Debate on All In vs. Modular MSP pricing

By Denes Purnhauser on January 30 2020

The Managed Services business was created from the traditional suite of desktop management, backup, network and server support. Most MSPs now are offering various services outside the traditional managed infrastructure scope: application management, additional cyber security or virtual CIO services. This is the evolution of managed services, and the right way, however many MSPs have just reactively added some of these services to stay relevant to their customers and protect the core MSP services. They might call themselves "your IT department." Let's check out why it’s a problem and what to do about it.

The problems

Here’s a quick overview of the pitfall of adding more to our managed services delivery without proportional monetization.

• Application Management, IT Security, and vCIO services don’t fall into the core MSP value proposition. Mixing them into the Managed Infrastructure Services creates confusion. The current IT infrastructure expertise was not always so convertible to process, business, or security expertise. Clients may have trouble believing you’re qualified for the others.
• These additional services create confusion in your messaging as well. What makes you better than your competition if you can’t clearly differentiate ourselves? If you just mesh these services into the MSP package, they and the value perceived get lost as "features of the MSP program" rather than stand-alone products.
• As you add services, your MSP offering becomes more expensive. Your competition can still claim the same offering, though it isn’t, and at a lower price point. Clients will see no differentiation and not understand what makes you more expensive.
• If you stack all these services together, you lose flexibility. Clients may not need some of what they’re paying for, so you’ll lose the ability to deliver packages suited to the primary need/lower maturity/small client segment.

 

Differentiate yourself from your competition and become sales ready in 30 days

This all means if you keep doing the one-size-fits-all "we are your IT department" package, you’ll be lowering your shield to where the competition can hurt you and also dulling your sword in terms of new client acquisition.

What to do

Let's quickly cover some strategies you can apply to make this trend your friend and not your enemy.

• List out the value propositions you’re offering. Managed Infrastructure, Managed Applications, Managed NIST Cyber Security or vCIO. You can add to the list if you need, just make sure you define each as a value category that makes sense to the end client.

• List out all the services you do for your clients and try to place them into the categories. What you’ll see is your complex offering start to make more sense, with an internal consistency that’s both easier to describe and to get the client invested.

• Treat your listed services as your modular (e.g. LEGO) building blocks. Now you can start building up different service bundles based on those blocks. If you focus on the differentiation between Application Management, IT security or vCIO, you will see how you can actually have service bundles as stand-alone products rather than just added features.

Because all your services are going to be in bundles your tech people will have no difficulty knowing what each client has. Also because most of the categories are not related to their infrastructure job, you aren’t creating more complexity on the execution side.

• If you’ve crafted some bundles, you may consider create a basic and a premium offering for each product line. You can end up, for example, with four product lines, two versions each. A basic package will be good for entry level stuff like a small advisory as a vCIO and some starting IT security in the packages.
  
  

• Now you can deliver a proper service offering for each client and prospect based on their needs. For example, an accounting firm will have Premium IT Security, Managed Service and Basic vCIO and Application management, whereas an engineering firm will need Premium App management, vCIO, MSP and a basic security package.
  
  

Benefits and tradeoffs

Let's see some pros and cons for this strategy

Benefits:

1. Now you’re able to give your clients a more tailored offering, and they’ll see that it suits them best, because you could give them a choice.
2. Now you can maximize the monetization and profit for each package, because you don’t have to deal with competitive pricing.
3. Now you can keep up-selling as their maturity grows, and eventually offer them all premium offerings in years to come.
4. Now you can differentiate yourself and get into the battle where the prospect has a strong MSP but the IT Security, App management or vCIO is weak.
5. Now you can communicate online and better convert on your website, as three value propositions are not commodities (only the infrastructure component is).

Tradeoffs:

1. You have to productize the services and define each clearly (we’ve already defined 100+ services for you in high level of detail)
2. You have to keep clients in their swimming lanes with proper account management and internal service management (quarterly business review with discussion is enough in most cases)
3. You need a discipline to sell what you deliver and deliver what you sell. With production it’s not a problem, but still a new item.
   
   

Just for fun...remember… in 2008 it was only one iPhone available…. How about today? Why do you think Apple has more options in colour, size and storage today?

Conclusion

Consider the benefits and tradeoffs of moving to a different pricing model. Your managed service will be evolving in a more rapid pace as client needs evolve. It’s up to you to create a model which will manage these changes reliably. If not, you’ll have a very stiff and rigid model giving away a tremendous amount of value and sacrificing opportunity and service all at once.

5 Questions that will make your Client Meetings Strategic

By Denes Purnhauser on January 24 2020

What would it feel like not just having great and engaging meetings with clients but being able to become true business partners? Progressive MSPs has been started because when the Quarterly Business Review (QBR) meetings aren’t focused on the “Client’s Business Review” but the “MSP’s Business Review” then engagement drops and the relationship gets mired in the technology partnership level. Although it raises a concern about the scalability of the process - as account manager employees seem to have trouble engaging executives with real business discussions - there are best practices that can be applied to empower employees to elevate the conversation.

In this blog we collected five great conversation starters that will generate huge engagement among high-value client business owners and executives. Your growth need not stagnate just because you as a business owner are the only one who can deliver these meetings.

Upsell your clients with strategic QBRs and IT strategy meetings

 

Prerequisites for making business conversations easy

We have been teaching, coaching and guiding MSPs to do better consultative sales meetings, quarterly business reviews, audits and annual strategy workshops. We have researched what types of questions work and what questions won’t engage executives.

There are seven common traits among great questions that can elevate your conversations. You can read later five of our favorite questions, but we wanted to empower you to be able to create your own sets of questions later.

1. Leading. Questions are open-ended and generally based to help the interviewer drive the conversation without need of great expertise in the topic.
2. Low-risk. Whoever answers the question feels no pressure or risk of being intimidated or sharing information that would not be shared openly anyways.
3. Trust building. Show honest curiosity and make the interviewees feel understood.
4. Contextual. Relevant in multiple potential contexts. Questions can be asked in annual meetings, quarterly meetings or even in ad-hoc social events.
5. Discovery. Ensure you take notes and go deeper when needed.  The answers can be used for general purposes or follow-up later with more information.
6. Actionable. Drive specific actions or generate complete action plans from the answers and topics.
7. Consultative. Ensure you conduct business and consultative conversations rather than promoting technology or solution specific outcomes. 

If the questions you ask executives are missing one or more of these traits then the result can be stalled conversations, uncomfortable feelings, and lost confidence.

Ok let’s dive into the questions one by one:

 

1. What made you successful in this business in the first place?

This question leads you to uncover the client’s main value proposition. That means they will talk about what distinguished them among their competition, why they started the business and what made them successful in the first place. This makes most executives proud as this is their story.

