How to build client rapport under pressure & limited time

A new customer of Managed Services Platform called us the other day: “Guys, I have a concerned client and risk going into a meeting completely unprepared. I want to do it professionally so they see I am fully organized on their needs, that I can get my ideas across and have an engaging meeting with them. Oh.. did I say I have only one hour?”. We helped this client shift from being reactive, defensive and unorganized to professional, confident and prepared by assembling their personal committed overview ready for the meeting in 30 minutes using our pre-built templates and software. This is how the risk was turned into opportunity.

Get long term client loyalty

with regular and strategic QBRs and IT strategy meetings

Use Case Overview

After our session with the MSP, and getting a strong result quickly, we recorded a similar process internally with a mock client to be able to demonstrate the preparation process. We went through the process the same as we do with our MSP client. We should note that this is not a normal process, but an example of how our tool can be used in a fire fight to save a potential churning client.

Problem:

• Multiple issues had to be handled
• Both MSP and their client had legitimate issues (high-stakes meeting)
• Preparation time was extremely limited
• No customizations had been made yet from our pre-built templates

Result:

• MSP was able to control the communication rather than reacting to client complaints
• MSP was able to demonstrate the value of the services and show that the client issues were minor problems easily fixable with suggested projects (free in MSPL)
• MSP was able to get on the same page with a client on what to do next and to set proper expectations going forward
• The MSP owner was delighted in not just saving the client, but turning them into an advocate with a proper communication process

Use Case Brief:

• Roles - Account Managers / Technical Account Managers / vCIOs
• Maturity Level - Low / Medium
• MPSL Software Subscription - Entrepreneur Plan ($250/month)
• Solution Set Prerequisites - IT Infrastructure Audit Solution Set
• Time: 30-60 minutes

Solution:

• Use an IT Infrastructure Audit to frame the problems in a business context
• List all the issues onto a roadmap as custom solutions to client issues
• Score all other domains to demonstrate the value of services
• Use the missing score items to generate more project items
• Finalize a project roadmap with all current issues and all proactive projects
• Use the roadmap to move the client from reactive tactical thinking to a proactive strategic mindset

Why Growing an MSP is so hard?

The Managed Service Provider business model is a complex one and comes loaded with all sorts of challenges. One of the biggest issues is being able to drive predictable growth for the company and to build an operational maturity that can manage that growth at the same time. You’re beset from both sides: MSPs will suffer from their growth being slow and all effort will go into desperate tactical marketing and sales efforts. They’ll also struggle if growth is too fast and all efforts are spent on a tactical fix of their service delivery. 

Progressive MSPs have deserved a strategic answer to move from the reactive firefighting mode to a proactive business building model. Let’s review how to solve this problem once and for all.

STRUCTURE, MANAGE AND AUTOMATE YOUR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO PROCESESS

Flow

A fellow Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi recognized and named the psychological concept of flow, a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. He wrote an amazing book on the subject called “Flow: The Psychology of Happiness”. His studies revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is 'flow' - a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to complete absorption in an activity and results in the achievement of a perfect state of happiness. Flow has become the classic work on happiness and a major contribution to contemporary psychology.

The foundational idea is that if you personally face a challenge too big for your skills you feel anxiety as you are overwhelmed by the task in your hands. However, if your skills are developing and you are not facing challenges you feel boredom and lack of motivation. What he pointed out was that the challenge and skills have to be in balance to be able to be happy and grow as an individual.

We’re sure you can see how this idea can translate to growing an MSP…

Your MSP’s Flow state

If you make the analogy apply to growing your managed services you can envision a strategy. 

MSP’s Flow state is needed to grow your MSP in a sustainable way. Imagine how it would feel to:

• grow your business by differentiation and win new businesses in a predictable way
• grow by developing, releasing and adopting new services such as cyber security, Cloud or IT Consultation
• grow a happy, motivated and developing team and provide them efficient processes and automation to deliver amazing services
• grow your existing client base by staying relevant, making their businesses more competitive with technology

Flow State

Your MSP’s Flow state is when Operational Maturity Development is balanced with Growth. This is the state where your growth is sustainable, people are motivated, issues are minor, it’s fun to go to work and an exciting journey to run the company. The owner can make enough money to set aside profit for personal reasons but invest back to the company as well. There is a satisfying sense of balance between working “in” the company and working “on” the company.

