Accelerate Your Growth with the new features just released

By Denes Purnhauser on October 18 2019

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

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

 

1. New software features for Growth

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

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

 

New Features to Help Inspire High-Value Client Conversations

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

Click on the circles!

Some of the major focus areas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

New Features Help You Focus and Boost Productivity

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

Click on the circles!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

2. Expert Guides for Growth

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

How to grow with Account Management

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

How to grow with vCIO

Drive Strategic Conversations and take on the execution by Adam Walter

How to grow with Technical Account Management

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

How to grow with Sales

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

How to grow with cyber security

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

How to grow with Focus on Execution

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

 

3. Role Specific Programs for Growth

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

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

 

4. Process for a Sustainable Growth

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

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

Grow your enterprise one quarter at a time

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

Unleash Your Growth Potential

By Denes Purnhauser on October 11 2019

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

Understand your Untapped Growth Potential

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

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

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

Unleash your Growth Potential one role at a time

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

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

 

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

 

How to Unleash your Growth Potential

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

Your potential of growth depends on three things:

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

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

 

5 Steps for sustainable growth

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

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

Conclusion

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

 

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

By Denes Purnhauser on October 4 2019

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

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

 

1. Focusing on the symptom instead of the root problems

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

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

 

2. Focusing on a tactical solution

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

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

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

 

3. Premature scaling:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

2. Set a Smart Goal for a focused Burst:

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

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

 

3. Execute the Burst with the end in mind:

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

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

4. Create a machine to grow the momentum:

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

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

 

Conclusion:

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

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

 

The 4 roles that make you a high value business partner

By Denes Purnhauser on August 30 2019

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

 

Client Engagement Roles

 

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

 

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

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

The reasons for doing this:

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

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

Examples:

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

 

Client Engagement Responsibilities

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Client Engagement People

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

 

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

Best Practices:

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

 

Conclusion:

By clarifying roles you may find it much easier to

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

 

Building blocks for Strategic Engagements

By Skip Ziegler on August 23 2019

The Strategic Client Engagement.  It’s a fancy name for a meeting; but it helps set the overall goals of what we are trying to achieve: an opportunity to talk with our clients about how technology can help drive their business to meet their current and future needs.

 

Generate client engagement with five qbrs in 30 days

 

So what does the Strategic meeting look like and how do we make these a recurring part of our business?  The first and most important step is to stop focusing on the technology! I know that seems odd for a Strategic Technology Engagement, but many times we spend too much effort discussing tickets that have already closed and invoices that have already been paid.

We have to shift our focus to future technology needs and opportunities, and when we shift that focus it has to be directed on business drivers, the real benefits to their organizations. The Technology Stack Assessment is a great place to start. 

Now you may be wondering, I just said that we shouldn’t be focusing so much on technology but we are going to start with a technology assessment?  The key is how we use it. We have 2 major goals in a technology stack assessment:

1. Align their stack with our standard stack of services and products and
2. Define how their Technology Stack helps their business.  In both goals we are making technology decisions based on business needs.

 

Let’s discuss the 1st goal: Stack Alignment  

How is this a strategic benefit?  At first most clients have a basic goal for their technology resources: it needs to work consistently and efficiently.  You and your client could spend endless hours discussing and evaluating every product or service that is available, but the benefits for such customized specialization can be very minimal. What is most important is that the technology works.  By aligning your clients to your established technology stack you are able to eliminate all the time and effort of identifying a specific resource and go straight to getting the benefit of that resources. Additionally, your service team is going to be able to deliver services at greater efficiencies and higher quality if they are working within a standardized technology stack. This is a win-win for you and your clients.

Once we have established the technology stack we can begin working on positioning it to support the needs of the business.  Is your client looking to open a new office in another geography? Are they testing the market and trying to minimize startup costs?  Are they shifting their focus from retail based services to onsite interactions? All of these scenarios have specific business needs that could be met with Remote and Virtual Services solutions.  Our approach to these opportunities has to be centered on how the technology can meet the business need and not about the current feature sets available from Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, or Vendor X. Too many times we try educating our clients on all of the available options and features and letting them decide which technology they should utilize.  Are you their technology professor or their technology expert? We need to become educated on our clients business needs and help them align the technology that meets those needs.

By using a Technology Stack Assessment we have to opportunity to manage their current and future technology landscape and help build a stable platform that the client can use to grow their business.  After your Strategic Client Engagement meeting, your clients should have a clear understanding of how their technology infrastructure supports and enhances the business.

