest quarter of all time in Q1 from April to June. This represented a mighty 44% growth YoY for the quarter one year prior, and a 107% growth compared to the first quarter of 2017.
The fact that 41% of the revenue is contractual and annually reoccurring makes PAV’s business predictable and build on sustainable foundations upon which we can build even more value for our customers.
Contracts and new business
Our new business wins were at the heart of this year-on-year growth. Overall, the team won 1,106 renewal and upsell contracts during the year across the two offices, and 57 new logos.
Certifications/qualifications achieved during last year
As part of our vendor partnerships, the team combined to achieve sales, technical and marketing accreditations with 23 vendors, in addition to participating in various sales workshops and best practice sharing. Our specific qualifications achieved in 2019 include:
- Commvault – Authorised Service Partner
- Cisco Select, Express Cloud and managed services certified
- Sophos Gold reseller and MSP Connect Flex Partner
- Dell Authorised Partner
- Mimecast MSP
- WatchGuard Gold
- Microsoft Silver for small and midmarket cloud solutions
Best New Business Win Category
In addition to the excellent skills of the sales team, PAV also have a national team of service delivery professionals that help our customers with IT support and monitoring, project delivery, cloud services, backup and disaster recovery, and application packaging services.
Our ability to listen and understand our clients’ specific technology challenges allows us to deliver IT support services and solutions to companies of all sizes across the UK. Our customers trust us to optimise their IT infrastructures to boost productivity, maintain high levels of network security and free up their time to focus on their business.
In 2019 we were also proud to secure public references and testimonials from several of our customers, including Pace Technology, Woodroyd Nursery, MDA College, Kew Electrical, Monarch Mobility and La Redoute.
Stevensdrake Solicitors, a leading South East commercial, business and family law firm, selected PAV i.t. Services for their backup and disaster recovery solution, and form the basis for our Best New Business Win award nomination.
Stevensdrake is an award-winning law firm based in the South East with history dating back to 1782. Having maintained Lexcel accreditation, the Law Society’s quality mark for excellence in legal practice management and client care since 2005, they are also recognised by the leading independent legal directory, The Legal 500.
The opportunity and how it was won
The customer was using an on-premises backup and disaster recovery solution, but wanted to look alternative solutions for a number of reasons including cost, flexibility and storage limits. Having seen PAV’s marketing campaign for our cloud-based Backup and Disaster Recovery Service, the customer contacted us to understand more about what an upgrade could look like.
To understand the customer’s requirements and the upgrade path, several pre-qualification calls and demonstrations were required, followed by on-site meetings and follow-up calls.
Why was the business won?
Motivated by the lower TCO, greater flexibility for doubling front-end data size at no extra cost, and to avoid restriction on the amount of data that they could back up, the customer chose to move to PAV’s cloud-based Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
PAV’s Backup and Disaster Recovery Service provides businesses with a fully managed, powerful and configurable data management platform, capable of protecting and recovering data from all their data sources including physical and virtual servers, public cloud and SaaS as well as disaster recovery functionality to replicate critical business systems, which can then be rapidly recovered.
PAV’s referencable backup customers such as La Redoute also played a part in winning Stevensdrake’s business, along with the skill and personal attention of the PAV sales and technical teams, and strong vendor relationship with Commvault for the sizing of the project and its implementation.
“Having worked with PAV i.t Services as a trusted advisor for our IT requirements for many years, we had a high level of confidence in their experience and expertise to propose a managed cloud backup and DR solution which matched our business requirements, giving us a scalable and cost effective solution which provided us with the assurance our data is both fully protected and available.”
Neil Harding
IT Manager
Stevensdrake Solicitors
CRN Sales and Marketing Awards 2020
The CRN Sales and Marketing Awards 2020 take place virtually on 14-16 July.
You can read more about the Awards on this link, and follow PAV’s progress on our social media channels.
