Most MSPs are facing the commoditization trap. Competition is getting fierce, price pressure is constant, it’s hard to get in front of prospects and selling additional services like cyber security or IT consultation is tough.

There is one telltale sign each MSP should look for of declining client engagement which leads to the downward spiral of less connection, less stickiness (retention) and eventually less profitability.

In this blogpost we are going to learn about this telltale sign, how you can identify whether your MSP is affected and what to do to overcome the problem.

I am happy to introduce the sets of software features, updated templates, expert guide content and super specific programs to accelerate your growth! If your Account Management is not producing project revenues, your vCIO is not getting paid for advice, your Sales people are not getting leads or your cyber security services are not being sold then this release is for you! This is what we are going to cover:

1. New Software Features for Growth
2. Expert Guides for Growth
3. Role Specific Programs for Growth
4. Quarterly Sprints for Growth

Whether you’re a “one-man-band”, an emerging MSP with a handful of people, a team about to reach the 20 people mark or even a large 50+ organization you have one thing in common: you may have reached a growth plateau and want to unleash your potential to get to the next level. In hindsight you can recognize that it all comes back to bottlenecks in your organization’s capabilities to unleash those potentials role by role: Account Management, vCIO, Technical Account Management, IT Sales, Cyber Security and even the owners. All of them have low-hanging-fruit opportunities and by snagging those you can get to the next level in a smooth, predictable way.

Unfortunately this is not a cheap cliffhanger title just to grab your attention. You’re reading it on your mobile so I’ll be brief like a bumper sticker: you steal money from your own MSP because you address the symptoms of problems with tactical Bursts of effort. That only generates more work and expends resources to generate tiny bits of unsustainable value. Sure, you feel busy and productive, but you don’t solve the problems in the long run. Sound familiar? Let's take an example and see how to fix it with Smart Goals and an action plan.

Transforming your Basic IT Service Provider company into a high-value business partner is a study in communication - why you communicate, what you communicate and who is communicating to whom. There are four roles that are critical to your relationship with your clients. The communication from these four critical roles will determine whether your company is becoming a commodity or a differentiated brand. Let’s take a look at these roles and what you can do to make sure their communication will be excellent.

Here is the Problem...

Communicating with your clients at only the technical and tactical level will eventually lead to diminished engagement. Executives are looking for more strategic and business-oriented conversations. Without a clear understanding of the roles for the Account Managers, Technical Account Managers, Technical vCIOs or Business vCIOs it is nearly impossible to leverage any process, best practice or tool to get your critical audience excited.

On this interview Rich Anderson (Imagine IT) and Adam Walter (Virtual C) talk about leveraging Microsoft 365 for business discussions, differentiation and as a platform for growth.

Rich Anderson has been successfully validating the opportunities behind Microsoft 365 discovery processes and cloud services. Adam has built a remarkable audit process for turning productivity issues into projects.

Problem: long decision making process and postponing of urgent/important projects

When projects are vitally important or urgent but the client is hesitant, doesn't make a decision or simply ignores the facts, then they do not see the value that you do.

Your goal is to demonstrate this value, make the decision easy and instill a sense of urgency to move forward.

Because this is a crucial conversation, structured meeting tools can help to:
Use visuals to align the client with the problemGenerate a high level perspectiveMake the deliverables tangibleRationalize the decision with an ROI Calculator.

Starting vCIO services can be a struggle not just for you and your people, but for the clients too. There are some established expectations of vCIO services, which sets a hurdle right at their kickoff of these services. There is, however, a natural way of solving this problem: use easy to sell and easy to deliver productized vCIO projects.

Of course, developing such effective and elegant solutions does take time, so we’ve set up a shortcut to start, and let you build up vCIO Project products instead. Don’t worry - this isn’t taking on new work - just solve problems you’re expected to already, but start getting paid for all you do.

Let's see seven examples of typical vCIO products:

We had a great debate in our Banff Workshop about timing one’s IT Strategy correctly when meeting with new prospects. Some people were adamant the IT Strategy meeting be a requirement to even sending a proposal, while others were more inclined to implementing an IT strategy creation process after the onboarding, after we fix all the client’s technical issues. This is often the case in a workshop, when everybody was right but in conflicting ways. Let's see how to best approach this question.

One of the hot topics in the bootcamp was a typical MSP issue - managing client agreements. The problem gets verbalized in different ways: "I have many new services I would like to sell to existing clients" or "I have to re-onboard all of our customers because the agreement is very old" or "I want to increase our prices to reflect the improvements and additional tools we introduced" or "I barely make any money and I need to renegotiate our prices". Sound familiar? We’d like to introduce a systematic approach to solve this problem for now and the future.

We just finished our first ever live 3 day Managed Service Productization boot-camp in Banff, Canada. With 25 participants we worked to crack the code in scaling up the managed services. Jam-packed with real work, the workshop groups created amazing content and generated ideas that have been sparkling. I wanted to capture some of the more intriguing ideas the MSPs came up with.

I’ll be elaborating on these topics in upcoming weeks, since I see each topic as worthy of more than a blog post, but here are the main ideas. These are my personal Ah-ha! moments.