The 4 Steps of Successful Cyber Security Service Monetization

In my observation, previously working for an managed service provider and now with MSPs: for some, monetizing security is an elusive goal that seems to be reserved for those who already have connections, experience, and the right customers. Why?

Generate client engagement

with five NIST cyber security roadmaps in 30 days

Clients are confused

It is very common for managed services customers to believe their MSP is responsible for cyber security. They think it should be included in the price they already pay. This is just an extension of the misconception that Information Security is part of Information Technology.

MSPs are inadequate

Selling cyber security services is only for those “big” enough to have an in-house service because quality security talent is hard to find, expensive, and nearly impossible to retain. And without some experience on the team, many MSPs are not sure they have adequate expertise to build and run a security program anyway.

Some turn to third parties for assessments and services, but are concerned that having a 3rd party conduct assessments might reveal that somehow the MSP has been doing a bad job with security. Often, the MSP can't play a role of any significance to the customer in the assessment process, so without an option for a heads-up, many abandon the effort.

MSPs are overwhelmed

Big companies are snapping up all the qualified/experienced security staff, while the rest are playing “employment pinball” until they’ve got enough experience to be a senior analyst somewhere. From the outside looking in, there’s a strong “gotta have money to make money” vibe in cyber security.

There also don’t seem to be any partners focused on helping MSPs build cyber security programs. All the partners and products are focused on the Enterprise sector. What guidance is available costs $thousands and still takes 8-12 months to build out a cyber  security program and able to offer any services.

It shouldn’t be this hard

It just shouldn’t be this hard to build and monetize a cyber security program — especially if you actually care about it! There is a way. I’ve built a cyber security program designed for MSPs. This works for those who want to work on building their own in-house program as well as those who just want to be able to sell cyber security (and remain involved) without having to hire and retain their own cyber security experts.

4 Steps to Monetize Cyber security in your MSP

Essentially, the process goes like this: Educate → Sell → Assess (and prioritize) → Remediate (remediate, and remediate some more).

Once I show a business owner their need, they then typically ask me what they should about it, so I sell them an assessment in which we build a roadmap of risk reduction projects to execute in both the short and long term. Now in my case, I’m not actively an MSP, so someone else is making the money on those remediation projects, and those projects hold more revenue than any single assessment — especially if the remediation includes subscription services.

Educate

When it comes to selling cyber security assessments, the first thing you should want to avoid is being shopped on price, so instead of vying for position in the eyes of the few who already know they need cyber security, seek to educate just some of the many who don’t understand their need. 

Some will understand if only you can explain things in a way they can relate to. That is the secret sauce. I have found a way to effectively communicate the significance of cyber security to the ongoing success of their business in this internet-connected world. 

In the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, they describe how to shortcut the learning process for complex or new topics. Essentially, the human brain learns based on what it already knows. My favorite example is where they attempt to describe an uncommon fruit in detail, from scratch. When they’re done, the reader may think he has a decent understanding of this fruit. Then they start over, but this time they start with a point of common shared understanding: “it’s like a grapefruit, but bigger.” Instantly, the reader understands the fruit even more clearly than by reading the detailed description. This is the technique we use in helping business owners understand their need for security.

See a short sample video: Making Security Make Sense - Teaser

Here’s why I start with education: In my experience, when I play the role of mentor by educating the asset owners, they tend also look to me for their next step. They ask “OK, well… so now what do I do? What’s my next step?” The obvious answer is: start with an assessment.

Sell

Since the business owner already knows his need for an assessment at this point, my job is to continue to guide him toward his goal of getting one. He already wants to buy, so I explain the “simple process” the assessment follows. I do this because visualizing a simple start-to-finish process takes the mystery (read that: uncertainty) out of the purchase.

Once the process is understood, other than presenting him with a quote with a Statement of Work for an NIST cyber security assessment, my job is to not give him any reason to think twice. Show him the process, then give them the quote + SOW. I am pretty firm on this not being the time to do special scoping discussions or negotiations. Keep it simple. Anything but a smooth path to purchase introduces risk of a lost sale.

