Five principles behind an engaging Quarterly Business Review process
In our design of the new Quarterly Business Review tool we wanted to ensure that MSPs can find business opportunities with existing clients, enhance the quality of their engagement, become a business partner and demonstrate the value they provide all at once. Achieving those multiple goals in the midst of commoditization of traditional infrastructure management services requires finding a balance among five different strategies. Let's check those success factors to make sure you deliver timely and engaging QBRs.
UPSELL YOUR CLIENTS WITH STRATEGIC QBRS AND IT STRATEGY MEETINGS
We’ve identified several common mistakes managed services providers are making during the QBR
process, leading to less and lower quality client engagement, over complicated processes and too much work. We wanted to create a tool that’s straightforward, easy to use, and guides the service provider to optimal client engagement.
1. 360 Degree view of IT
Most MSPs’ QBR is all about the explanation of their services, performance and ‘speeds and feeds’ of the infrastructure, and the motivation is to show they work hard for the money. This is hardly engaging.
Being engaging of course requires the ability to ask questions from the client’s leadership regarding their business priorities, problems they’re facing or opportunities they see or think they could find. It gives you the chance to put your services in their business context. You also need to be able to ask questions of front-line people - struggles they have with applications, processes or any user-related opportunity. This all gives the service provider the ingress to solve real problems and start scoping projects you can deliver. If you can’t focus on 360 degrees of their business with technology, you can’t have a sustainable client engagement process, so we designed the tool to gather variegated input from several distinct sources in preparation for the QBR, where you’ll have a more comprehensive, holistic view through the meeting.
2. Balance the business and technology
MSPs are often the victims of their own aptitude. When they start working with a client, that client is usually dealing with a suite of frustrations and confusion...nothing seems to be working. We can’t let them set the conversation in this miserable frame. It has to elevate from the technology issues to finding solutions to business problems in order to deliver visible business value.
It’s always a good idea to keep your target audience entertained, and for us that’s the various opportunities they can leverage with their technology. When you stay relevant you’ll generate visible value persistently. To this end we designed a specific thought-provoking mini questionnaire for the leadership team that you can run prior to the meeting, giving you the opportunity to understand their business related issues, problems and goals. Once they feel understood, your suggestions and advice will be more on target, more easily adopted and more valued by your customer. Just focus on their goals rather than your agenda and you’ll sell them new projects.
3. Nurture maturity
Many MSP client has just started their journey with you and many are your clients for years. Many client of yours have pretty big complex business models many of them has very small and simple operations. That diversity creates a wide range of IT maturity which need to be managed.
Our philosophy is this maturity needs to be nurtured all the time. If your client has a super low maturity you need a tool not to overwhelm them, however if they have a pretty mature IT you still should nurture it further. We designed the QBR tool to be modular. If there is a super small client you do not cover everything. You might just focus on the IT metrics first then quarter by quarter introduce new aspects such as the business goals or applications. However, if their maturity is high enough you can involve more people to the conversation, focus on different line of business applications or offer additional vCIO services with more IT strategy and execution.
4. Cadence of Accountability
Many MSPs do Quarterly Business Reviews once or twice a year, either because they cannot allocate the time or believe there’s no need for quarterly interactions. There is no real cadence to communication, just occasional meetings.
We believe that having a strict quarterly rhythm of the process is crucial. We even designed the report in a way that incentives regular completion - it feels awkward if a Quarter is missing. We wanted to make sure the process becomes an easy routine for the team, not a one-off. Some items in the QBR report relate to only the current quarter, while others display their progress across them. For example the latter shows the trend of fixing business problems better than just a snapshot of current issues, while for technical details we need to work on current issues with a narrower focus.
5. The right level of details
One popular strategy among managed services providers is creating standards to which all clients must comply. While this is a great initiative to simplify processes, it can create too much work and misalignment with clients at the same time.