You can lead the questions towards the relevance of these aspects today. What puts their success at risk? How do they keep being successful in the future? Those avenues can help you to find potential business issues your company can help solve, either in the short term or in the longer-term.

2. What does your team do every day to keep clients happy?

This question leads to discovery of the core functions they have to do well to run the business. The team’s required focus on the critical things has to be maintained in order to keep clients happy. This is more important than ever as the competition is getting fierce in every industry.

That information gives you many clues of different operational challenges, bottlenecks and potential headaches for the executive. You can find initiatives they are working on and can capture important priorities you might be able to address with tech solutions.

3. What are the three things in your market that would not be relevant in the future?

This question leads to the future. What’s not going to be important in the future will reveal what will be important tomorrow. This is really a hidden strategy related question uncovering their perspective of future priorities.

That information gives you clues about how they see how technology itself will shape their industry, and how digital transformation is affecting their industry and company. You can understand what role they are giving to their technology initiatives. That gives you a great overview about what level they value your company’s help.

4. If you could work only one day a week, what are the critical things you would need to do to maintain the company?

This question leads to understanding their personal priorities. If they would have only one day to work a week, what roles and activities would they choose. This personal question can reveal many personal priorities. Also, it can be used to put in a negative order. See what types of work, obligations or roles they do not like. 

As an example, if they would answer: “I wish I would not have to do any cash flow management ever again” that can help you to see it’s a personal pain point for them. Or they may think about the core roles they play in the organization. 

This question is not an obvious one and very challenging. People usually do not have a quick answer for that but it can also unlock their personal goals with the company.

 

5. What habits do you want your leadership team to obtain

This is also a great question to unlock leadership gaps. Now, most executive’s main priority is to build a great leadership team. This question is focusing on the potential gaps the leadership team sees. 

This can help you to understand the personal leadership priorities and the leadership issues preventing them from growing - common needs such as better meetings, more accountability, better motivation or personal development. This will give you many clues to the pain points the leader has with managing and building a team. 

3 Steps to make this work

In the technology sphere most account managers, technical account managers, and vCIOs are engineers at heart and sometimes these types of conversations don’t come easy.

However, being in a comfort zone means going back to a technology conversation that is comfortable for the account manager but not engaging to the client.

Based on hundreds of sessions we have learned that confidence is everything when it comes to client meetings. Nobody wants to be in a situation where they don’t feel competent, confident and in control. Let’s follow these three steps to apply these questions to your next meeting. 

1. Read aloud and tweak it until you feel authentic. Make sure the questions are comfortable to ask and natural to you.
2. Think forward, what types of answers you might get and what would be your response to dig deeper or to switch the topic.
3. Call 3-4 friends, team members or even your CEO and include these questions in your natural conversation. Listen and see what happens.

This skill will change the type of conversations you have with business executives and can transition you from being a great technical gifted account manager to a very assertive business consultant.

 

On a bumper sticker

Think about the following briefly:

• Think about how many times you are covering these types of topics with your clients? 
• What you are missing out by not having these discussions?
• What are the obstacles preventing you to put these questions into your client meeting agenda?
• How would you be perceived when asking these types of questions as a technology provider?
• What is your comfort level to lead conversations in these points?
• What would you get by having these business-related conversations?

The more you and your team are getting comfortable diving into your client’s businesses the more opportunities, loyalty and trust you are going to obtain. Put together your own versions of the questions, tweak them and make sure you are becoming a high-value business partner by helping your clients as best you can.

How to get out of your “Client Engagement Debt”

By Denes Purnhauser on January 17 2020

As a Technology Provider, you’ve undoubtedly encountered the symptoms of your clients' "Technology Debt." This is the manifestation of the inherent costs of perpetual support for less-than-optimal technology. This is a drain on both you and the client. Client Engagement Debt is a similar concept that encompasses the implied cost of not having enough quality Account Management, Technical Account Management, vCIO or IT Consulting activities with your clients. This costs you money, erodes trust, loses opportunities and even lowers the value your clients see in your services. Let’s take a look at how much debt you have and how to get rid of it this year.

 

STRUCTURE, MANAGE AND AUTOMATE YOUR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO PROCESESS

 

7 Symptoms of Client Engagement Debt

Let’s cut to the chase and see whether you have Client Engagement Debt. The following list will provide symptoms of unhealthy Client Engagement Debt.

1. Meetings are ad-hoc - meetings are set not well in advance but because of an issue, opportunity or client request
2. Conversations are tactical -  issues have piled up so the discussion is long and strategic topics go unaddressed
3. Too much preparation time - there are no snapshots or baseline reports so conversations have to start from scratch every time
4. Conversations are technology-focused - the lack of business discussions leads the meetings to technology discussions usually with non-executives
5. There is no Strategic Governance - the quarterly meetings stand on their own and aren’t supported by a strategic roadmap
6. The MSP owner is the only one who can do QBRs - the MSP owner is overtaxed with integrating all the missing pieces to present to a client

and this symptom is very tricky… as it presents as a great outcome of hard work..:

1. Efficiency gains - reduced ticket count and efficient operation generate less natural facetime with a client. This is positive in general but it might relegate the MSP to a “low touch” partner role if there are no consistent proactive Account Management meetings in place.

Potential implications for different MSP size

Client Engagement Debt is not something that happens overnight because of a sudden issue or problem. Rather it’s a result of a slow eroding process of various inhouse and external factors. 

External factors like technology commoditization, more millennials in the workplace, general technology adoption, tech savviness and the overall maturity raise the managed services market.

Internal factors like Account Management processes, quality of client meetings, time invested on client meetings, discussed topics, previous attempts of developing client engagement initiatives.

Here are the potential implications for MSPs of different size and maturity:

Small MSPs

If your company has less than 5-7 employees the chances are high that the owner is the only resource capable of delivering engaging client meetings. The obvious time pressure limits the resources available for developing programs or delivering quality interactions with proper follow-ups. The challenges are in streamlining the process and becoming more strategic with these conversations. This goes back to defining an Annual and a Quarterly process with clients, and support it with an application that helps the sharing of conversations and action plans.

Mid Size MSP

If your MSP has 8-20 employees the chances are high that there is a full-time individual responsible for Account Management and/or vCIO activities. The challenges at this point are related to accountability, scalability and a unified experience through the process. Properly set expectations for the client segments, proactive playbooks for activities, measurement of engagement as well as defined and adopted technology standards. These are the foundations of a process that will scale.

Large MSPs

If your MSP leadership were able to pass the 20 person mark then your 2nd layer of management should be in place and, due to your size, multiple people are responsible for different levels of client engagement. Account Managers, Technical Account Managers and vCIOs are working together as a team to drive client engagement. Now the challenges are more on the management and scalability side of the house. Processes, unified workflows, shared information, productivity and duplicate-able client meetings are the priority. As the team has to work together, a single QBR process might include 3-4 people in various roles to prepare a report, deliver the meeting and follow up all tickets, projects or opportunities. This leads to internal client engagement operation initiatives.