Client Engagement Excellence Program

By Denes Purnhauser on May 31 2019

Here is the Problem...

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

 

 

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

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

 

Generate client engagement with five qbrs in 30 days

 

Client Engagement Excellence Model

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

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

 

Client Engagement Excellence Process

Then we designed a process to improve all these areas.

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

 

Client Engagement Excellence Program

The Program has it all

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

 

Benefits

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

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

 

How much time should you spend on account management activities?

By Myles Olson on May 31 2019

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

 

Start vCIO with Quick Productized Projects

By Denes Purnhauser on March 2 2017

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

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

Let's see seven examples of typical vCIO products:

1. IT Development Roadmap ($1500 - $4500) to build up a general IT roadmap, focusing on infrastructure while addressing typical business problems and recommending applications, security or compliance themes as well.
2. IT Budget ($500 - $2500) to develop an IT Budget in detail. If the scope is limited to the infrastructure services/investments, SaaS subscriptions and software licenses, it’s a cookie-cutter and helps you sell additional services like regular budget checks.
3. Application Selection ($500 - $1500) to select a typical SaaS based application they can buy online without any sales reps involved, such as a CRM, Project Management or any other light line of business application package. You help them set up the requirements, pre-select the candidates and facilitate the selection process.
4. SaaS Audit ($500 - $1500) to audit all SaaS subscriptions they have and check whether they have the optimal package, exhibit alternatives and integrations available. They do the heavy lifting and you coordinate the process.
5. Risk Assessment ($1500 - $5000) can be boring, to be blunt, but there is no better way to kick-off some IT security initiatives, open the discussion on compliance, or just assess IT risks beyond the scope of just their infrastructure.
6. Productivity Workshops ($1500 - $3000) aren’t only useful to office workers, but anyone using to-do apps, project management tools, Office 365, note-taking apps, chat and email apps on various devices. Put together a curriculum you can go through onsite or online with the managers/power users to help them leverage technology better.
7. Virtual IT Department Evaluation ($500 - $1500) deals with the many vendor, software and SaaS providers who constitute your clients’ virtual IT department. You can safely assume nobody is leading that herd. Evaluating the different parties involved, set responsibilities and required service levels and manage them accordingly to assure they get the most out of their vendors and services.

 

These are just quick tips, but how do you make them productized?

1. Write down the target customer and the scope of the project.
2. Write down the project deliverables as task lists and tasks to be able to establish the price.
3. Put together a one-pager on the problems it solves and the benefits it delivers and print out 20-30 pieces, as well as a promotional email.
4. Start promoting it with a discount to batch more projects into a given month so you can be more efficient.
5. Wait and watch while these initial projects start to push you towards a stand-alone vCIO service.

 

My 7 Ah-ha! moments on the first MSP 2.0 boot-camp

By Denes Purnhauser on February 9 2017

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

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

1. The main confusion and misalignment is within the service catalogue

Traditionally, the ad-hoc organic development of services and service catalogues creates major confusion for clients and employees. This has limited the scalability of MSPs. It doesn’t define your services nor categorize services into service categories and service bundles. The problem is the failure of proper categorization, service definition and articulated value propositions leaving too much room for interpretation of services. Luckily, we’ve experienced the power of service wireframing exercises which can lead to a well defined service catalogue.

2. Make the vCIO role more tangible, to lead to greater sales

Selling stand-alone vCIO services is easier by starting specific productized projects. The vCIO can be an intimidating and abstract concept for some clients: while the vCIO activities are solving their problems, they have no grasp of the how those abstract deliverables like IT Strategy, Quarterly Reviews, Monthly Reports, Budgets, Project Scoping or Stakeholder Interviews are working. It’s easier to visualize canned, productized project services solving one specific problem in demonstrating the vCIO work. In advance of developing ongoing vCIO services, therefore, it’s much easier to develop one-time vCIO projects in a productized way.

3. Misaligned agreements lead to client and profitability issues

A systematic approach is needed to realign clients annually, as a response to many changes in tech and the environment. Either the client’s expectations change and they feel under- or over-served, or our profitability drains from additional work. Every year we need a version change on the service offering. Over the course of a year the service provider is developing, changing services as part of the development process. New services are available to all clients as "beta" functions through the year, and at the end of the year all beta services go to official services and clients make decisions whether they need the new services (they pay for) or stick with the old package. Everything beyond this gets relegated into the realm of too much communication and too many agreements in the air.

4. IT strategy upfront or spare the onboarding

One company demonstrated a great use-case, to charge $4,500 per client prospect as an IT Strategy development process. It served to qualify and differentiate the prospects, as well as to release unqualified prospects from the funnel quickly. This strategy helps acquire higher maturity clients.