We’ve designed service standards with enough flexibility for you to evaluate and implement alongside your processes and best practices, to increase your efficiency. It doesn’t make sense to create detailed standards nobody feels are relevant, or have the time to follow. We let you define standards for each infrastructure or application category so you aren’t bombarding clients with detailed standards they don’t even comprehend. We give you a 1-100 scale to evaluate their performance against a standard, so you can best approach the balance of compliance and effectiveness. For example one level of performance can get a lower score for a more mature or bigger organization than a small simple one. Maybe focusing on that area doesn’t deliver tangible value to a small organization, but for a mature corporation it’s a necessity. You’re able to stay relevant to your clients while implementing your skillfully crafted standards that deliver value to them and you.
Conclusion
Implementing a professional, relevant and engaging Quarterly Business Review process is a must theses days. The success of this process can literally make or break your relationship with your clients. Let's learn from other MSPs and improve your chances to stay relevant to clients in years to come!
Where the MSP serving software industry is going
All our accolades to the development people in the Connectwise Team and the super beta users; after three months of development we’re happy to announce the Connectwise integration is live.
I know integration is a boring subject and I don’t intend to explain the details of the features here. But the development process and the results have been prompting many to wonder where the software industry and specifically the MSP servicing software industry is going.
Ours was not just a simple data based integration. Our tool is actually running inside Connectwise with customized screens. One doesn’t even need to log in to our native tool to use all the features inside Connectwise, like execute Account Management, vCIO activities and running discovery workshops with prospects.
The question I am raising is: are we actually heading to where we have only one application that runs our MSP, and all the vendors create “modules” for that application?
1. MSPs ultimate need
In an ideal world you as an MSP would use only one application to manage EVERY task in your organization. That’s an ultimate verticalized application taking care of everything and managing all modules.
The obvious limitation is that such a system requires you follow set processes for every single area of the business, which makes it hard to adopt. Thus the current model of having a base PSA and many integrated applications makes sense. The drawback is that these integrations are in all different shapes and sizes, the user interfaces are unique and most just give you the ability to transfer data across applications.
Clearly there’s a need for a faster learning curve, and more flexibility for IT managed services providers to adopt more and more tools to their stack.
Based on the technology available today we as a vendor community were able to create just such an ultimate solution.
2. Required Effort
Let’s first see the current reality. Creating integrations involves almost the same effort as creating the product itself, dealing with moving parts, planning, alignment, version control, testing in different environments and so on.
We used the fairly new Connectwise API feature to embed our application into theirs. We’re sending information back and forth, so we created special screens that show in their app. Our need to hide our client navigation requires additional screen designs too, so there’s been a lot of work in trying to match to their design and environment.
The same additional risks and effort had to be there when iOS moved from the old design to the new. All apps had to adopt the new iOS design to comply with Apple.
Surely the platform provider (now Connectwise) will see a need to give additional support to developers and act as a real platform to enable them.
3. Growth opportunities
For a small bootstrapped startup like many smaller MSP spin off vendors like us, there’s no bucks for promoting our products. We rely on the channel and try to piggyback on other well established vendors. The strategy makes sense involving more hard work than dollars.
That means if the platform is open and supportive and has all the processes to promote a niche solution to a larger audience, smaller companies have more options. They can choose to be a “module” only. They can do the integration selling to only one platform’s users, then later expand to become a stand-alone product. In this way the marketing, sales and promotion costs can be minimized.
Thus more and more startups can develop real solutions for the MSP community because the entry level is lower to start something. Can you count all the companies spun off from an MSP scratching their own itches? DeskDirector, IT Glue, Passportal, Brightgauge have all been able to grow and have a sustainable business model. Can you imagine running your business without those awesome solutions? How many others have died because they weren’t able to push it through?
However this puts a high risk in the startup’s business and changes to the platform can kill the initiative overnight. Certainly as an MSP you don’t want to invest to a product with no firm foundation.
That’s why the platform has to have policies to protect the integrators, and increase the overall value of the platform.
4. Conflicting strategies
The platform owner and the integrator can have overlapping functions, and conflicting strategies need to be addressed.