Regardless of the size of the MSP the real solution for managing Client Engagement Debt is similar to getting out of financial debt.. First create a momentum to start paying back the debt, then stabilize the operation to prevent future debt arising. That is why a holistic approach is needed rather than a quick fix.

 

Holistic Client Engagement Development

Let’s not go into the details too much here. If you feel you have these symptoms and are less engaged with your clients, you need to fix it soon. It’s critical because being an MSP is a “High-Touch” business model. Your foundation is a very close relationship with clients. In the past “Solving the IT Problems Together” created a natural bond with your clients. Now that you’ve been so successfully efficient you need different activities to maintain quality engagement.

Client Engagement Development has four components:

 

1. Client Engagement Foundations

Before we hit the road and cut the Client Engagement Debt we need to lay down the foundations of your Client Engagement.

Essentially, what is the level of Client Engagement your MSP wants to provide, who is going to provide it and what will comprise its requisite activities?

1. Client Engagement Goals and Strategy
2. Client Engagement Roles
3. Client Side Roles
4. Client Segmentation
5. Client Segment Playbooks

 

2. Standardization

Once we have these foundations you have to define your standards. These standards are required to create an overall scoring of the technology health, applied best practices and technology stack adoption by your clients. These make the misalignments actionable for your team and standardize the operation, and will hugely attenuate ticket noise, as well as render the Account Management process easy and repeatable.

1. General Standardization Strategy
2. General Standardization Process
3. Service Standardization
4. Technology Stack Standardization
5. Technology Best Practices Standardization

 

3. Client Engagement Activities

Now you can start establishing your client engagement activities. What is going to happen in the Annual Strategy Meeting, what will you do in the Quarterly Business Review Meeting, what types of Audits will you have (Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Office 365) and so on. This is going to define the various activities you’ll provide to the distinct client segments you’ve defined.

1. Technology Engagement Activities - Technology Roadmap Planning, Quarterly Business Reviews, Technical Audits etc.
2. Business Engagement Activities - IT Strategy Planning, Quarterly Business Reviews, Business Workshops etc.
3. Sales Engagement Activities - Renewals, vCIO Project Scoping, Consultative Sales Meetings

 

4. Client Engagement Operations

Parts 1-3 were about developing your Client Engagement - and now we move to execution. Now you need to manage your people (or your calendar if you are alone), schedule meetings with the right contacts, manage meetings and generate and maintain client roadmaps for governance. This part is about efficiency: less time in preparation, more effective conversations, and productive handoffs to the delivery team. Here’s where we are going to learn how to run an effective client engagement operation.

 

Your Reward: Client Engagement Excellence and Account Management Dividends

Client Engagement Activities done well reduce your Client Engagement Debt and prevent future Debt happening.

1. You run an efficient, profitable operation by adopting technology best practices, a unified solution stack, and well-defined services.
2. Your clients are better engaged, value your services more highly, feel they’re getting what they’re paying premium rates for and generate sustainable growth for you.
3. You can differentiate your brand and demonstrate your value to your clients.

Without a strategic effort, your next Client Engagement initiative will likely stall and never take off for scalability. Let’s do it right this time. 

 

2019 / 2020

By Denes Purnhauser on December 20 2019

Good news for you as a Managed Services Platform member! Unlike you, the majority of your MSP competitors are still

• Not delivering consistent high impact QBRs to their clients, and let them wonder what they’re paying for
• Not delivering visible business value, only trying to look like it
• Not adopting new services such as cybersecurity, vCIO or Application Management
• Not winning deals with profitable clients, only growing with low margins with a demanding client base

As a member of the Managed Services Platform, you’re way ahead. Let’s quickly review how you’ve been ahead of the curve in 2019 and how you’re going to be even more competitive next year.

Check out this quick summary of the updates in 2019 and what is coming in 2020!

 

2019 

The year of 2019 saw your team garner a slew of small incremental changes to grow your business. The following are the four growth opportunities we’ve helped to unlock:

• Win more business by differentiating yourself from the competition with proper service design, management, and communication
• Expand your clients by generating more project revenues with business roadmaps, strategic quarterly/tech reviews (QBRs), and better client meetings
• Develop new services for added value with Cloud, Cybersecurity or vCIO by leveraging the Expert Guide community and the software solution
• Create a more streamlined operation by structuring your client engagement into strong Technical Account Management, Account Management, and vCIO processes

 

10 ways you can implement new processes IN less time

These are the best practices you need to adopt to grow faster…

1. Client Engagement Excellence Course and Masterclass
2. Client Meeting Quickstarter Course
3. Client Engagement Readiness Assessment, Action Plan and Customized Roadmap
4. Weekly Live Training Sessions
5. Brand new QBR Report and Recommendation Library
6. Client Segmentation Tutorial with the Excel Tools
7. Pre-built Client Playbooks for A, B, C, D Client Segments
8. Pre-built Client Engagement Playbooks for Onboarding, At-Risk, and High-Value Sales Targets
9. Video Channel for easier learning
10. Email Onboarding Email Sequences

If you want to learn more how take less time to implement new services, schedule a quick call with us or download our FREE MSP growth guide. 

10 ways to save time executing client engagement activities

These are the main functions that enable you to prepare and execute meetings faster...

1. Client Roadmaps with Connectwise Opportunity and Project Integration
2. Technology Best Practice Automation and Tasks Library
3. Management Dashboards for High-level Visibility
4. Report Snapshot for progress demonstration and compliance
5. Scorecards for reports
6. Questionnaire for reports
7. Template editing and updating for reports
8. Client Engagement Score Planning and Management
9. Client Engagement Activity Planning and Management
10. Consolidated sections in reports for more versatile report building

 

10 ways we increased revenues from QBRs

These are the main functions that enable you to drive more revenues from client meetings…

1. Interactive Report Sharing
2. Client and Master IT Roadmaps
3. Client and Master IT Budgets
4. Roadmap Detail Widgets with Rich Texts
5. Service Review Widgets with Rich Texts
6. Office 365 Audit Templates and recommendation library
7. Service Selector Widgets
8. Video Embeds to reports
9. Snapshots for reports
10. Scoring widgets with dashboards

 

 

2020

Over the next year these will be the main focus areas:

Software Features in Q1

We are releasing many new interesting features during the first quarter to achieve the following goals:

