How Slack app can be a revenue generator for your MSP

Last week we went through how we can stop giving out free advice and making consultation a revenue generator. Let’s see that in practice. Our example today is Slack app, the latest silicon valley unicorn (1B+ valuation). Slack, in most cases, is a free tool designed to enhance your internal communication. So how can we as cloud service providers deliver value and earn revenue with this great tool.

Customer Segment Profile

First, we need to understand a problem most of our clients have. The sector of the industry we’re focusing on now is companies whose teams work together on processes, projects, and collaborating with both vendors and clients.

Jobs to be done: Like so many other aspects of modern life, most of them need to deliver more value with fewer resources.

Pains: Typically they communicate over email, getting 100 or more emails a day, without a clue as to how to handle this volume. They cc each other excessively just to keep everyone in the loop, and use a host of applications like Project Management, CRM, plus service automation, and so on. Even these are mostly cloud based, with no integration, so every one of these systems needs to be checked separately if they want the whole picture.

They’ll also try out new apps on a weekly basis in their search for solutions, install a few, run the 30 day trial, all while not having the time to properly evaluate them - and like Sisyphus’ rock they keep finding themselves at the bottom of the hill again.

Gains they are looking for: They want an overall improvement in their communication each other, vendors, and clients, so they can focus on their work instead of emails, and would love to get answers, reasonably quickly, from a system, application, or from each other regardless of location - in the car, office or at home.

But they’re already too busy...the last thing they need is the added task of creating this solution. What’s missing is someone to listen to their issues, understand them, figure a solution, and then not only implement it, but also train their people and support them in the learning curve so that they can get back to the business of their business.

We’ve observed that this is quite typical. even though we know the tools are out there...they just don’t get used or aren’t implemented and trained properly. That’s nothing new to us in IT: Owning tools is easy...finding the right one and using it properly is another matter.

Value Proposition Map

Discover how Slack with the proper consultation and implementation can help them achieve this communication improvement.

Gain Creators: As a product Slack helps teams communicate within a single space. This can happen in private channels, one to one communication, public channels, you name it, and it can manage topics according to need. It also integrates with thousands of applications, and so ususally gets the sought after information from disparate sources without logging into those applications. In essence it creates a unified platform for company-wide communication and replaces internal emails almost completely.

The tool is the first step. Also required however is the creation of the business case, context, and the process to properly implement it, training users, creating basic policies and enrolling the entire team and the company overall. Of course we could leave them to do all this on their own, but our value proposition is to make this process successful from the get-go. This is actually more important than the tool itself.

Pain Relievers: Teams are now working in all kinds of venues and access the information from a myriad of devices, anytime, and anywhere. They always have to share files and documents with each other. Even with cloud based file sharing it’s a time wasting task - to copy / paste the links, then use another app to send. Another problem is after sharing, nobody’s aligned on where the file came from, and have to re-check the email to access it again. Slack eliminates this speed-bump entirely, leaving the file in context, and with its robust search engine, one can find it easily with any other system of communication.

Still, most users will have questions, and Slack doesn’t have real one-on-one support that incorporates an understanding of their business context...it’s rather more general help on features. Our support can fill this gap. We’ll often be able to offer our technical skills in integrating many other applications into Slack - a not so obvious task. We can be the ones to make those integrations work and enhance them over time.

Product & Services

The ultimate solution for the opportunities / problems of the client is a Slack Implementation Project.

• Needs assessment
• Project kickoff
• Implementation
• Project management
• Training
• Documentation

Because this implementation project is largely common among all who would have it, it can be templated easily, so from our perspective is streamlined. A Slack implementation project in this sense with initial consultation, implementation, technical set up, training and initial support can fall into a $2500 - $3500 range. It leads to an additional MRR for support and subsequent enhancement projects.

Marketing/Sales

The best way to market this is with an eBook or a Grader. You can see an example of a Slack grader here. It asks the following questions from the client:

We can quickly score their answers and see whether Slack can be useful to them to show, try, and implement. It can lead us to a quick product tour and a kickoff meeting for the needs assessment.

Delivery

The delivery part is a canned project with

• Project Plan
• Process descriptions, hints and tips
• Pricing and packaging document, contract, agreement
• Task lists for the milestones
• Tasks for the necessary deliverables
• Meeting memos, agendas to manage the project efficiently
• One-page checklists for the discovery meetings
• Presentation decks for education/training
• Basecamp.com live client facing workspace with everything necessary to facilitate smooth communication with the client

Conclusion

Slack is a great tool, and boosting the tool with our implementation services is a big hit. Clients will understand that we’re no longer just a general infrastructure service provider but a real business ‘wingman’ or ‘wingwoman’ for them with respect to the creative use and implementation of technology solutions. It ushers us into the trusted advisory role and helps us reframe our clients to see that IT is not just cost-savings, but a huge competitive advantage.