Cash-Flow Issues State

On the horizontal axis, you see your MSP skills as Operation Maturity which means more professional people, organization, leadership, processes, and automation. This usually leads to higher expenses, salaries, and overall cost increases. If sales aren’t sustainable to match, growth leads to cash-flow issues as expenses overtake revenues.

Service Delivery Issues State

On the vertical axis, you see the growth challenges your MSP is facing which means releasing new services, selling more projects or landing more new clients. This usually leads to service delivery issues such as new client onboarding issues, piling up projects or dropping the ball on day-to-day operations.

Apathy State

This is the state when the MSP is too small to be able to work enough IN the business to generate quality delivery and too small to be able to work enough ON the business to be able to overcome issues and grow. This is not where an MSP should start, but it’s where MANY MSPs find themselves after a successful start, by servicing too many not ideal clients, generating too many services, growing without any structure and entering unprofitable agreements This becomes a constant battle to make ends meet, and a struggle to escape the vicious cycle. This is not what bankrupts and MSP, but is where they get stuck for a long period of time without realizing it. 

Reactive vs. Proactive Business Building

The reason for being in any of the yellow - not ideal states is the lack of balance between Customer Development (Win New Businesses and Expand Existing Client Base) and Internal Development (Operation Development and Service Development). 

The operational pains (like service delivery issues) force the leadership to focus on fixing problems and pay less attention to winning new businesses or expanding the current client base. They hire new people and buy new tools to let people work on internal projects (which reduces the billable hours overall) which leads to cash-flow issues.

The cash-flow issues force the leadership to shift focus and start generating demand, go after existing clients, do QBRs and close more projects. As the pressure is high they likely close deals with less ideal clients or promise services the team cannot deliver in a sustainable way. They close more projects with clients who need more development, consuming disproportionate resources and so on. The operational pains start to arise again.

This vicious cycle pushes the company from one yellow state to another without staying in the middle for any valuable period of time.

On the contrary, proactive business building is when the organization stays in the “flow state” most of the time. They might take on a new client who is not ideal, they release a new service half baked or simply not paying attention to high-value clients for a while. These are natural imbalances but none of them alone pushes the organization out of balance to force the leadership to shift gears rapidly. Internal Development and the Customer Development is balanced which results in less turmoil, issues, problems and needed damage control.

This might lead to an obvious question: how to actually grow in a proactive way? What is the solution for that? What are the blueprints? Can I follow a 10 step formula?

The bad news: there is no solution…. you have to figure it out by yourself...

The good news: there is no solution… your competition has to figure it out themselves too.

The bottom line… if you excel in this, you can leave your competition behind and wondering how you do it!

Sneak Peek - The Model of Proactive Business Building

I do not want to leave you hanging without giving you a chance to start solving the problem. This is the first article of many we produced on Proactive Business Building. Let’s take a sneak peek of the model we are going to introduce to give you a competitive edge over your competition. The model is not going to solve your problems but will give you a reliable process for you to see negative trends, causes and potential fixes to get this done quickly.

Your growth potential depends on the four different elements we have covered before:

Internal Development:

• New Service Development
• Operation Development

Customer Development:

• Win New Businesses
• Expand Existing Client Base

As you see we can put those elements into an easy thinking framework and call it Growth Potential. This helps you to wrap your head around the concept of Development-type activities for new services and new clients and Operation-type activities for Operation Maturity and Client Engagement.

It might be obvious that these quadrants are highly interdependent. You cannot be great in one without being great with the other three.

There are key activities you can execute better to unlock your growth potential. Here are the 20% activities which will lead you to the 80% result.