• High-Level Client Engagement - The Client Dashboard helps you to provide a high-level executive overview to client decision-makers over many different reports. An overall score can show their Security Assessment, Office 365 Assessment, Technology Assessment or vCIO Strategy scores in one dashboard. You’re always able to demonstrate the value you bring, regardless of their size or maturity.
• Executive Oversight - Managed Services Platform always attracts the most forward-thinking and innovative MSPs. These MSPs are growing and their leadership teams need more high-level information, like which clients aren’t adopting standards, forecasted project revenues for the next quarter, or which account managers are driving engagement. The new executive dashboards and email reports keep executives informed on their clients and employees.
• Client Project Roadmaps - Client Project Roadmaps have been the most popular updates this year. We wanted to deliver further flexibility to customize the project templates with respect to clients. This way your team can farm typical projects based on templates and then customize the projects for each client, even with varying scope to match requirements. These projects can be synced to Connectwise to send quotations or start project delivery.
• Account Management Productivity - Managed Service Platform does focus on the strategic side of the business, but after implementing the client engagement tools it still functions as a day-to-day operation tool for hundreds of account managers. With the new updates, you are able to sync your activities to your calendar, have an overview of your next activities on the dashboard and also communicate with your team about all your different activities. Do more with less time.

 

Member Success Management

The increased member count and the widened software requires more diligent Member Success operation with custom engagements for different members.

• Software Weekly Live Training - Weekly Software Live Training sessions let your team to ask questions and solve problems in real time.
• Software Peer Groups - For more advanced users of the platform, we provide peer groups to set goals, learn new functions and grow with support.
• Weekly Roundup Emails - We help our members learn by curating the content of blogs, articles, software functions, and partner content into one weekly email roundup. 

 

Membership Programs

For many MSPs the bottleneck of growth is a lack of time. Our Expert Guide Partners have been busy developing membership programs to help grow MSPs with education, masterclasses, coaching, templates and custom engagements.

• vCIO Excellence Membership Program - The program by Virtual-Chas has been launched with great success. New templates, content, masterclasses, and videos are being developed to help Technical Account Managers and vCIOs to stay relevant and offer more business value to clients.
• Cybersecurity Excellence Membership Program - Infosec Consulting has been developing a program to develop, market, deliver and monetize high-value Cybersecurity programs. Pricing, packaging, service design, assessments and complete blueprints for launching successful Cybersecurity services.
• Sales Excellence Membership Program - MSP Sales Pro is launching a very unique sales membership program to win new businesses. This is not an ordinary program that helps you make a website and generate social media buzz, but a comprehensive study of disruptive ways to access high-profile prospects with Cybersecurity and vCIO-led sales processes.
• Info-Tech Research Group Membership Program - Info-Tech Research Group is the most advanced resource for business-focused IT service providers. They are expanding their offering for MSPs to let them move upstream and help them to stay relevant for maturing clients.

 

Community

Managed Services Platform was always a community-driven effort. Next year we are putting more effort into the community portal for members to be able to access Expert Partners, Peers and share ideas and exchange information.

• Integrated community engine on the portal with single-sign-on. Comments, reviews and discussions about courses, templates and solution sets.
• Expert Partner-led private groups for facilitated conversations and access to coaches .
• Private Peer Group Discussions in closed groups to work together on ideas, templates or to seek help from peers.
• Software related discussions about feature requests, hacks, beta programs, and new templates.

 

What are your growth goals for the next year?

Generate more project revenues? Develop a new service you can monetize? Win new clients? Streamline your operation and become more profitable?

Let us know your priorities and we’ll make sure you’re headed in that specific direction!

Happy Growing New Year!

How to Become a Trusted Advisor With Strategic Client Meetings

By Denes Purnhauser on December 13 2019

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.

Ok that’s a shameless cliffhanger, but I really think you should check out this post!

 

Get long term client loyalty with regular and strategic QBRs and IT strategy meetings

 

How to identify the issue?

Identifying the issue is simple, but admitting it is hard.

Let's think about the last 10-20 client meetings and answer Yes or No to the following statements.

• The meetings were about tactical discussions like project scoping, project updates, service management, contract renewals etc.

• The meetings were held with office managers, IT directors or Operational Executives

• The meetings covered technical aspects like backup, disaster recovery, tickets, service metrics and technology projects

• The meetings were mainly initiated by an issue, a client request or a pressing technology problem (like windows 7 update)

• The meetings were mainly based on a well-prepared presentation, documents, proposals etc.

If you answered ‘yes’ to 2 or more of these statements then the majority of your client meetings tend to be ad-hoc, tactical, technology-driven presentations with technology liaisons.

The next question is how many proactive, strategic, business-driven conversations you have with your client's executives.

The more strategic, business-oriented, interactive conversations you have with people who run organizations, the more relevant, sticky and high-value a business partner you are.

 

What is the ROOT problem?

The problem is that these meetings actually define the quality of your relationship with your clients. This seems to be a norm among the MSP community as (no wonder) your services are typically tactical (infrastructure, office, network) and technical (Information Technology) services. But regardless how awesome you are, how great your services are and how diligent your internal processes are, this defines your relationship as a basic IT service provider. That was great in the past but in the new commoditized market this becomes an issue.

Ok here is the short version: doing proactive, strategic, business driven conversations with business leaders will differentiate you and keep you relevant for years to come. That can lead you to expand your client base and transform you from a basic IT service provider to a high-value business partner.

 

Why Strategic Client meetings help?

Strategic Client Meetings are going to help you get the right audience, have the right conversations and make your clients more competitive with your help. You will be able to redefine what technology can do for them and how you can help reach their business goals.

1. Engage Executives - How to provide the value your executives are looking for.

2. Generate More Revenue - How to design exciting project opportunities and close them quickly.

3. Do More in Less Time - How to prepare, run and manage high-value business meetings

 

I. What makes a client meeting strategic?

Some people think that “strategic meeting” is just a buzzword and there are no clear boundaries or definitions that make a client meeting more strategic. Let’s dive into three aspects to start building your own.

1. Strategic Agenda with Strategic Roles

The agenda of these meetings is strategic, not tactical. The topics are their business goals, challenges, what makes them different, why they’re better than their competition and in-house hurdles to execution of their strategy. These topics can be covered only with the people in their organization involved on these levels full time. You need the individual leading the organization.

Don’t assume just because the individual you’re meeting with is the president you’ll have a strategic conversation. For small businesses the president wears many hats. They might be responsible for the technology part of the business. If this is the case your meeting agenda might still be tactical and the conversation will be not strategic.

 

2. Strategic Client Segments

You are running a tech organization so of course you can’t have only strategic conversations. You have to have some tactical dialogue with your clients as well. However, without a policy of how to allocate finite resources - like people who can deliver strategic conversations - to myriad clients based on their size, you can find you’re overspending on small clients who offer less revenue opportunity. It’s crucial to calculate a “client engagement budget” for all client segments. Then you can balance how much time you spend for tactical and strategic conversations. For example, you can allow an “A Client” with $5,000 MRR up to 60 hours of engagement a year but a “C Client” with $1,000 MRR justifies only 12 hours a year. (We use the 5% MRR formula to calculate client engagement budget).