Note: As a cyber security consulting firm, the sale of the assessment is my “win,” so I don’t really budge on pricing because I know what I need to get out of the transaction for it to be profitable. But for an MSP, there is another angle to consider: the assessment is just the beginning of the revenue stream from cyber security. For the MSP, remediation projects are more likely to be the real revenue source. So MSPs can flex on the front-end pricing (quite a bit in fact, if they know their typical remediation revenue). BUT, this bears repeating: Keep it simple. If you slow things down or introduce turbulence by debating numbers, the chance of losing the sale increases greatly.

So here’s what I suggest: Before you show them pricing, decide ahead of time what “deals” you’re willing to make. So if you’re willing to offer a half-price deal, be ready to cross through that initial price and put the half price number there. However, I wouldn’t start with a bid of several thousand dollars and be willing to go to free though… People don’t respect what they don’t have to pay for, and if they took you from $thousands to $0, “What kind of game are you playing?” Whatever your numbers, pick and stick so the process is quick.

Assess / Prioritize

Whether you’re running your own assessments in-house or you’ve outsourced them, they need to be timely and relevant, and they need to demonstrate business value.

Timely Assessments

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably not trying to run comprehensive assessments with complex requirements. That means there’s no good reason for these assessments to take long.

For relatively straightforward assessments, I shoot for two weeks as a maximum amount of time to gather data, prioritize findings, produce the summary with recommendations, and be presenting back to the client. I’ve found they typically tolerate three weeks, but at the fourth week and beyond, they’re impatient and much more likely to be critical of your findings, process, advice, etc, especially if you have any “critical findings” in your report which you took your sweet time to tell them about. So if your goal is to sell remediation services after the NIST cyber security assessment, be quick about the process.

Relevant, demonstrating business value

Unfortunately, many assessments have been delivered which had little more than the standard output from whatever scanning tool was used. That’s like a mechanic handing me a color-coded printout of the OBD2 readouts and telling me to fix all the red stuff first. Thanks a lot.

For an assessment to be relevant and have business value, it has to provide realistic guidance for the particular business for whom it was performed. A quality assessment delves into the risk tolerance, the whos, and the whys of the customer. Only when you have a good understanding of the business’ objectives can you make relevant recommendations. For example, there are plenty of critical severity findings which may pose no practical risk for a given business, while several low severity findings in combination pose immediate risk.

Relevance and business value go hand-in-hand. If you understand how the business operates, what it wants to achieve, and it’s mid-to-long term goals, you can offer practical guidance on risk reduction.

Remediate

Remediation is the sweetest part for an MSP. It’s additional revenue (maybe even monthly recurring revenue!) on top of whatever managed services are already in place. 

When it’s time to present findings and remediation guidance to the customer, it’s best to break it into timeframes. There may well be several relatively critical findings, but keep in mind: if this business owner only recently realized the need for cyber security, they don’t have a budget set for remediation. They bought the assessment to get a feel for what they need to do something about vs what they’re going to have to put off until later (or simply accept as inherent risk). So in my experience, it is very well received to provide them a “menu” of things to fix within different timeframes. Something like “Immediate,” “This Quarter,” and “This Year.” (Keep it simple.)

During the report presentation, I explain the implications of findings and my recommendations for immediate fixes, then I ask the business owner which ones they can / want to tackle first. Everything else in the “Immediate” section gets moved down into the “This Quarter” section, with anything else already there. Again, we discuss what would be practical to pursue within the next 60-90 days and move everything else down into the “This Year” section.

These discussions can’t really take place without some understanding of the price for the various remediation projects. So I recommend the MSP come to the meeting with individual quotes for each item in the “Immediate” section and rough price-only estimates for the items in the “This Quarter” section. This allows the business owner to do some quick mental math so we can plot a rough course for the next year during the presentation meeting. Estimates for the longer-term projects are optional, but aren’t very helpful during this meeting.