New Service Development

1. Service Development Process
2. Service Development Roadmap
3. Services Productization
4. Service Catalogue
5. Service Marketing

Win New Businesses

1. Sales Readiness
2. Differentiated Message
3. Predictable Demand Generation
4. Consultative Sales Process
5. Sales Operation

Operation Development

1. Internal Development Processes
2. Service Delivery
3. Project Delivery
4. Stack Standardization
5. Process Automation

Expand Existing Client Base

1. Account Management Services (Tactical)
2. vCIO Services (Strategic)
3. Client Segmentation and Playbooks
4. Client Engagement Operation
5. Client Engagement Activities

To unlock the key activities we have been building an assessment and action plan tool to be able to quickly assess your growth potential. The result is a score over the 4 building blocks to review the health of your growth over the various categories.

The assessment gives you an idea where your company stands and what actions need to be taken to get back to a “Flow State”

Stay tuned as these items are going to be published over further blog posts and downloadable PDFs!

Debate on All In vs. Modular MSP pricing

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

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”

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

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!

Managed Services Platform Account Manager Report 2019

In our previous blog post, we reviewed how we typically see our vCIO community members from 2019, so now let’s look at another report regarding our other active community of more than 700 account managers that are working with us today.

Generate client engagement with five qbrs in 30 days

Like in the case of our vCIO community, the language composition shows a clear majority of English-speaking countries. 62% are from the United States, 10% for both Australia and Canada, and 5% for the United Kingdom and New Zealand respectively.

The most active movement of account managers is concentrated in the United States, Eastern Coast. However, the most numerous account manager nucleus is scattered in California, North Carolina, and Texas. The largest city groups are in New York and San Francisco; furthermore, we should mention Toronto, Canada and London, UK as well.

Considering that the most active account manager groups are scattered throughout the United States, its no wonder as to why their educational experiences aren't centralized in any American university. However, at the beginning of the list, classic technical education centers can be seen: Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and Harvard.

The account manager function is related with technical account management topics like sales, information technology, engineering, support and only partially related with business management topics such as IT consulting, business development, finance and project management.

Between the groups and forums, hot topics are more technology-related than any other; virtualization, Microsoft Office 365 and recently cloud computing, NIST cyber security. It should be noted that smaller MSPs usually deliver these services through outsourcing or assistance from an MSSP or CCSP partners. In order to develop these transformations internally for MSPs, we have launched our “Build a Better MSP” expert guide program with a wide range of building business solutions for the SMB space. 

Unfortunately, only a small minority of account managers feel the importance in developing their business management skills, like consulting, communication, decisiveness, problem-solving and leadership. The technology dominance usually happens when owners of MSPs with less than 15 employees perform the account management role themselves, among many others. And most of these MSPs are challenged with the commodization trap of their service offering. So they look for new cloud or security services that can differentiate themselves from other MSP competitors. 

Regarding their experiences, we can say that qualified and veteran account manager experts are a majority in managed services providers with more than 15 employees: 70% have more than 10 years of experience in the technology market and the other 21% have between 6 and 10 years of experience. That’s why they have a high percentage of account managers at seniority level positions. The other reason that account managers find themselves in senior level positions, as mentioned further above, is that CEOs are usually the  executives of small MSPs with less than 10-15 employees, but are also often the Account Managers as well.

Often small MSPs do not have dedicated Account Managers, while the mid-size MSPs with more than 15 employees are challenged with MSP Account Manager turnover problems, because more than 50% of them have less than 2 years experience with the organization. That's why MSP owners try to give their account managers a clear playbook of activities that they can manage and fulfill with clients. Likewise, they would visibility gain access into their account manager activities.

So what are typical and successful MSPs like with account management services?

• Small MSPs usually have resource problems because the owners or executives try to provide account management services themselves, among many other roles, which is the reason why they can not be full-blooded professionals who don’t always have time resource problems. 
• Account managers are dedicated professionals from a mid-sized MSP with more than 15 employees but owners of these businesses are challenged with employees for which the solution should be developed into a scalable business consultative service with processes, predefined segments and tools that support their executive and monitoring demand. 
• Account managers have strong technological backgrounds and interests, but only a small minority are interested in developing their consultative and business-related skills. However, like vCIOs, should feel comfortable talking with small to mid-sized business executives, and last but not least, they should understand how to put technological solutions into a business solutions context.