Another company's strategy was to push low maturity prospects through a very systematic and specific onboarding process to get their maturity to a manageable level. The final step of the onboarding was an IT strategy creation which defines the next steps once the understanding is set.

The strategies are perfect capturing the value for the different maturity prospects.

5. Fix a leaking boat before building a new one

All the promises you make to a client, all the expectations you set, even unintentionally, are potential drains in your profitability. The problem with non-productized services is their vagueness. Unlike a coffee mug where you see the shape, size and quality these services are not tangible. So make services tangible! Fix the big hole first! Create a totally new service offering by making your current services so well-defined they won’t slow you down during your company’s development period.

6. The eroded value proposition of the fully managed IT services

A lot of MSPs set their Value Proposition as a mission statement. While it is inspiring, it doesn’t give specific direction. Breaking up the big Value Proposition into smaller value propositions helps distinguish service categories. Breaking down further defines the services. Everything stems from an MSP trying to make their clients more competitive with technology, and drilling down to specifics is what’s missing. Without it the message is too general, doesn’t engage the clients and doesn’t focus direction to the service provider.

7. Headspace + Focus + Facilitated Workshops make miracles

Seeing the team slow down and merge away from the day to day operations to a higher level focus and headspace was amazing. We went through over 20 exercises over the 3 days. The impressive small group and larger group interactivity was able to dig out major issues and opportunities and create actionable items from vague ideas. The collaboration was most notable from Australia, US, UK, Germany and Canada. I think I underestimated level of wisdom, experience and knowledge in the group. This also made me aware of the need for major initiatives like implementing stand-alone vCIO services or productizing a service offering for that type of environment to make an effective change. Some things can’t be learned in days of emails, meetings and other distractions.

• Virtual CIOs in United States
• Virtual CIOs in Australia
• Virtual CIOs in Canada
• Managed Services Platform Virtual CIO report
• Managed Services Platform Account Management report 

 

ROI Calculation of the Account Management role

By Denes Purnhauser on February 2 2017

If you’re running a successful, growing and modern managed service provider practice, you either have solid account management / technical account management practice in place, or you’re still doing it ad-hoc, and plan to develop a clear structure as soon as possible. In both cases calculating the ROI of the new role is critical, as well as setting goals and realistic expectations for the employees. Check out this ROI calculation and the huge potential of proper account management to growing your business.

ROI calculation doesn’t just make visible some real numbers from something less tangible; it’s also a great way to ‘look under the hood’, to perceive what drives your success and what rules of thumb we can implement to streamline our decision process.

We’ll go through three different aspects:

1. the data we need for the calculation,
2. basic assumptions for the model, which you can change to suit your particular experience, market and customers,
3. the formula that illustrates the potential of the role to increase revenue and return on investment.

 

Generate client engagement with five qbrs in 30 days

 

Data input

1. Client segments:

The first thing we need to know is how many clients you have under MSP contract, in each company scale.

• D: less than 15 employees ( sub $1500 MRR)
• C: 15-30 employees ($1500 - $3000 MRR)
• B: 30-60 employees (3000 - 6000 MRR)
• A: 60+ employees (6000+ MRR)

The client segments represent their buying power, and achievable up-sells / projects and additional services, as well as different life cycles and buyer's profiles.

2. account management Internal resource hourly rate

We need to understand how much time the account manager is spending on each type of accounts, to know cost of the role. The internal cost is usually the typical expense calculation: adding the salary together with all the burden and using a 70% utilization to get an annual rate. This rate typically calculates to $35 - $60 per hour.

3. Current revenue

To be able to track growth we need the current revenues from the revenue categories the account management can leverage. It’s typically the ARR (annual recurring revenue), the Project revenue and the professional services revenues like vCIO/consultation, etc.

 

Assumptions

For this model we assume some adoption and success rates. This will be our expectation of the account management work. It’s a very important consideration, as it sets the account manager's goals to achieve in a broader sense.

1. Adoption Rate

This is a percentage, indicating how many clients from the given customer segment will actually adopt account management. Adoption means clients actively participating in the various account management meetings, which is a direct function of how many actually see the value, invest time and develop a fruitful relationship out of it.

Typically the smaller the client is the lower the adoption rate. Their IT is not a critical part of their strategy, the budget isn’t there or we may assess that it’ll be unproductive to spend extra hours with them.

If you do account management ad- hoc, you know which clients are more tractable in this regard.

