Why the better MSPs work the less perceived value they have

By Denes Purnhauser on March 10 2020

For a while after our session with Sea-Level something was bugging me. We pondered a conundrum in this seminar: why can’t MSPs not become the victim of their own success? Why does a smooth service have to lead to disengaged clients? How can the MSP remain the hero not justhen the client has problems in their day-to-day operation but even when those problems are gone and the technology just works, and they stop noticing the value of the services? 

After many 1-1 discussions we came up with an answer. The issue comes into clear view from a distant overhead, as does the solution. Now having been able to create a model that explains the problems, the solution is far less difficult to manage.

We are going to break down the problem into 3 stages each with a brief explanation.

 

Develop and operate a scalable and structured

account management and vCIO operation in 30 days

 

The Model of Perceived value and Maturity

We are going to use a little model here. On the vertical axis you see the level of the Client’s  IT operation maturity. The more mature the IT operation, the fewer problems will arise. This is where MSPs commonly focus their energy to ensure reduced ticket noise and a smooth IT operation. The operation maturity is climbing not only on the MSP’s side but on the client’s side, as well.

On the vertical axis you can see the Client’s Perceived Value of the IT services. As you see you are a victim of your own success. The better IT you provide to the client the less value they perceive from Technology Services.

This model is not about the net value that they got but their perceived value. There are three distinct phases along the journey. Let’s tackle one at a time.

 

Phase 1.: Constant IT Problems

This is the phase in which most MSPs have made the initial sales deal. The prospect had low IT maturity with minimal in-house or outside resources. They were fed up with the problems. When their MSP came on board perceived value of the services skyrocketed. The MSP was able to bring order, standardize operations and improve the quality of their work.

In this case the value was entirely in Technical Services and was very obvious to them. Nobody had to sell the value.  Everybody has it laid out in front of their relieved eyes.

 

Phase 2.: Reduced IT related issues

Now after years of your hard work it seems that IT is no longer on the board meeting agenda as it no longer generates issues. Everybody is working efficiently, the discussions with the MSP become “business as usual”. Some problems arise occasionally but are mostly within development projects and aren’t emergency issues. Complacency grows and clients start to see the MSPs more as a service provider rather than a hero.

Now in this phase, the value is even more clear from the MSP’s perspective. The work is harder, more processed and very high maturity. But this is exactly what prevents problems from germinating and if the client has no metric to evaluate the MSP other than “problem, issue resolution” then the perceived value will start to fall. Cruelly, their net value is rising while perceived value declines.

To maintain your well-deserved perceived value to the client in this phase is no longer a technical service-related task, but communication-related. This is the phase when the MSP needs to establish a proper Account Management / Technical Account Management practice to be able to communicate the value of the services. These are the technical reports, and roadmaps to be able to show to the client the hard work the MSP is actually doing. Nothing fancy, just let them see what they are paying for. Without introducing Account Management, the perceived value will diminish. That is the beginning of accruing an Account Management Debt.

 

Phase 3.: No IT related issues

The next phase is where very few MSPs can increase the perceived value without stretching the boundaries of the initial Managed IT Infrastructure Contract. In this phase, the IT infrastructure is not just good enough, but probably overshooting their need. Just think about how much advantage most aren’t taking of their Office 365 subscriptions outside of email. 

The client’s IT maturity cannot be raised more without them actually implementing applications and leveraging the opportunities of technology. This part is hard as now the client’s willingness will essentially decide what’s next.

This is the place where churn becomes likely even with very satisfied clients. Why? Because they start shopping for “cheaper” alternatives. The majority of the developments have been done and no more technology projects are on the horizon. They start feeling less value in their services.

This phase is no longer just a technical and communication related one. If the MSP cannot connect the application of technology to their business then the client will not see value or opportunity within IT. If the IT only keeps firewalls and emailing with Office 365 then it will not be seen by them as a real business relationship. 

The MSP has to establish a business conversation with a client to be able to stay relevant. The client management team should believe in the future and the opportunities that technology can bring to the table. This requires a true IT consultancy mindset and services. Without a business consultancy, digital transformation or business vCIO mindset and services the perceived value will stagnate at best.