Once the business owner has decided the order of remediation projects, an Account Manager or vCIO can handle the roadmap without further need of a cyber security analyst. Any immediate actions for which the MSP brought quotes can be executed on the spot.

Note: MSPs need to be ready for the findings. Some findings may reflect poorly on the MSP, so be ready to step up and fix things ASAP. While this may be embarrassing at first, it is usually endearing to the customer when they see you doing your part, just like you’re recommending for them to do.

The 4 Steps of Successful Cyber security Service Monetization

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Why MSPs are not closing business enough

You pro­vide a great ser­vice, the price is right, your mar­ket­ing cam­paign is spot-on, yet very few deals are actu­ally clos­ing? Does this sound like your com­pany? Sadly, a good offer often times isn’t enough to win a client over. Some­times a lower level com­peti­tor gets the busi­ness. Why? Bet­ter sales tech­niques. In order to go from con­tact to con­tract, you need to be one step ahead of your com­peti­tors, espe­cially as it relates to sales processes and tech­niques. Fol­low­ing are some help­ful tips that will help you close the sale faster – and eas­ier – than ever:

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

Cre­ate a fool proof meet­ing agenda

As a rule of thumb, busi­ness meet­ings with your prospects must be as effi­cient as pos­si­ble. Not only does that help you present your­self as a pro­fes­sional, but it also sig­nif­i­cantly reduces the time it takes to close the sale. On the other hand, a dis­or­ga­nized meet­ing sends a very pow­er­ful mes­sage that you are not prop­erly pre­pared. To make sure you’re show­ing off your com­pany in the best way pos­si­ble, have the meet­ing planned out from start to end, leav­ing noth­ing to chance.

Go over the impor­tant stuff early in the process

Per­haps one of the worst moments in a sales job is when after months of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, you sud­denly real­ize that you’re just not the right fit for the deal. As a result, you never close the sale, and all the time and resources you’ve spent go down the drain. To pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing to you, ask the impor­tant ques­tions early in the process. This will ensure that you’re not wast­ing your time on a client that will never actu­ally close the sale.

Pro­vide more than is expected from you

After you’ve gained the ini­tial inter­est from a poten­tial client, you need to cre­ate a good image – and fast. A pop­u­lar sales tech­nique involves going beyond the expected, and sur­pris­ing the client in a good way. The ways of achiev­ing this range from free gifts and tokens of appre­ci­a­tion to infor­ma­tive emails that could in some way help the client in their busi­ness. All of this will attract their atten­tion, and make you more appeal­ing than the competitors.

Go beyond a “yes”

In many cases when try­ing to close a sale, you will get a ver­bal agree­ment, while the actual con­tract never gets signed. It’s impor­tant to make the phase between ver­bal and writ­ten agree­ment as short as pos­si­ble. The longer your prospect stalls, the higher are the chances they’ll change their minds or find one of your com­peti­tors to be more suited for their needs. Let your poten­tial clients know that you are seri­ous about the deal, and that you expect the same from them.

To actu­ally close the sale, you have to be atten­tive and meet the client’s needs. Using the sales tech­niques out­lined above might be just the thing that “clicks” and makes your next prospect choose you over your com­peti­tors. In order to improve your chances of clos­ing each deal, make sure you man­age each and every deal per your stages in your sales cycle. This cru­cial step will min­i­mize the time spent on bad deals and shorten your sale scy­cle on qual­i­fied deals.

Need more help? Let the team show you how to win more deals via bet­ter meet­ings and stronger qual­i­fy­ing techniques.

What does EOS have to do with becoming a Cloud Service Provider

I'm talking to you today because I've been getting a lot of questions about why I've been so focused on EOS^TM (Entrepreneurial Operating System) and then other strategic methodologies and all of these teachings that I've been bringing to you regarding shifting from a traditional managed service provider to becoming a Cloud Service Provider (CCSP). And what I've realized as I've worked with different clients is that one shoe doesn't fit all...