I’ve been watching the open conflict between Connectwise and Keseya. Both have PSAs and RMM solutions integrations back and forth. The goal of both parties is to be THE platform. The question is how it affects the user experience. Could there be any strategic limitations from companies on the integration side which hurt the user experience?
However this conflict can be smaller and more operational. Another example is when Autotask decided to put the “Dashboards” and “Metrics” to their strategic scope and developed features around that. Integrator partners like Brightgauge invested a lot to create integration and offer Dashboards to Autotask users. Brightgauge is a far superior tool for dashboarding but if the platform starts developing peripheral features for their product around the integrator’s core business that can lead to conflicts of interest and confusion for the clients. Shall I use Brightgauge or can I use Autotask for dashboards?
Conclusion
Our integration, moving our product into Connectwise, raised many strategic questions. It’s an interesting time to be in this industry. To provide a more integrated experience is a need from the managed services providers standpoint. To get integrated and give a better experience to managed services providers is the duty of the vendor community. Becoming a platform provider for the MSP industry is clearly a movement for major RMM/PSA players. It will be interesting to see how we can leverage the true opportunities to make the industry better for everyone.
5 false Myths of Managed Services
As we have been talking with hundreds of Managed Services around the world we have been able to identify several common beliefs, and even myths shaping their thoughts.
The biggest problem here is that these beliefs were valid in the past. The times when the MSP model founded and spread across the world, these concepts were helping people to sell and execute services. However as the market went forward with the tectonic shift of consumerization, cloud, mobile and the overall maturity of IT, these beliefs are no longer valid.
Generate client engagement
with five Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) in 30 days
Myth #1: Offering vCIO as an add on to the Managed Services
Offering the vCIO service inside the Managed Services package was a natural step in trying to get back in the boardroom. It was more important to the service provider to show that, despite everything being done remotely, they’re working hard and proving it with ticket counts and reports.
It made the vCIO more an “IT infrastructure manager” role rather than a “IT executive” role. It led to three problems.
- First, the vCIO capacity of the contract does not scale with the size of the organization like other MSP related services do. IT scales up with the complexity, changes and developments of the clients. That means ball-parking a user based price for a Virtual CIO is unlikely to be appropriate. This results in either the price being too much for the market (they don’t want to buy it), or the contract being more work than revenue supports (you don’t want to sell it).
- Second, because it was a reactive rather than a proactive step from the MSP standpoint, it was more sales effort to differentiate the commoditized IT infrastructure services. There were no real processes behind the services and deliverables, no real value proposition, expectations were set inconsistently across the customer base, and the result was delivery not meeting expectations.
- Third, creating a solid offer on virtual CIO involves capacity time with a very expensive resource. That makes the MSP offering more expensive compared to the competition. For the client, the results and benefits of the "vCIO of the infrastructure" don’t make much sense. Customers are apt to compare prices ‘apples-to-apples’ between competing IT managed services providers but rarely are the service offerings that comparable.
Myth #2: Everything is packaged all in
When the MSP packages were designed in the middle 2000’s the value proposition of the MSP package was “keep the lights on”. The value proposition reflected the basic Helpdesk, desktop and server management. It was fairly easy to deliver, not so complex, and had well defined boundaries to the service.
If you see a competitive offering nowadays it’s full of IT Security, Application management, Advisory (vCIO) services managing hybrid complex modern environments with legacy stuff. The value proposition is no longer what it used to be. But as we package more and more goodies into the offering somehow the boundaries and value proposition have been lost.
We had only one iPhone model back in 2007 with one size, one colour and one storage. Now we all know of three different sizes, four different colours and countless storage options available. Even Apple, usually offering as few models as possible, had to follow the customer requirements as the market got commoditized.
Many MSPs are now unbundling their current services to different logical products, as well as bundling them to service offerings which are standardized, but give the client a choice other than buying or not buying the offering.