Building Starter vCIO Services

There is no question that vCIO service is no longer a nice to have service offering for IT managed services providers.

• It is a needed offensive strategy to tap into the growth potential of the prospects with high maturity.
• It is a perfect defensive strategy to keep the prices up and protect our client base from low price entrants.

However, the delivery of IT Management services is not entirely new; most IT companies have some issue to monetize on this opportunity.

During the webinar, we are going to learn a lot about how to tackle the challenges, and start implementing vCIO services. It is a service your team can execute, it’s scalable, and you can start to charge for it.

• The basic building blocks of our consulting services
• Building proper plans for the different client types
• The boundaries of our services to make money
• 15 Quick Win vCIO light projects to start tomorrow
• The process of MSP marketing and selling the services to existing clients

Delivering Business Focused QBRs

ADAM WALTER AT VIRTUAL C

You would like to be a high-value business partner in your client’s eyes rather than a basic technology service provider. Your QBR process is a critical part of influencing their engagement up to a higher level. Watch this recorded webinar with our vCIO expert guide, Adam Walter, who has shared his 5 step process to make any technical QBR into a business-focused one.

6 Best Practices of Top Performing vCIOs

ADAM WALTER AT VIRTUAL C

Watch this interview with our vCIO expert guide, Adam Walter, to learn how to be more engaged with clients by finding best practices for becoming a trusted business advisor in 6 single steps.

 

Build your MSP with the help of virtual CIO services

Colin Knox is a true entrepreneur in the managed services provider industry. He’s been operating a very mature and well-polished boutique managed services provider in Calgary, Canada.

He’s also been recognized by Penton Technology Group in the ‘MSP Mentor 250’ which lists the best of the best managed service provider executives, entrepreneurs, experts, coaches and community leaders.

Colin’s service philosophy involves helping people grow and to that end giving them a chance to learn and develop into virtual CIOs. His business growth focuses on high level services.

In the interview I tried to learn how he was able to put this together.

I was interested to learn Colin has just exited from the day-to-day operation a couple of months ago and is dedicating his full attention to a very interesting project. I honestly did not realize the full impact of this before our talk.ortance of this before the talk.

If you’re interested in learning the stories and real-life examples from somebody who’s made it, watch the video and grow your business! Then use the 9 decisions worksheet in our MSP 2.0 Virtual CIO Service Delivery Quickstarter Kit to begin your transformation to a modern MSP.

Use the 9 decisions worksheet in our MSP 2.0 vCIO Service Delivery Quickstarter Kit to begin your transformation to a modern MSP. 

What makes a good vCIO?

Typically there is a certain type of personality that is best suited to the vCIO role.

• They have some consultative background.
• Their “down to earth” mentality suits working with small to medium business.
• They tend to be systematic, process-oriented thinkers.
• They understand how to put technology solutions into a business solutions context.

Chances are you possess many if not all of these traits. But who else on your team also fits the role? The idea here we’re looking at here is nurturing and developing ideal vCIO candidates to build a hyper-successful MSP in the modern marketplace - something one can't do alone. Let’s take a look at what that will require. 

STRUCTURE, MANAGE AND AUTOMATE YOUR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO PROCESESS

You might guess the ERP guys, former consultants or business analysts and even some tech employees are perfect fits, but this isn’t necessarily so. The real skill lies in understanding what it means to be a virtual CIO in the modern MSP 2.0 ideology. Most IT managed services providers who offer a vCIO solution are still using it as an extension of the infrastructure support offer, only on a higher level. As long as the solution is grounded in supporting networks and servers instead of the business and people, it will remain an undistinguished commodity and replaceable by the next, cheaper competitor.

The MSP 2.0 vCIO does much more: everything from managing all the IT strategy and policies based on ongoing goals of IT competitiveness and profitability, to all technology, vendor and channel management. This virtual CIO meets with the heads all departments and purposefully learns their needs. This vCIO knows the “why” of the goals of the CEO and of the company. Of course servers and networks are a part of this, but far from all of it. This is a way to open up substantial business opportunities. More information is available in our MSP 2.0 Quickstarter Kit.

Are your ideas for candidates shifting? Who do you think might fit this position best now?

We are offering some short but exciting webinars that cover many of these topics

Monetizing Client Apps and SaaS Solutions the Smart Way

If you’re like me, you’re often evangelizing cool applications, services, and vendors to your clients. You have a cool feature on your Todo application, or you were able to integrate your CRM with LinkedIn, or you just collaborated with your team with an awesome project management tool. We spread the idea because we are advisors by nature. The question is how can we capitalize on this habit? How do we create service offerings around SaaS-based applications?