 

3. Strategic Client Playbooks 

Once you know how much time you can spend on a given client segment you can create a strategic playbook for each client. Like your “A Client” with 60 hours annually can have an annual strategy planning workshop (2x4 hours) some business-related cyber security, compliance or application audits (3x4 hours a year) and solid QBRs with multiple people (3x6 hours). You can put it into a playbook, plan the meetings and execute with scalability. However the playbook for a “C Client” might be a light annual strategy workshop to create a roadmap and have basic QBRs to execute the plan.

These three steps lay the foundation for consistently effective and proactive meetings.

 

II. Examples of Strategic Client Meetings

The other common mistake we see among MSPs is to dump every type of discussion into a QBR: contract renewals, technical assessments, updates, technology landscape or standard stack adoption, all to be covered in one 90 minute meeting. Preparing huge presentations will lead to rushing through the process. Let’s check out three very good examples of distributing disparate topics to different meetings to establish the strategic layer for the clients.

 

1. Strategic Workshops

Strategic workshops are delivered typically once a year. This is a highly business-focused conversation with specific topics you can perform with a whiteboard. Encourage brainstorming around their business. A typical exercise can be a SWOT analysis, industry analysis or simply a summary of their goals and where they’re heading. For many smaller MSPs these meetings are driven by the owner of the MSP, and is still scalable as meeting with a client from the executive level once a year is still worth it. Business owner to business owner conversation is more about high-level topics anyways. The workshop format helps bring about predictable outcomes and materials that can be used for building their business, like IT roadmaps.

 

2. Strategic Audits 

There are many topics of discussion that can give measurable outcomes. The health of their infrastructure (IT Technology Health Audit), the utilization of the complete Office 365 suite (Office Productivity Audit), the state of their cyber security practices (NIST Cyber Security Audit) and so on. These audits, done in advance, are based on a scoring mechanism and the meeting is where you’ll be validating the facts, educating the client and generating actionable roadmaps to fix problems and unlock opportunities. These Audits can be distributed over the year as “themes of the quarter” and so on. This provides a positive client engagement pulse with executives based on facts.

 

3. Strategic QBRs 

Here is the payoff. Once you have Strategic Workshops with business topics and you do Audits which translate technical issues to business language, you have a solid case of business context for your IT projects. Your Strategic QBRs can be wrapped around the execution of the strategy. Now your tactical components actually have context as well. Talking about the Disaster Recovery plans, and backups and cloud migration is no longer out of the blue. Now the Quarterly Business Review (QBRs) get the legitimacy of business sense so executives can see the progress and understand the big picture. Further, talking with a technical liaison is easier if the “order” comes from the top and there’s not and insulation layer between you and the executives.

These Strategic Conversations lead to strategic decisions and strategic engagements.

 

III. Outcomes of Strategic Meetings

The main goal of these strategic meetings is to become more of a high-value business partner. The decisions you help them make are higher level and more specifically attentive to their business goals. Often you are just a concierge of those decisions and your MSP will execute the project. However, as these projects are technical by nature you can still manage them. Let’s see what outcomes you can expect to govern your high level engagement.

 

1. Strategic Roadmaps

A strategic roadmap is simply the execution plan of the IT strategy. You have identified the strategy with 2 or 3 major initiatives throughout the year and created a breakdown of projects that need to be completed in order to achieve the goals. The roadmaps need clear, strong approval of intent from the executive level. This is going to be a great framework to wrap the year’s activities around. The projects should be outlined if not scoped. Create project outlines defining the cause, vision and expected outcomes of the projects in 2-3 sentences. These are not project scopes yet. The goal here is to have specific initiatives and lists of typical action items to lead to success.

 

2. STRATEGIC BUDGETS

The trick of these roadmaps is that these projects have to be approved and many details will be forthcoming as the projects get scoped out. As the client’s perception clarifies, they might be getting hungrier for more and expand the project budgets. In order to keep things real and see whether the intent will lead to project approvals it is great to have an overall high level budget estimation for the Roadmap. If you know the project outlines you can “guesstimate” the time and effort behind the project as an assumption. The budget is going to give a reality check to the client about their capabilities and you can sort out the “nice to have” projects without putting so much time into scoping and planning. This also achieves great alignment with the client. Once the budget is approved then approving an individual project will be a breeze as long as they’re within your estimates.

 

3. Strategic Services

Besides managing your project incomes, strategic meetings have the power to actually make your current and new services profitable too. For example, many MSPs have trouble upgrading clients to separate, add-on cyber security services. The need is obvious, but the services are expensive to deliver and explaining the need for an updated security plan is harder without the strategic components. However, if the strategic plan has a cyber security audit, cyber security issues move from a tactical level -  “they need more services” - to a strategic level - “cyber security is a strategic level risk.” The “$35 per user” additional cyber security add-on will be accepted more readily. The process is less salesy and it puts the responsibility on their end to make the call, or live with the potential consequences.

The strategic meetings deliver more strategic decisions and this transforms you into a high-value strategic partner.

 

Conclusion

Running an MSP is hard. There are many issues about service delivery, hiring people and growth. Establishing strategic relationships with clients and prospects makes everything easier: better control of the client, higher quality conversations, more visible value, and obvious differentiation. Every forward-looking MSP is getting more strategic, the question is how quickly can they make the transition.

 

Accelerate Your Growth with the new features just released

By Denes Purnhauser on October 18 2019

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

 

1. New software features for Growth

One competitive advantage can be to build your MSP faster, design and communicate services better, create better client experience and become a high-value business partner.

Integrating these functions into one platform will generate momentum and even solving one bottleneck at a time keeps that momentum building. You don’t need to master everything all at once - just one at a time - then ride the momentum to reap the results as you move on to the next bottleneck.

 

New Features to Help Inspire High-Value Client Conversations

During the 2019 Q4 release we were focused on making you a master communicator as an Account Manager, vCIO, Technical Account Manager, Owner, Salesperson or even as a virtual Chief Information Officer.

Click on the circles!

Some of the major focus areas:

Sections: Organize your reports better into sections, open them for clients and focus on the content you are about to deliver or their decisions you want to support.

Questionnaire: Get involvement by conducting questionnaires up front. Use the results for an audit, checklist or a general progress report. More involvement leads to more commitment.

Calculators: Turning vague ideas into specific numbers, percentages or dollar amounts will facilitate communication. Use calculators with clients together for clarity and collect evidence to support their decisions.

Snapshot: Taking occasional snapshots will build a story about the problems they had, the solutions you provided and the growth they achieved with your help.