Be sure to download our growth guide below, and for more information on how to build, strengthen or create a more efficient Account Management offering, check out our account management Growth Solutions here on our homepage.

• vCIOs in United States
• vCIOs in New Zealand
• vCIOs in Australia
• vCIOs in Canada
• Managed Services Platform vCIO report 

How to Become a Trusted Advisor With Strategic Client Meetings

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.

Managed Services Platform vCIO Report 2019

Managed Services Platform's vCIO community has been growing year by year since 2014. In fact, we are most likely now the largest active vCIO community in the world with more than 600 members. With this news, we have decided to create a short report regarding how we typically see our vCIO members across the globe.

This community’s largest attribute is the language composition where more than 98% of our vCIOs are from any of the English-speaking countries around the world: 58% are from the United States, 10% are from Australia, and 8% are from Canada, while the rest are from the UK, New Zealand, and South Africa. 

DEVELOP AND OPERATE A SCALABLE AND STRUCTURED

ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO OPERATIONS

The most active vCIO movement is in the Eastern coast of the U.S. These numbers extend from New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee; however, there are two other states, Texas and Washington State, where the movement is growing most rapidly.

Other typical attributes from our community members are their unabashed professional and academic experiences. It has been confirmed that the vast majority of our vCIOs have university degrees and have each amassed more than 10 years of experience. More than 80% of them share these attributes.

The single largest essential trait for a vCIO is their IT prowess (50%). However, sales, IT consultancy, process and business development planning are also significant skills of their expertise. Interestingly, 8% of these vCIOs themselves are MSP entrepreneurs in their off-duty time.

Their offerings come from the fact that most of them are entrepreneurs in their own right, with most of their active companies coming from small businesses with 1-5 employees (This equates to about 15% of them) and 5-25 employees (48%). Many times their efforts, unfortunately, are in vain because the owner(s) are neither often able to delegate the vCIO role nor do they have enough time to fulfill that role themselves.

The other typical problem is that they try to implement the vCIO service quickly without any previous development training. They then continue a technical conversation with their clients without any business and strategic purposes. If a vCIO cannot deliver an engaging and recurring business consultancy in a determinate time, they will lose the profitability of these vCIO services. Ultimately, clients will keep looking at them as an IT technician and not as an executive-level business advisor.

Middle-sized MSPs with 25-50 employees already have dedicated vCIOs and can deliver profitable vCIO services while providing a valuable business consultancy. But based on our experience, the most successful MSPs with vCIO services are large-sized companies with more than 50 employees. These organizations can dedicate enough resources to scale their vCIO program and establish their own service definition, processes and best practices.

Most of our MSP members in the community with vCIOs typically have client sizes with 25-200 employees and offer between 10 and 20  services, most of which are related to the core IT infrastructure.

What this means is that although the core IT Infrastructure services and project revenues decrease constantly, cloud-centric and advanced security service revenues grow in their place. It should be noted that smaller MSPs usually deliver these services through outsourcing or assistance from an MSSP or CCSP partner. In order to develop these transformations internally for MSPs, we have launched our “Build a Better MSP” expert guide program with a wide range of building business solutions for the SMB space.  New services, like cybersecurity, identity management, EOS, cloud-centric solutions, are now all integrated, providing easy access for MSPs to learn and develop.

So who is a typical and successful vCIO based on what we see? vCIOs are dedicated professionals in a mid-sized MSP. They always have strong technology and consultative backgrounds as technical account managers. They tend to be systematic and process-oriented thinkers. They feel comfortable talking with small to medium size business executives. And last but not least, they understand how to put technological solutions into a business solutions context.

See previous parts:

• vCIOs in United States
• vCIOs in Canada
• vCIOs in Australia
• vCIOs in New Zealand

If you currently do not have vCIO services, but still intend to implement them in the future, we will be able to support your efforts with an exclusive coaching package and our client meeting report tool as well. 

Accelerate Your Growth with the new features just released

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!