I hope you have read our monster blog article about the business model changes of the MSP. In this model there is an item called "Marketplace" in the partnership section, there are revenue streams called "Marketplace Commission" and "3rd Party project management," and there is an activity called "Resell Vendors, Applications."

The idea here is quite a common practice among IT managed services providers - finding a problem on the client side and helping them with an application. After deploying, manage the usage, subscription, and processes of the application. IT companies are mostly infrastructure providers, so they do these types of activities but in an ad-hoc way. What’s new here is the proactivity and a defined structure for these types of services.

PROBLEMS - VALUE PROPOSITION

Your clients have probably been using a lot of cloud-based applications for a while now. The average 20- to 50-seat company solves niche problems with niche applications. Some examples are sending bulk emails, using surveys on websites, organizing meetings and schedules, taking notes, sharing files, managing online marketing and sales activities, and automating processes.

The problems they have are the following:

• Finding out if there is an application for the specific problem (discovery services)
• Finding the right application for the problem (evaluation services)
• Buying the application or managing the procurement (negotiation services)
• Deploying the application to devices (deployment services)
• Creating the necessary processes (process management services)
• Integrating the application to other systems (integration services)
• Teaching the application to people (educational services)
• Supporting the application (support services)
• Managing the billing (vendor management services)

So, in a way they have the same problems they had in the good old days except they now with "technological" problems like installation, server setup, etc. We usually refer to this as an "IT management" problem. Usually clients simply swipe their cards to get access to applications in no time. They don’t know or understand that buying an application is only 10% of the entire process. It is easy to get onto this slippery slope. Users buy applications, then have problems, stop using them, and conclude the technology failed. The trick is education and storytelling.

My favorite story for this is Evernote's business-card-scanning feature. This is a nearly-free tool that can scan business cards, send LinkedIn invites on the spot, and then populate their CRM application with the contact data. I usually go through the process with clients/prospects and explain how it works and that it’s very affordable, because very few people use and leverage its true functionality. They just get it and use it, but the non-obvious features are going undiscovered. After this story, they understand what they are missing. This is a small reframing :-)

The value proposition here is to make your company more effective and vital by harnessing applications.

SERVICE DELIVERY

The delivery side is not rocket science, and very close to what traditional IT managed services providers are doing. However, to do it seriously, there are a couple things to think about:

Problem - Solution library:

Creating the problem library means you collect all the non-obvious problems you could solve with applications. Populating a CRM with Evernote’s business-cards-scanning feature is not an easy one to realize; it might be connected to a CRM through Zapier's integration feature.

You should create a knowledge base of the different business pains of CEOs and package your solutions for that. I bet you have a couple of geeks in the team who know every cool and popular service and app around.

There are also ready sales in managing people, meetings, delegating tasks, managing calendars, personal effectivity tools with the integration of mobile devices. Here, you could offer a bundled solution with to-do applications and shared project management tools, etc.

Integration method:

To make the process happen, you need to use a cloud-based integrator platform like Zapier to connect Evernote and the CRM application. It’s a pretty neat tool - you just drag and drop the two applications you want to connect, select your triggers and actions and you’re ready to go.

Partnerships:

Most of these applications have a partner model. That means if you sell them, you receive a commission. The best win-win way to use it is to share this commission with the client. In this case you remain independent, while still getting the client to choose your recommended provider - they enjoy the benefits of a discount and trust of your partners.

Pricing and packaging

There are many options here, but sooner or later you are going to shift to the managed model, which is very clear and easy to enroll.

Just think about it—they want to buy this service for the same reason they would want to buy a cloud based-application: as a service with a monthly flat fee, a package of their choice, and within their budget.

This is a flat fee based on application per user. You could use Light, Medium, and Pro classifications based on the difficulty of the application. For example, a ToDo app is classified as a Light app while an Online Marketing Tool is classified as a Pro app.

Then, you need to categorize your services, for example into Silver, Gold, and Platinum. The Silver covers basic services, but the Platinum includes integration with five other applications. A must-have is the hard edged definitions of the service, clearly stating what is included and what is extra. This is critical to smart delivery of the service.

At the end you are going to get a decent sized spreadsheet with all the applications and all the packages. The big idea is to aim at managing all their applications, so consider a quantity discount.

Of course, for bigger projects like a CRM or Accounting Package, you could always use the "3rd-party project management" method to monetize on the evaluation and implementation after the application of a flat fee. These are not just "apps"; these are serious business applications.

CONCLUSION

There are huge opportunities in the application world because even when there are no technical problems it doesn’t mean MSPs have nothing to do. There is plenty of work that can propel the success of our clients but they aren’t aware of it...the apps come from the cloud, so they must be ready to go with no more concern.

Teach your clients to build their own marketplace, deliver services, and create more recurring services!