Integrations: Use more tools from your stack like BrightGauge, Office365 or SmileBack to pull out detailed data whenever you want to underline your message or show evidence.

Audience: Communicate to the right audience by selecting client side roles such as CEO, CFO, Office Manager or IT Coordinator. Log the meeting based on their seniority and collect Client Engagement Scores.

Infographics: Get your ideas across with modern visuals, interactive drawings, timelines, processes or charts. Customize your own graphics or embed auto updating partner infographics for changing content.

Scorecards: Simplify things with quick ratings. Gather user feedback, executive opinion or even the internal team's perception of scorecards. Send surveys or complete within the report and showcase scorecards.

 

New Features Help You Focus and Boost Productivity

The other big focus is on your execution efficiency with the 2019 Q4 release. There’s dashboards show aggregated information, a renewed Connectwise integration and many small workflow related UI enhancements to do more with less.

Click on the circles!

Standard Adoption Score Dashboard: Have a quick glance at the current rate of the adoption of your technology stack. You can set different scores for different segments and measure with attention to your diverse clientiele.

Growth Score Dashboard: Identify the amount of revenue in your deal pipeline and where revenues are stuck. Find out why you can’t move from planning to approval or why projects aren’t closed and billed.

Client Engagement Dashboard: Keep tabs on your high-value clients and be confident they all have regular meetings and are engaged. Even a substantially cheaper offer won’t undermine your value and they’ll stay.

Master Roadmap Portfolio: Forecast workload, budget and analyze projects together to be able to push certain initiatives further or close them faster to meet your resource allocation needs.

New Connectwise integration: Generate Connectwise opportunities and projects from the platform and keep those opportunities and projects synced with your PSA and your roadmap. This is a true two-way integration to sync account management with the service team.

Task Library: Simplify operations and communications by predefining tasks needed to meet the technology best practices. Connect library items to your scores and auto-generate tickets in Connectwise.

Multiple Seniorities: Assign different client-side roles to your contacts to make sure you have all types of conversations you need with the strategic, tactical and technical business roles. 

Expanded New Templates: Updated templates for the Client Engagement Excellence Program are ready for you. A brand new Quarterly Business Review with visuals, dashboards and partner content will help you get inspired and build the report that will support your goals.

 

 

2. Expert Guides for Growth

Choose a role you want to explore further and watch the short video for inspiration. Expert guides will walk you through how to grow your business with that role. 

How to grow with Account Management

Sell High-Value, standard projects with a proactive process - by Myles Olson

How to grow with vCIO

Drive Strategic Conversations and take on the execution by Adam Walter

How to grow with Technical Account Management

Develop Technology Standards and get all your clients to adopt - by Skip Ziegler

How to grow with Sales

Generate qualified leads and differentiate with client experience - by Mark Woldman

How to grow with cyber security

Make cyber security make sense to clients and offer packages they can buy - by Caleb Christopher

How to grow with Focus on Execution

Create structures for AM/vCIO, keep the team in focus and ensure accountability - by Elissa Kulczycki

 

3. Role Specific Programs for Growth

We are introducing role specific SMART goals for you to accelerate your growth with one role at a time.

• Account Managers: Generate $100.000 project revenues in 10 strategy driven QBRs
• How to grow with vCIO:  Upgrade 3 clients to a paid stand alone vCIO package with $3.000 MRR 
• Technical Account Management: Approve a Technology Roadmap with all key clients to adopt your Technology Standards
• Sales: Get in front of 5 high-value prospects and close 2 deals with $5.000 MRR
• Cyber security: Upgrade 10 clients to a paid stand alone cyber security package with $25/user/month
• Managers: Structure your Account Management and vCIO Operation with Client Engagement Score
  

 

4. Process for a Sustainable Growth

Growing your business can be done with quick high-intensity bursts. These results unsustainable growth with short peaks of results. We want to make sure you have a long term vision, break those to quarter long rocks you can deliver. Those rocks are focusing on one area, fix the bottleneck and keep it sustainable. Then you move your attention to the next goal but build on top of the previous efforts.

1. Platform Orientation Meeting - if you have no membership yet, let's start exploring your goals and discover how the platform might serve your growth
2. Growth Readiness Assessment - assess your readiness of growth and identify the bottlenecks holding you back preventing your breakthrough
3. Smart Growth Action Plan - build a SMART goal and plan your next steps to achieve those goals with an action plan
4. Execute your Rock - do it by yourself, pick an expert guide's education or engage with a 1-many or 1-1 program to make things change
5. Repeat - go back to the drawing board, choose your next goal and get started on the next quarter.... 

Grow your enterprise one quarter at a time

Hope you are excited to get your MSP to the next level and start building your SMART goals and action plans!

Unleash Your Growth Potential

By Denes Purnhauser on October 11 2019

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.

Understand your Untapped Growth Potential

Let's first check your company roles and how they can be bottlenecks in your growth.

• Account managers are not providing a predictable stream of projects and cannot support a steady cash-flow
• vCIOs are not upgrading clients to strategic-business vCIO services and cannot get paid by clients
• Technical Account Managers are not adopting new technology standards and cannot set the base for efficient service delivery
• Owners are not setting proper structure for AM/vCIO and cannot keep the team accountable
• Sales People are not getting in front of ideal prospects and cannot differentiate themselves from the competition
• vCSOs are not upgrading clients to modern cyber security services and cannot get paid by clients

You might be a small company and you as the owner might be wearing all of these hats. If you had to choose only one, which would be the most important?

Unleash your Growth Potential one role at a time

Working on every role at the same time will not let you focus or ever achieve a breakthrough. Pick the "rock" you want to work on during the specific quarter and focus on that role. Here are some examples how:

Watch the complete seminar to learn how to unleash your potential with different roles in your organization. Expert guides will walk you through making it happen.

 

• How to grow with Account Management: Sell High-Value, standard projects with a proactive process by Myles Olson
• How to grow with vCIO: Drive Strategic Conversations and take on the execution by Adam Walter
• How to grow with Technical Account Management: Develop Technology Standards and Adopt them with all of your clients by Skip Ziegler
• How to grow with Sales: Generate qualified leads and differentiate with client experience by Mark Woldman
• How to grow with Cyber Security: Make cyber security make sense to clients and offer packages they can buy by Caleb Christopher
• How to grow with Focus on Execution: Create structures for AM/vCIO, keep the team in focus and ensure accountability by Elissa Kulczycki

 

How to Unleash your Growth Potential

The traditional way of developing a company is to develop best practices, implement those to the normal daily life and keep vigilant with them during the day-to-day operation. As you have no resources this leads to bursts of projects without sustainable outcomes. Think about why the six roles of your company still have bottlenecks.