 

Your Decisions:

1. Treat Clients differently based on their maturity: Check your client base and determine at which stage you are with them. 

• If they are in phase one, you need to push awesome technical solutions. 
• If they are in phase two, you need to add high-touch account management to be able to communicate the given service value. 
• If they are reaching phase three, then brace yourself…you need to introduce a new way of thinking and sets of services to generate business value outside of the technology focus. It’s that or create many mechanisms to lock them in even as their perception of value declines.
  
  

2. Choose your Strategy:

• Defensive Strategy - shoot for the clients on Phase 1 and 2 then monetize the opportunities along the way. Once they’re reaching Phase 3 do whatever it takes to keep them even with a declining engagement
• Offensive Strategy - do not even try to sell to Phase 1 clients but focus your efforts to catch Phase 2 clients. Invest in development services for Phase 3. (vCIO, Application Management, Cyber Security Compliance etc.) Then go out to the market and steal clients from MSPs playing the Defensive Strategy. How? Simply offer the client’s executives “business value” with IT strategy planning sessions and Digital Transformation services.

 

Conclusions

The trends are obvious. 

1. Fewer and fewer small and medium businesses will be in the Phase 1 stage.
2. There will still be a great deal of clients in Phase 2 but the competition will be very fierce here.
3. More and more clients need higher-level IT services - it’s a real emerging market with little competition. Here the challenge is service development and a consultative sales process.

None of the options is easy to manage but all are predictable from the big picture standpoint.

 

5 Practical Ways MSPs Can Prevent Churn

By Denes Purnhauser on February 25 2020

We asked last week during our webinar with Sea-Level Operations: What are the symptoms of Account Management debt? Low perceived value,  communication breakdown, and churn were included in 100% of the responses. Most interestingly 77% of the time churn was mentioned without prompting. During the session we analyzed this situation and identified the crucial methods to prevent potential churn. We are going to highlight the 5 major activities Account Managers can do to accomplish this.

 

STRUCTURE, MANAGE AND AUTOMATE YOUR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO PROCESESS

 

1. Creating a Business Context around Services

The first priority for Account Managers would be to connect the IT services to their business goals. This can happen with IT Strategy planning meetings when the major focus is on the client’s business goals, issues and challenges. Properly applied to their IT Roadmap these findings can be quite effective. 

Most MSPs make the mistake of proactively creating and presenting these plans to the clients without actually interviewing them. This is like a doctor writing prescriptions without a diagnostic exam. It is not enough that the MSP knows what to do and what needs doing. The client needs to feel understood! That’s what makes Strategy Workshops critical.

Churn Prevention Factor: 10 out of 10 by making you a strategic partner rather than a technical vendor.

 

2. Value Demonstration by Service Definitions

MSPs offer very complex and technical services bundled into specific packages. Back when the value proposition of an MSP was “peace of mind” for the client and the client had problems, the bundled service was an easy sell. Of course now that MSPs make their clients complacent and “problem-free” the pains are gone and clients are second-guessing the value of the given services. 

Detailed Service Definitions and regular mandatory reviews help to remind clients that problems seems distant BECAUSE of the huge amount of work, professionalism, and services delivered. These Service Definitions though should not be phrased technically, but in a way that a business owner understands that one key point: they are paying fair wages for these services.

Churn Prevention Factor: 8 out of 10 by getting everybody on the same page regarding how much professional work goes into having a “hassle-free IT” operation.

 

3. Value Demonstration by Excellence Models

The other communication issue with clients is a symptom of the ever-changing technology landscape and the client’s obligation to make their IT investments aligned with newly required quality. This idea is lost easily without being able to see the big picture. Asking to fund a firewall upgrade will definitely be viewed as an “unnecessary expense”.

Excellence models and scores can help define what “good” looks like and how “excellent” looks better in any given area. The MSP can create an excellence model for Office 365 / IT Infrastructure / Cybersecurity / Applications and so on. The excellence model can be reviewed through an internal audit where the MSP goes through the relevant criteria. The result is presented to the client as a score, which is easily referenced and compared over time.