Win new clients with it sales software

I could be far more prescriptive about the specific tools and execution strategies, and we'll begin to formulate that as we have more and more folks come together and get our brain share together in terms of these specific tools and tactics we can utilize in this journey. But I fully believe that not all organizations are built the same, and ultimately leadership needs to come together, create a great strategic plan and they need to know how to execute against that plan.

So all of my conversations have really come back to my core belief. And I happened to be an EOS implementer as well. And so I've been teaching people traction, EOS, and really helping folks utilize that methodology to execute well within their business. Once they begin to execute well, we can get a bit more depth around strategic tools such as 3HAG, I'm a big fan of 3HAG, Blue Ocean strategy and some others to really think about where they want to be, who they want to become over the next three years, and how that ties to their vision, their values, their purpose. Bring it down to that strategic three year map, that picture, and then know how to execute against it within that one year, 90 day, and one week rhythm that EOS brings to you as an organization.

So as I work with you, please know that my focus is going to be very centric around the EOS, that EOS mindset. And then everybody I'm working with is thinking about how Cloud is going to shift their business. And we're also going to layer in some strategic activities to make sure that we are aiming that rifle in the right direction, and we know where we want to end up three years down the road.

Why vCIO Programs Fail

The industry is changing, you need to evolve or be left behind by your clients. The next step to MSPs is vCIO, but how do we get there?

I have spent the last few years coaching MSPs on how to create successful vCIO programs. There is a consistent message across every single MSP:

“We want a vCIO program but have not been able to get it going”

BE A BUSINESS PARTNER, NOT JUST AN MSP

I want to dive into why this is happening and what you can do about it. But first some history:

Technology has been around since before the wheel, helping us do things easier. When computers first came around they were used to help process data more efficiently. Businesses used these devices to solve problems and disrupt industry. When we first started out you could make a killing doing PC support because everyone was trying to use this technology they didn’t understand.

Then as more professionals entered the marketplace and technology needs evolved we shifted focus to mostly server and network support with PC support still being a staple because labor for that is now very cheap. Then things started moving off premises as business applications moved to the cloud. What this means is there is less infrastructure to maintain on site and it is more and more common to see larger companies outsource IT support.

So what we have seen is support move from PCs to Servers to the Cloud. Now what?

While technology used to be something that companies used to differentiate themselves or create unique opportunities, it now plays a critical role in their business. Things that are critical to organizations, are managed strategically, at the executive level. Your clients are making strategic IT decisions today, the problem is often times they don’t have the right people utilizing the right information to make those decisions. Strategic MSPs deliver services that allow them to take a seat at the table to help manage technology to meet the needs of the business. In other words you need to bring strategy to the table. This is what the vCIO does. But you already knew this, otherwise why are you reading this blog? What you want to know is “How do I get there?”

Here is the problem I keep coming across: MSPs think that strategy is desiging out a product life cycle.

While this is a great best practice, you will end up losing customers if you focus on it.

Your customers don’t care that you have a plan for upgrading firewalls on a schedule, nor do they care about your plans to deliver next gen products. What they care about is the same thing you do: Making Money.

In order to do this you have to do something that most IT professionals avoid like the plague. “Business Strategy” You know, all those boring business classes that you make fun of and meetings with random people that go nowhere, you need to learn it and apply it to technology. You get to become a manager. This means regularly scheduled meetings that focus on business talk.

I often refer to myself as a business consultant with a technology focus. The reason for this is because I need to present what I do to business leaders. They understand the business consultant, they are someone who helps a business solve problems. I just do it from a technology standpoint.

By setting the table like this I am able to get them to focus on strategic sessions that do not talk about technology but rather what problems are facing the business as a whole. I do this through 2 main items:

• Project Discovery: SWOT strategy sessions but any business strategy framework will do. You just need to learn about the client’s problems and opportunities facing their business.
• Audit: The next thing you do is learn their technology and business. Some standard audit will do, just as long as it is consistent. I recommend a technology stack audit and Porter’s 5 forces analysis for the business audit.