Myth #3: Value is in the “stuff” not in the consultation
In the good old days when an Exchange Server project was $20,000 or more, MSPs across the globe added “consultation” hours for free as pre sales activity to make sure the clients were going to buy the initiatives. Then as vendors pushed more and more high value network devices, backup and disaster recovery tools and virtualization, the “free advice” become the norm as everybody was making money on the devices and projects and not the consultation.
Now the landscape has changed dramatically. SaaS brought the idea for clients to transfer all IT expenditure to Operational Expenses rather than investing capital on buying software or hardware. The other trend - Cloud - has brought the customer community the democratization of software packages. They can buy the biggest corporate software package in the world called Salesforce.com (you make sure understand it is way no longer a CRM only) and can start with $25 per month.
In this landscape the free advice does not make any financial sense because there are no big ticket projects to bury the acquisition costs.
The value is no longer on the applications but the consultation to select the applications, implement them and make sure it’s used and well integrated. The IT consultation has to be paid regardless of the solution size. It can be literally a $2000 project to help them select a $50 per month project management application.
Myth #4: My target prospects are the companies with IT problems
Before the MSP space got saturated the sales process was more straightforward: get a prospect with visible IT problems and pains, show them some network assessment of how bad theirs performs and how we can help, and the sales was done. Most MSPs didn’t even have any marketing or sales process - the hot prospects were just coming through referrals.
Now if a prospect has any real, visible IT pain we might see them as a huge opportunity. But think about the following: why was the prospect not able to solve this problem before?! Maybe they didn’t see the value in IT, didn’t want to pay for it, or their industry is stuck in the past? There’s a chance the company is not going to turn into a class-A client. The flipside is that these type of companies need the “basics only”. They will check the competition and price will be the most important factor.
The bad news is that the pond of companies with real visible IT problems is shrinking every day, while a growing competition is fishing on it.
However there’s now a growing number of clients who’ve been served by an MSP for years. They have no backup issues, they know that IT is an investment and they see the changes and the opportunities. They are implementing SaaS applications comfortably, and leverage technology in nearly every part of their business. They are a potential customer for new and innovative services. These clients we cannot reach with traditional marketing, sales and referral channels.
The future “A Class” clients of yours are already served by an MSP. Going head to head is not a good strategy because it leads to a price war. However addressing their IT 2.0 / MSP 2.0 problems and communicating more effectively can lead to establishing relationships with executives who are open for the next wave of IT services and know they’ll not get it from their current provider.
This is fishing in a growing pond where nobody is fishing now. Choose where you want to be.
Myth #5: Account management is a sales activity
As MSPs have been providing more complex services the account management activities become more and more important. It can be anything from regular client visits, helping the engineering team close project deals, escalating issues and upselling different services.The selection criteria for Account Managers is more sales, a clear motivation from the MSP perspective.
On the other hand, as we see the complexity of the client’s ecosystem rising the “IT Management Challenges” increase too. That means the client needs more managerial resources to maintain their complexity and be able to realize opportunities, recognize threats and stay competitive with technology.
Now our sales account manager meets with IT management demands from the client perspective. He does not have resources or services to enhance the business and manage the traditional MSP issues during a Quarterly Business Review. The client will be interested in the engagement with the Account Manager because he has pains he want to solve. Unfortunately the Account Manager has no resources to solve those problems and the engagement will decline.
That is why the Account Manager role should be called “Client Advisory” and should be switched from the sales role to a service role. The service has to be defined and tracked the same way as we do for engineers. They have to have annual, quarterly, and monthly activities with clients, creating IT strategies, developing software roadmaps, helping them select applications, and conducting basic training and business related reviews. These services can help the client (and eventually get more project orders as the result) and also open the door for higher level stand-alone vCIO services.
Conclusion
These beliefs were valid in the past. As we move into the post-Cloud era the foundations have been changed, so we have to change our approach and adapt. With Managed Services Platform we’re working hard to create tools and processes for the activities we need to stay competitive in this new Managed Service landscape.