Now going back to the firewall issue. By auditing the client and showing 80-90% “green” scores all over the place you’ll instill confidence that their MSP is delivering value. On the other hand showing a potential “red” score with 40% will highlight a bottleneck that can be remedied with an updated firewall. Now the expense is not a waste but a conscious and wise decision by the executive to turn that red light green.

Churn Prevention Factor: 8 out of 10 by illuminating every issue from a big picture perspective.

 

4. Consistency by Proactive rather than Reactive Meetings

I learned the big difference between being proactive and reactive from Steven Covey. Being reactive is the easy and mentally lazy default approach. Like if the phone rings we pick up, if an email arrives we open. Proactive things are often not urgent but important and we have to act upon them. Reading a book is proactive as the book never rings and never notifies our inbox. Reading a book is never urgent but can be vitally important. The same can be said about quality time with clients.

Clients will initiate calls to which they expect you to react. That’s easy, but it’s also easy to neglect to proactively prepare an agenda, generate a report and spark conversation. Consistency means you put the important ahead of the urgent and you carve out the capacity and time to regularly meet with clients regardless of current issues. Bringing topics to those meetings will help you avoid getting mired in operational items and focus instead on their business objectives as you direct rather than respond to topics. Further if clients don’t see consistency within your interactions they’ll be hard pressed to believe in your service delivery consistency either.

Churn Prevention Factor: 7 out of 10 by demonstrating consistency with proactive meetings.

 

5. Contact All Stakeholders As MSP’s

QBRs are full of tactical elements such as ticket reviews, service delivery issues, upcoming technology updates and so on, and key stakeholders are often absent. Business owners and executives are not interested in the details, but without having a platform to meet with them the MSP will lose communication lines with the key decision-makers. 

This is why forward-thinking MSPs have been designing meetings just for executives. Office Productivity Audits, IT Leadership Workshops or Application Implementation Projects are ideal for the decision-maker audience. IF an MSP cannot separate the tactical from the strategic the majority of the conversation will be reactive/tactical rather than proactive/strategic.

Churn Prevention Factor: 7 out of 10 by demonstrating consistency with proactive meetings.

 

Conclusion:

You do not have to do everything immediately. Getting out of the Account Management Debt is a process. But this process also has quick wins. See where you are the weakest and fix those first.

I strongly recommend the webinar we made with Rex, Rich, Jason together walking through these topics.

 

 

How to build client rapport under pressure & limited time

By Denes Purnhauser on February 19 2020

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

 

Get long term client loyalty

with regular and strategic QBRs and IT strategy meetings

 

 

Use Case Overview

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

 

Problem:

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

 

Result:

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

 

Use Case Brief:

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

 

Solution:

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

 

 

5 Questions that will make your Client Meetings Strategic

By Denes Purnhauser on January 24 2020

What would it feel like not just having great and engaging meetings with clients but being able to become true business partners? Progressive MSPs has been started because when the Quarterly Business Review (QBR) meetings aren’t focused on the “Client’s Business Review” but the “MSP’s Business Review” then engagement drops and the relationship gets mired in the technology partnership level. Although it raises a concern about the scalability of the process - as account manager employees seem to have trouble engaging executives with real business discussions - there are best practices that can be applied to empower employees to elevate the conversation.

In this blog we collected five great conversation starters that will generate huge engagement among high-value client business owners and executives. Your growth need not stagnate just because you as a business owner are the only one who can deliver these meetings.

Upsell your clients with strategic QBRs and IT strategy meetings

 

Prerequisites for making business conversations easy

We have been teaching, coaching and guiding MSPs to do better consultative sales meetings, quarterly business reviews, audits and annual strategy workshops. We have researched what types of questions work and what questions won’t engage executives.

There are seven common traits among great questions that can elevate your conversations. You can read later five of our favorite questions, but we wanted to empower you to be able to create your own sets of questions later.