Once these are done put this all together and pitch your technology solutions and explain the SPECIFIC business problem it addresses. If you ever say “Because it is getting old” you are losing your client. If you mention firewalls or servers...you are going to lose your client. What you need to say is “We will allow sales staff to process more clients by implementing technology to increase their access to the salesforce platform” THEN you can mention the technology that will do this. Maybe it is a virtual workspace, or maybe you are implementing a more robust WAN, it doesn’t matter at that point because you have already won the customer over.

Technology is a business augmentor

This is the core message you need to get to your clients. You want to frame everything you do in this light. By understanding their business and technology, you will be able to pitch solutions that will deliver a service that makes a difference. Your clients will brag about how you helped them disrupt their industry, develop a world class classroom or break through the glass ceiling.

In the end, stop talking about technology’s gadgets and gizmos. Start talking about business strategy and how to make your clients money!

Virtual C engages clients to increase the success of their IT delivery. Want to learn more? 

BE A BUSINESS PARTNER, NOT JUST AN MSP

The IT budget spreadsheet you never find time to build

Have you always wanted to sit down and design a great budget spreadsheet that clearly explains IT spending? One that your clients will understand, complete with pretty graphs?

Here you go!

Clients want clearer and more predictable budgets. This will help their financial departments find tax write offs and adjust spend appropriately. However, they do not know what most of the line items are in their IT budget!

One of the major reasons that IT shops do not have budgets is because of a gap in knowledge. Engineers are not trained as accountants and vice versa.

This easy to use budget template bridges the gap by allowing a breakdown of IT costs to allow for more engaging conversations such as why managed infrastructure helps stabilize budgets!

This includes

• Easy to use Excel Budget Template
• Explanation of how to build a budget for your client
• Explanation of forecasting and basics

Setup a quick consultation call to learn how to generate an extra $13,000 Annually

Client Engagement Excellence Program

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.

Get Buy in from Executives on Required 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.

1. Use visuals to align the client with the problem

The first goal is to make sure that the client sees the problem. You'll find they often understand the problem logically (risk of downtime, cost of unproductivity, aging network) but they don't appreciate the gravity of the situation.

For this we can use a content widget and embed rich media such as:

• YouTube video explaining the problem more vividly
• Calculator to explore the problems
• Stories, quotes and testimonials of clients

In this example we used a downtime calculator to make the IT downtimes more of a tangible loss for the client.

2. Generate a high level perspective

The second goal after getting aligned with the problem is to offer a broader and holistic perspective on the solution in an interactive way. It's one thing is to understand the problem but another challenge to get them to believe in a solution.

You don't want to throw a complete list of technical solutions at the executive. You'll just create confusion and probably lessen the chance of project approval.

Interactively build the solution with the client together so they can follow the steps and understand from building blocks up to and including a high level perspective.

In this example we added a few pre-packaged projects to a project roadmap widget and created two new projects on the fly. Our goal was to be able to keep things simple but compelling enough for the executive to make decisions.

3. Make the deliverables tangible

The third goal is to get into the details of the deliverables to make sure the client understands the required effort and technology recommendations. While the client is not a technology expert we need to offer some insight into what we'll do.

First, the client executive has to rationalize the decision after the meeting too. They need to know what they're buying is a well-designed and ideal solution. Secondly, they may need to convince others or at least rationalize the spending for the management team. We want to make sure they're equipped to do that.

In this example we use the Project Scope Widget simple project descriptions, pictures and videos to deliver a better experience.

4. Rationalize with an ROI calculator

The last goal of the meeting is to make a decision or at least make the decision-making process clear. Let's remove all speed bumps in their journey to making this essential decision.