Managing "unrealistic" expectations
I just watched a hilarious 2 minute Youtube video where a comedian recounted the tale of someone righteously indignant over the atrocious inconvenience of the wi-fi breaking up during his trans-Atlantic flight. It made me ponder the trend of setting unrealistic expectations when it comes to technology. We have a short memory for problems fixed, take progress for granted and miss the chance to revel in our achievements.
Then I was thinking that perhaps this reminds you of a type of client of yours who is spoiled by all the progress and never satisfied. Who set these unrealistic expectations? How can we make sure we're not creating the problem ourselves? Check out this quick video and see what we can do to prevent it happening.
On a personal level I encountered the erroneous popular expectation in my own family, while travelling through the Canadian Rockies having a Facetime conversation with my brother on a highway somewhere in Europe. The line broke 4 times, and my brother was so frustrated he nearly threw the phone out of the car. At that instant Apple was a poor service provider without any consideration for him. Now, my brother is a perfectly sane person, so I realized that there’s a common misconception that’s easily reached...that instant and constant integration and global flawlessness should be expected from technology, and everything should be as strong as my wi-fi at home.
Now think of your clients, who will have a similar tendency to set expectations quite high. They don’t have a detailed understanding of the complexity of their network, applications or the necessary integrations. Nor is that their job. When you’re doing your job well they’ll inevitably start to take it for granted. Millennials especially are used to constant internet access and expect mobility across all devices. Some legacy corporate systems are still years if not decade behind that.
Who’s to blame?
The misconception itself is unavoidable. The public can’t be expected to all learn IT infrastructure, the world is just too big a place to cover with connectivity, and the competitive free market we all believe in includes proprietary and innovative fundamental disparities. The neglected measure lies within the marketing, sales and account management - the delivery of the message. Of course, service quality can be an issue, but that’s a reasonable expectation, and purposefully set in our contracts. We have to manage the unreasonable expectations of our clients about their corporate environment. Everything around technology is dynamic: your offering, your solution stack and their environment, so expectations cannot set for years (lie static in a contract). They must be readjusted frequently.
Often the sales process is over-ambitious, marketing collaterals can describe “ideal” situations where everything is perfect, or account management is promising resolutions for an irate client are rather than resetting expectations.
How can we reset the expectations frequently?
The solution is surprisingly simple. The secret is we have to actually ask for the expectations of our clients regularly (quarterly, bi annually) and adjust our priorities and perspectives accordingly. Just stating this isn’t enough. We have to understand what they think and see whether our services satisfy their expectations. If not, they may upgrade to a higher level service, or we need to communicate the realities of expectations and service. A proactive process is ideal, and it’s usually worst to address the issue during a complaint.
Let’s take a look at what we need as a process for this. We need some items in place to make it happen.
- The questions have to be “loaded” questions reflecting our services. In that sense we can directly couple the issue to one of our services. It also gives us the ability to gauge how well they understand our value creation.
- We have to make sure we can address the idea of responsibility. There might be solutions that prevent the problems, but somebody has to be responsible for the decision to buy a service.
- The questions should “educate” them and help them understand some basics, or help us raise a complex issue and explain its intricacies.
You might have a questionnaire with 10-25 questions (depending on their size) to get a 360 degree view of their perspective.
Generate client engagement
with five cyber security roadmaps in 30 days
Which statements are true about the company's Information Security? (select all that apply)
- We have secure control over all user/admin/internal/web passwords.
- Our devices are protected from virus and malware at all times.
- Unauthorized people can't get access to our email.
- Our email is separately tracked and archived.
- Unauthorized people can't access information stored on laptops or mobile devices.
- None of the above.
The questions are loaded with the following services: Password Management, Managed Endpoint Security, Managed Email Security, Managed Email Archive, etc. That gives us the ability to see whether they have those services and what to expect.
They have to make decisions whether they need the service, usually some type of add-on. If it’s included with the package they’ll understand the complete value proposition of our fully managed service.
The questions both educate and introduce the opportunity to get more clarification. Then, your sales people, account managers or vCIOs can elaborate on the details.