Your potential of growth depends on three things:

• Your Talent - the strengths of your team
• Experts help you - people can take the workload from your shoulders
• Tools help you - applications can offer you a productive framework and streamlined execution

By building your MSP with Expert Guides and Purpose-Built Software you will drastically cut the time to success. This will help you to leverage your current resources to break through the barriers and stop spinning your wheels.

 

5 Steps for sustainable growth

Growing your business can be accomplished through a series of quick high intensity bursts, but will manifest in unsustainable growth with short peaks of results. We want to make sure you have a long-term vision, and can break down the big rocks to stones you can deliver. Those big rocks don’t fit through your system - fix the bottleneck and keep it sustainable. Then move your attention to the next goal but build on top of the previous efforts.

1. Platform Orientation Meeting - if you have no membership yet, let's start exploring your goals and discover how the platform might serve your growth
2. Growth Readiness Assessment - assess your readiness of growth and identify the bottlenecks holding you back and preventing your breakthrough
3. Smart Growth Action Plan - build a SMART goal and plan your next steps to achieve those goals with an action plan
4. Execute your Rock - do it by yourself, pick an expert guide's education or engage with a 1-many or 1-1 program to push things through
5. Repeat - Go back to the drawing board, choose your next goal and execute the rock of the next quarter....

Conclusion

Regardless of your company size you always have growth potential. By identifying the low-hanging-fruit with one role, you are able to generate the momentum and the positive cash needed to fuel further growth. Being more conscious, focusing on one role at a time and making sure the role will stay sustainable will deliver a compounding positive effect over time.

 

How you steal money from your own MSP and how to stop doing it

By Denes Purnhauser on October 4 2019

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.

We’ll go through this process by analyzing a typical MSP use case: Account Management.

 

1. Focusing on the symptom instead of the root problems

Say you go to a client meeting that doesn’t go as planned. Maybe the client was not engaged, they did not seem to value your services, they weren’t interested in the next project you offer or were simply looking for a price cut of your services.

You come out feeling "we are no longer relevant", "our competition is stronger", or “we need a better QBR process". These are not the root problems to solve - these are the symptoms.

 

2. Focusing on a tactical solution

Now you feel you should take action and start browsing the net on how to conduct a better client meeting and  become more relevant.

You check out some software applications and spend some time evaluating them, download templates, figure out the best processes and talk to peers about how they do their client meetings.

You land a software package, the team is happy and feel the solution is on the way.

 

3. Premature scaling:

As you execute the implementation you start to see the big picture and imagine how you’ll be doing 15 QBRs monthly for your 45 clients. The challenge becomes terrifying - the amount of activities and tasks to get done, all the preparation and connecting the dots. You start working on processes, customizing collaterals, and working on the process day and night.

Then time goes by and a handful of meetings is done; the team feels this is way too much effort for too little gain and loses momentum. The team finds another urgent project to work on and suddenly the QBRs fall by the wayside, and client meetings are not delivered.

Does this not describe what’s happening with your MSP? Let's go through this list...

• Why did your vCIO initiatives, IT Strategy Services and monetization of IT consultancy never take off?
• Why can your Technical Account Managers not communicate the increased values to clients and you find clients don’t value your services anymore?
• Why is your team still addressing the noisy clients rather than focusing on the high value clients with opportunities?
• Why can’t you get in front of new prospects and close high-value opportunities in a predictable way?
• Why do you cover the increased costs of IT security services in your MSP package rather than monetizing on IT Security as add-on services?

This is not your fault... this is a common symptom of what’s missing - a strategic approach to make improvements in your company.. Let's try another spin on this story:

 

1. Analyzing the symptoms but working on the root problems:

You go to that client meeting which did not go as planned. The client wasn’t engaged, didn’t seem to value your services, and were only interested in a price cut and not your next projects.

You go back and think it through and you realize that your service company has no Client Engagement "Department" at all. No foundations, no client segments, no roles, no playbooks defined and clients are generally served in a technical/tactical level but are not managed in a strategic way. Holy smokes, we need to do something.

We need to define the complete Account Management program and create resources to get somebody to run it!

 

2. Set a Smart Goal for a focused Burst:

We need a Burst of effective effort which will start the process in a low maturity setting and help us generate revenues to make it sustainable, work on the system and fine tune it. The goal, however, is not to get it perfect right away, only to start it and get momentum so you can set the foundation to fix it in the long term.

Set a Smart Goal for the quarter: "Increase Project Revenues by $100k in the next 90 days". We do not say "do a better QBR" or "Structure Account Management". We say something quite specific that we can achieve if we reverse engineer the goal to manageable pieces. Like doing 10 QBRs and landing $10,000 each. Now we can focus on the best course of action to land $10k on each QBR. This is actionable, feasible, and the team can actually get results AND develop the process at the same time.

 

3. Execute the Burst with the end in mind:

Now we have a plan, so we can work on the details that will generate momentum. We’re going to use the Burst of effort to generate as much value as we can with the limited resources we have. But we’ll focus on revenue generation which will be used to create the resources for the higher maturity operation later.

• We deliver QBRs to 10 clients who have security and infrastructure technology debts.
• We generate project roadmaps focusing on security and infrastructure averaging $10,000.
• We list 5 -10 low-hanging-fruit projects and customize our collaterals to focus on selling only those items to make the process simple enough.
• We run a high-value client meeting that results in agreement on the relevant projects.
• We do not customize, do not try to build a rocket ship and we do not automate... just ship it.
  
  

4. Create a machine to grow the momentum:

Now the Burst of effort was intentionally "immature", "simple", "minimum viable" or "beta". Why? Because the goal was not to fix symptoms but to be able to create capacity for delivering the required client engagement activities, introduce the concepts to clients and test the waters before we scale anything. We do not have an integrated approach, things are clumsy internally but the client facing part is optimized.

• We use the projects to get some breathing space and positive cash-flow,
• We refine the process and start customization and automation,
• We build on top of the foundation of QBRs and start conducting them regularly with lower value clients, and
• We introduce new ideas and new outcomes for each new QBR and start adding new tools like plans, budgets, roadmaps and so on.

 

Conclusion:

Creating Smart Goals for a conscious Burst of effort with the end in mind and generating the capacity to put the process to the next level is a way to actually create something sustainable.

Without Smart Goals and the quick Burst, followed by no execution machine our initiatives, all we’ll become is noise makers, never taking off and not generating value within our MSP...like stealing money from ourselves?

 

The 4 roles that make you a high value business partner

By Denes Purnhauser on August 30 2019

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.

 

Client Engagement Roles

 

Client Engagement Roles are responsible for interaction and involvement with your clients in various distinct business activities, and are defined by their area of focus. As very few MSPs have yet to clearly delineate those roles, a lack of clarity creates unnecessary noise within the process of client engagement.