1. Leading. Questions are open-ended and generally based to help the interviewer drive the conversation without need of great expertise in the topic.
2. Low-risk. Whoever answers the question feels no pressure or risk of being intimidated or sharing information that would not be shared openly anyways.
3. Trust building. Show honest curiosity and make the interviewees feel understood.
4. Contextual. Relevant in multiple potential contexts. Questions can be asked in annual meetings, quarterly meetings or even in ad-hoc social events.
5. Discovery. Ensure you take notes and go deeper when needed.  The answers can be used for general purposes or follow-up later with more information.
6. Actionable. Drive specific actions or generate complete action plans from the answers and topics.
7. Consultative. Ensure you conduct business and consultative conversations rather than promoting technology or solution specific outcomes. 

If the questions you ask executives are missing one or more of these traits then the result can be stalled conversations, uncomfortable feelings, and lost confidence.

Ok let’s dive into the questions one by one:

 

1. What made you successful in this business in the first place?

This question leads you to uncover the client’s main value proposition. That means they will talk about what distinguished them among their competition, why they started the business and what made them successful in the first place. This makes most executives proud as this is their story.

You can lead the questions towards the relevance of these aspects today. What puts their success at risk? How do they keep being successful in the future? Those avenues can help you to find potential business issues your company can help solve, either in the short term or in the longer-term.

2. What does your team do every day to keep clients happy?

This question leads to discovery of the core functions they have to do well to run the business. The team’s required focus on the critical things has to be maintained in order to keep clients happy. This is more important than ever as the competition is getting fierce in every industry.

That information gives you many clues of different operational challenges, bottlenecks and potential headaches for the executive. You can find initiatives they are working on and can capture important priorities you might be able to address with tech solutions.

3. What are the three things in your market that would not be relevant in the future?

This question leads to the future. What’s not going to be important in the future will reveal what will be important tomorrow. This is really a hidden strategy related question uncovering their perspective of future priorities.

That information gives you clues about how they see how technology itself will shape their industry, and how digital transformation is affecting their industry and company. You can understand what role they are giving to their technology initiatives. That gives you a great overview about what level they value your company’s help.

4. If you could work only one day a week, what are the critical things you would need to do to maintain the company?

This question leads to understanding their personal priorities. If they would have only one day to work a week, what roles and activities would they choose. This personal question can reveal many personal priorities. Also, it can be used to put in a negative order. See what types of work, obligations or roles they do not like. 

As an example, if they would answer: “I wish I would not have to do any cash flow management ever again” that can help you to see it’s a personal pain point for them. Or they may think about the core roles they play in the organization. 

This question is not an obvious one and very challenging. People usually do not have a quick answer for that but it can also unlock their personal goals with the company.

 

5. What habits do you want your leadership team to obtain

This is also a great question to unlock leadership gaps. Now, most executive’s main priority is to build a great leadership team. This question is focusing on the potential gaps the leadership team sees. 

This can help you to understand the personal leadership priorities and the leadership issues preventing them from growing - common needs such as better meetings, more accountability, better motivation or personal development. This will give you many clues to the pain points the leader has with managing and building a team. 

3 Steps to make this work

In the technology sphere most account managers, technical account managers, and vCIOs are engineers at heart and sometimes these types of conversations don’t come easy.

However, being in a comfort zone means going back to a technology conversation that is comfortable for the account manager but not engaging to the client.

Based on hundreds of sessions we have learned that confidence is everything when it comes to client meetings. Nobody wants to be in a situation where they don’t feel competent, confident and in control. Let’s follow these three steps to apply these questions to your next meeting. 

1. Read aloud and tweak it until you feel authentic. Make sure the questions are comfortable to ask and natural to you.
2. Think forward, what types of answers you might get and what would be your response to dig deeper or to switch the topic.
3. Call 3-4 friends, team members or even your CEO and include these questions in your natural conversation. Listen and see what happens.

This skill will change the type of conversations you have with business executives and can transition you from being a great technical gifted account manager to a very assertive business consultant.

 

On a bumper sticker

Think about the following briefly:

• Think about how many times you are covering these types of topics with your clients? 
• What you are missing out by not having these discussions?
• What are the obstacles preventing you to put these questions into your client meeting agenda?
• How would you be perceived when asking these types of questions as a technology provider?
• What is your comfort level to lead conversations in these points?
• What would you get by having these business-related conversations?