If you go through those questions every once in a while you can keep them aware of all the stuff you do for them as well as re-set expectations in this dynamic industry. This eliminates unrealistic expectations of greater functionality for free, and help us avoid overdelivery.
We can use it with current clients as well as during the sales process. The important part here is the discussion, communication and engagement with the client. The service delivery comes later.
Conclusion
Unrealistic expectations are common across the MSP market, and users are, to put it bluntly, spoiled with great technologies and misled by over-promising sales, marketing and account management. The solution is a frequent expectation resetting meeting through a Quarterly Business Review or a sales meeting.
Leveraging the IT Quarterly Business Reviews
Many IT managed services providers are doing some type of Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR) and most have trouble delivering it with the right cadence and voice. It’s too technical and fails to shows business value to the executive team. Introducing QBRs poorly can backfire and land the MSP into a more technical role. Let's take a look at some cool techniques to engage clients with Quarterly Business Reviews.
Upsell your clients with strategic QBRs and IT strategy meetings
Hint #1 - Talk business
Challenge: Whereas it is not a significant challenge to talk business with most owners as they are fluent with marketing, can connect the dots with typical business process issues and understand the overall pains of the client, this is not the case with tech people.
Solution: We cannot give every account manager an MBA but we can help them to ask the right questions. Questions make magic happen in this process, especially if they discover a problem related to the customer’s business. We have put together Executive QBR Power Questions that discuss relevant business issues during the meeting. Asking the right questions can engage the client and allow you to offer technical solutions for most business problems.
Hint #2 - Find out some bottlenecks
Challenge: We all know clients who could do with a better document management system, better task management or a better general management system for the company. The trick is to qualify them quickly and get them on the same page during the QBR.
Solution: Graders can be used to qualify clients for a defined IT solution. For example, we can ask seven relevant questions with possible Yes/No options about their general productivity. The seven questions lead to 7 solutions/best practices/features and so on. Where they have low scores a ready productivity application can help solve their issues. This helps start a business conversation based on real needs. Graders about security, document management, SaaS applications are a great way to introduce this conversation.
Hint #3 - Proactive Development
Challenge: If we keep checking the warranties, antivirus subscription, bomb reports, risks and hardware replacements during the QBRs, it can become a boring technical conversation. We’d rather show them we would like to proactively develop their business and elevate their maturity.
Solution: Proactive Customer Development is an expression we use to truly assess where they are and the needed next steps in becoming more competitive with IT. It can be to implement IT Budgets, to better manage their vendors, to invest in an IT strategy workshop or just focus on NIST cyber security. We can pre-package 10-15 QuickWin IT management projects and typically sell these easy to fix low hanging fruit items. It can be a Disaster Recovery Plan, a Mobile Security Project or training the staff in going online securely. We use a questionnaire to measure many different elements, to learn what’s missing and to offer prepackaged projects.
Hint #4 - Internal Compliance
Challenge: If we do not set some goals or achieve mutual vision with the clients, it will be hard to be on the same page down the road. Setting the stage for what we mean about being competitive with IT is important. Without that, we are missing the business context of our services. It can lead to conversations of costs instead of investments.
Solution: The QBR is a questionnaire and report determining the IT benchmark by which we measure the progress for our clients. It sets standards and constraints of internal compliance with which we suggest to them. The questions are business rather than technology related, designed to understand the ‘what and why’ needed to be in place to be competitive with IT. Why does it matter to have an IT strategy? Why does it make sense to manage the vendors and check the budget? Why does it make sense to manage every device from a security point of view? It helps you to use the QBR to set goals and deliverables for the next quarter, and then track progress. This exercise can generate many opportunities with your clients.
Conclusion:
There are many ways to make the QBR better by being more client focused. The tools you’ve seen here are integral Managed Services Platform methods, and just a sample of the opportunities.
Business focus need not be so complicated...we have the tools needed to make it easy and engaging for both you and your clients.