2. Additional Project Revenue Increase

A good account manager can bring more commonly implemented projects onboard. Scoping typical issues and helping close the deals are one thing. A less common practice is to sell productized projects. Creating a nice portfolio of typical projects for disaster recovery plan, security audit, application selection or any other project that can be productized and sold for a fixed fee is a huge skill you can leverage. It’s easy to sell, there’s not a lot of customization needed and it cuts down on the sales cycle, since you no longer need to plan and create proposals and customized collaterals.

We also must make assumptions of additional project revenues we can expect from the customer segment annually.

3. Additional MRR

A good account management can also sell additional MSP services, like bigger, better backups, voip, phone, print management, IT security, Managed Applications, Managed Mobile and other additional non-traditional MSP services. This will increase the MRR/user over time.

It also means that over time the client is going to be more committed, instability is less likely and our presence will grow wider with the client. This is all going to boost our profitability per client.

4. Additional Professional Services/vCIO

For each customer segment there’s a good chance to sell additional professional services. Different sizes afford different opportunities. Small clients can get professional Quarterly Planning, Annual IT Roadmaps, Training and some Project Scoping for a fixed fee, starting $250 - $500 MRR, like AM with a cool aid.

Larger clients can get budgets, project management, IT strategy plans, IT strategy execution, Application management and many other stuff for extra MRR.

The numbers given represent typical services you can sell to these customer segments with the proper education from the account management.

5. Resource requirements

Based on ouraccount management processes we perform 3x Quarterly Business Review and one Annual IT Strategy Roadmap per client. That takes about 10 hours a year per account. It does not include the quoting and additional work on the sales side. We think that is part of the profitability of the sold items, and is why we calculate 10 hours as an account management "overhead" for a client.

 

ROI

The ROI will calculate the investments to the tools + labour required to perform the given tasks to achieve the assumed results.

1. Cost of the tool

We include here the cost of the account management tool which is $249 per month for the functions the account management needs.

2. Cost of the labour

We just multiply the clients for whom we perform account management by the hours we need to invest at the hourly rate we calculated. As you can see that is a much bigger number. This is the account management's role cost. If you as an owner are performing this role, your expense is extremely high here.

3. Increased Revenues by segment

You can check the expected revenue increase by revenue segments. As you see it will change with your assumptions. However it is pretty clear that theaccount management role will exhibit value with the increased Projects and Additional Professional services first.

 

Conclusions

We can play with the numbers, but some things are obvious. Account management is a serious opportunity to grow within your established client base, but without the processes and dedicated role it will not produce consistent results. The investment is not onerous once you reach the 9-10 person company level, and past 18 it scales very smoothly. Let's check some conclusions from the ROI calculation.

 

1. The account management role can grow your business

Our calculation produced a 27% increase in revenue. Of course it means on January first everything is working and every client starts generating those revenues, which takes time to ramp up in the process. Allow 6 months to start generating the additional projects and service revenues. As products come together and processes get some momentum, you’ll see it take off pretty fast. You can expect results in less than 2 years from starting.

2. Doing half-assed account management is not worth the effort

"Do or do not, there is no try", said Yoda. Doing ad-hoc account management is not generating satisfactory outcomes. The investment cannot be measured, nor improved, nor managed at all. Doing something inconsistent can serve your short term revenue targets and will come across like sales campaigns. Clients will feel it. Make your decision here: there’s a chance account management is not for you and you just want to close MRRs and keep them alive.

3. Making the owner do the work is self-defeating

If the owner is the Account Manager, you’ll see dismal ROI, as the true value of your hours will be cut to a fraction. With that calculation the dream is dashed. This is a job of consistency and predictable results, and your leadership role isn’t designed to offer consistency. If you reach a client portfolio with 20-25 clients, the dedicated account management is going to be a reality. Account management activities shared with Project Management and some new sales will utilize the resources 30-50% of the time, which allows you to have somebody developing your business - current client base and new prospects as well.

4. Small clients are a burden

If you take a look at the distributed ROI, you’ll notice that the overall average is 9x, the small company average is far lower at only 3x, and for a large organization the ROI is remarkably high. That should not be a surprise, as investing the same time for different sizes of organizations logically pays better and can lead to more significant deals as well. This is economy of scale. The only reasonable path is to get the small clients to pay for account management services. You can call them "Client Advisory" services and charge $100 - $250 per month extra for doing the QBRs and the annual strategy planning as vCIO light services. This not only sets appropriate expectations and you get something back from your investments, but can also serve to qualify your clients.