 

Your client engagement roles should be separated by the nature of the activities (Business or Technology Related) and by the focus of the activities (Tactical or Strategic).

We have four different roles segmented by nature and focus of activities. Account Managers and Technical Account Manager roles are responsible for the tactical focus and Business vCIOs and Technical vCIOs are responsible for the Strategic focus.

The reasons for doing this:

• the client audience will be distinct (CEO / CFO / Office Manager / IT Coordinator)
• the required skills of the various activities will be distinct (Sales, Planning, Strategy, Technical)
• the engagement cycles will be variable (Strategic - Annual and Tactical - Quarterly)

Without proper separation of the roles, client engagement will be inefficient and your communication will be confusing.

Examples:

• the owner of the client entity has to sit in a meeting discussing tickets and backup issues quarterly
• the account manager is asking approval for a project from an office manager
• clients are not interested in participating in business review meetings
• clients are not engaged with business conversations discussing only technical issues
  
  

 

Client Engagement Responsibilities

 

Each role has a responsibility to engage the client with particular activities. The Strategic roles engage clients typically annually with executive roles. The tactical roles do so with the office manager or another technical coordinator level.

Typical responsibilities for the Strategic-Business (vCIO) role: Make sure IT is viewed as a strategic business asset, not a cost

• IT Strategy Development
• Business Application Selection
• Data and Business Intelligence
• Office Productivity
• System Integrations

 

Typical responsibilities for the Strategic-Technical (Technical vCIO) role: Make sure that the IT Infrastructure is aligned with their business goals

• IT Infrastructure Roadmap Plan
• IT Infrastructure Budget Plan
• Technology Stack Adoption
• IT Infrastructure Risk Assessment
• Hardware Lifecycle Management

 

Typical responsibilities for the Tactical-Business (Account Manager) role: Make sure that the companies are aligned, engaged and are expanding their business with you.
General Client Engagement

• IT Infrastructure Roadmap/Budget Reviews
• Service Satisfaction
• Service Expansion/Renewal
• New Service Sales

 

Typical responsibilities for the Tactical-Technical (Technical Account Manager) role: Make sure that the service is delivered well and the day-to-day operation is efficient

• Best Practice Adoption
• Service Delivery Alignment
• Ticket, Service Process Reviews
• Security / Backup / DRP Reviews
• Lunch and Learn

 

The Business-vCIO role’s scope is usually outside of the MSP’s IT infrastructure offering. That means the goal of this engagement role is to expand the services with the client. The engagements should lead to extra sales.

The rest of the role’s scope is inside the MSP offering and helps engage with the IT Infrastructure core services.

 

Client Engagement People

You might be an entrepreneur doing client engagement on your own. Maybe you’re an owner trying to delegate some of the client engagement activities to an employee. Even if you’re leading or participating in teams dedicated to client engagement, the likelihood that the roles and their audiences efficiently matching is pretty low. 

 

Most organizations have overlapping titles for many roles. The trick is how to map different people to distinct roles. Be aware you might have to redefine your current structure to achieve this streamlining of your processes.

Best Practices:

• If you are an owner delegating the roles, let's keep the strategic role and delegate the tactical elements to an employee. This way you can keep the high-level owner-to-owner type discussions with clients.
• If you are in a team, the sales team can take over the Account Management roles for more business development pursuits, the primary technical resource can take the Technical Account Management roles and a more senior individual can step up as a Technical vCIO. The Business vCIO can be done by the owner or a full-time consultant type resource.

 

Conclusion:

By clarifying roles you may find it much easier to

• hire the right people to the AM, vCIO positions
• engage clients with QBRs
• provide clients with strategic roadmaps
• get clients to adopt your best practices or solution stack
  
  
  

 

Client Engagement Excellence Program

By Denes Purnhauser on May 31 2019

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.

 

 

But without the tech-talk, it's hard to reduce the ticket noise, approve projects, get your technology stack and best practices adopted, or introduce new services. The problem is not a missing feature, tool, lack of integration or a usability problem.

The problem is a missing methodology and implementation process for client engagement excellence.

 

Generate client engagement with five qbrs in 30 days

 

Client Engagement Excellence Model

This program was developed to give you a comprehensive, step-by-step approach and the tools to take your client engagement activities to the next level. We’ve started with a client engagement excellence model to break down this problem into manageable pieces.

1. Define the foundations like your client engagement and client-side roles, the available time budget for each of your client segments and to develop playbooks for proactive client engagement.
2. Plan on how to standardize your services, technology stack, and best practices. What are the different development processes and how are those standards going to be adopted by your entire client base?
3. Implement client engagement activities to make sure you engage all the client-side roles like business focused audits and workshops for top Managers, Technology Planning for the operation leads, engaging Technology and Business Reviews for the office managers and IT coordinators.

 

Client Engagement Excellence Process

Then we designed a process to improve all these areas.

1. The process starts with a Client Engagement Readiness Assessment which helps to determine your current client engagement, find your bottlenecks, and discover any missing pieces. Basically, what would you like to achieve?
2. Then you form a plan - a roadmap to bridge the gaps. The roadmap has specific deliverables pointing to specific courses, masterclasses and solution sets.
3. The third part of the process is to execute the roadmap. You cannot do it all at once so you will focus on ensuring this practice is going to start.
4. The fourth and last part of the process is a repeatable accountability cycle to continually improve on all the components.

 

Client Engagement Excellence Program

The Program has it all

1. Courses - With access to on-demand training courses, articles, step-by-step guides, downloadable resources and videos you can learn as an individual or as a team.
2. Masterclasses - Access to Masterclasses in four topics is offered twice a week. Ask and get your questions answered by us or by your peer members to apply what you learn faster.
3. Coaching - Access is available to highly recommended 1-1 implementation program with weekly accountability coaching. We all know that excellence in client engagement cannot wait, and there's no time for trial and error or putting these things on hold.
4. Partner Content
   1. Our partners from Sea-Level operations can help to define your roles, create your client segments, calculate your budget and make sure your processes will be implemented.
   2. Our partners at Virtual-C can help you to design your standards, implement your existing best practices and implement workshops, audits, or strategic business planning sessions with CEOs as part of your vCIO engagements.
   3. Partners from MSP Sales Pros can help develop your complete Sales Engagement Program by defining your differentiators, guiding demand generation and demonstrating how to run engaging sales meetings.

 

Benefits

This program will not just give you direction and guidance on what to do but offer you all the help needed to make this change happen.

With that, you will implement the most comprehensive Account Management / Technical Account Management and vCIO programs available for MSPs today. You will develop and adopt your standards across your clientele to reduce ticket volume, and the need for support on myriad technologies. You will run QBRs with the right audience effectively AND engage your client’s executives with topics they want to talk about.