An ROI calculator can be handy in making the decision financially easy. Collecting the costs of the current situation and the benefits of opportunities will make the current issues tangible. Quickly estimating the one-time investment and potential monthly additional expenses will make the investment clear.

In this example we used the ROI calculator widget to explain the 1 year and 3 years return with the gauges and the financial value of the project.

How much time should you spend on account management activities?

Are you spending all your Account Management resources on your noisiest clients? Does this mean some clients are being overlooked and underserved? What’s the best way to segment your clients and assign the appropriate resources?

Denes spends a few minutes explaining the best practices and how you can setup Client Experience Playbooks to empower your team to always deliver the best experience, that drives MSP client engagement.

Generate Client Engagement with 5 QBRs in 90 days

Monetize Microsoft 365 Cloud Services

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.

Check out the chat if you're interested in these innovations:

• Imagine IT used Microsoft 365 IT Audits as door openers where a traditional MSP pitch did not work
• monetize Microsoft 365 related deployment, education and adoption services
  expand business discussions and services beyond the owners and make it a scalable process
• take control of personal, team and business productivity for your clients
• design projects and services that harvest the low hanging fruit with your clients and prospects
• position yourself as a business partner and differentiate your offering from your competition
• get your clients up to speed by proactively using Microsoft 365 products with them

Click on the image to see the complete report

Related Solution Sets

There are three different versions of Solution Sets available for helping you to monetize Microsoft 365 cloud services.

• If you're comfortable doing this on your own, the projects and report templates are available here
• Looking for a bit of guidance on getting this off the ground quickly? This includes 4 hours of 1 on 1 coaching. Pretty much your recipe for quick success!
• Want some help customizing the templates and report? This includes 3 months of guided implementation, coaching and accountability. You cannot fail! 

Bring your reports to life with embedded applications

There’s no arguing that interactive experiences are a lot more fun than just being handed a pre-canned report. The best meetings all share 1 inherent quality: They tell a story that the audience wants to participate in. Now you can structure an impressive, engaging client meeting and consolidate lots of great information in a relevant way using 3rd party applications.

Some of the innovative and successful ways we see our members use 3rd party applications:

• Always have definite next steps setup with your client/prospect by setting your next appointment using Calendly or MS Bookings.
• Review advanced budgeting spreadsheets in an interactive way.
• Embed contracting documents for review
• Customer satisfaction scores to be able to show actual end user feedback.
• TypeForm and SurveyMonkey can allow you collect pinpointed information and share it.
• Powerpoint lets you tell an even more interactive report while you leverage your vendor partner’s extensive marketing materials. Check out the free solution set from Info-Tech Research Group with 11 embeddable example powerpoint presentations.
• The king of marketing...VIDEO! Record a personalized meeting summary with Soapbox, embed, and share your reports to your clients to really take the experience you offer to the next level.

Now you can structure an impressive, engaging client meeting and consolidate lots of great information in a relevant way.

Use meeting themes to selectively change up the topics. Why not build out your reports so each quarter you review all the relevant projects and compliance issues, but have themes such as:

• Q1: Backup & Disaster Recovery - embed your DR reports from Continuum or Datto here, then offer a lunch & learn around data management best practices
• Q2: Policy & Compliance - Review security policies as embedded word or PDF documents. This is a great time to offer end user training to avoid ransomware and phishing exploits
• Q3: Innovation & Learning - Show embedded videos from Microsoft so your clients can see the value of adopting these applications. Now you’re bringing real business value to drive productivity for your clients.
• Q4: Budgeting and IT Strategy for the next year - take your client through a goal setting exercise to uncover their real business priorities using a 10 Points Spreadsheet or SWOT analysis.

Since you can build out your reports with all sorts of embedded applications to keep them fresh, each of your engagements will feel like a whole new kind of meeting that your clients will actually want to participate in.

Check out this shared, read only, interactive report with some examples of content you can embed.

Use the calendar booking app to schedule your 1-on-1 orientation and let us help you deliver a unique and powerful client experience.