The more you and your team are getting comfortable diving into your client’s businesses the more opportunities, loyalty and trust you are going to obtain. Put together your own versions of the questions, tweak them and make sure you are becoming a high-value business partner by helping your clients as best you can.

How to get out of your “Client Engagement Debt”

By Denes Purnhauser on January 17 2020

As a Technology Provider, you’ve undoubtedly encountered the symptoms of your clients' "Technology Debt." This is the manifestation of the inherent costs of perpetual support for less-than-optimal technology. This is a drain on both you and the client. Client Engagement Debt is a similar concept that encompasses the implied cost of not having enough quality Account Management, Technical Account Management, vCIO or IT Consulting activities with your clients. This costs you money, erodes trust, loses opportunities and even lowers the value your clients see in your services. Let’s take a look at how much debt you have and how to get rid of it this year.

 

STRUCTURE, MANAGE AND AUTOMATE YOUR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO PROCESESS

 

7 Symptoms of Client Engagement Debt

Let’s cut to the chase and see whether you have Client Engagement Debt. The following list will provide symptoms of unhealthy Client Engagement Debt.

1. Meetings are ad-hoc - meetings are set not well in advance but because of an issue, opportunity or client request
2. Conversations are tactical -  issues have piled up so the discussion is long and strategic topics go unaddressed
3. Too much preparation time - there are no snapshots or baseline reports so conversations have to start from scratch every time
4. Conversations are technology-focused - the lack of business discussions leads the meetings to technology discussions usually with non-executives
5. There is no Strategic Governance - the quarterly meetings stand on their own and aren’t supported by a strategic roadmap
6. The MSP owner is the only one who can do QBRs - the MSP owner is overtaxed with integrating all the missing pieces to present to a client

and this symptom is very tricky… as it presents as a great outcome of hard work..:

1. Efficiency gains - reduced ticket count and efficient operation generate less natural facetime with a client. This is positive in general but it might relegate the MSP to a “low touch” partner role if there are no consistent proactive Account Management meetings in place.

Potential implications for different MSP size

Client Engagement Debt is not something that happens overnight because of a sudden issue or problem. Rather it’s a result of a slow eroding process of various inhouse and external factors. 

External factors like technology commoditization, more millennials in the workplace, general technology adoption, tech savviness and the overall maturity raise the managed services market.

Internal factors like Account Management processes, quality of client meetings, time invested on client meetings, discussed topics, previous attempts of developing client engagement initiatives.

Here are the potential implications for MSPs of different size and maturity:

Small MSPs

If your company has less than 5-7 employees the chances are high that the owner is the only resource capable of delivering engaging client meetings. The obvious time pressure limits the resources available for developing programs or delivering quality interactions with proper follow-ups. The challenges are in streamlining the process and becoming more strategic with these conversations. This goes back to defining an Annual and a Quarterly process with clients, and support it with an application that helps the sharing of conversations and action plans.

Mid Size MSP

If your MSP has 8-20 employees the chances are high that there is a full-time individual responsible for Account Management and/or vCIO activities. The challenges at this point are related to accountability, scalability and a unified experience through the process. Properly set expectations for the client segments, proactive playbooks for activities, measurement of engagement as well as defined and adopted technology standards. These are the foundations of a process that will scale.

Large MSPs

If your MSP leadership were able to pass the 20 person mark then your 2nd layer of management should be in place and, due to your size, multiple people are responsible for different levels of client engagement. Account Managers, Technical Account Managers and vCIOs are working together as a team to drive client engagement. Now the challenges are more on the management and scalability side of the house. Processes, unified workflows, shared information, productivity and duplicate-able client meetings are the priority. As the team has to work together, a single QBR process might include 3-4 people in various roles to prepare a report, deliver the meeting and follow up all tickets, projects or opportunities. This leads to internal client engagement operation initiatives.

Regardless of the size of the MSP the real solution for managing Client Engagement Debt is similar to getting out of financial debt.. First create a momentum to start paying back the debt, then stabilize the operation to prevent future debt arising. That is why a holistic approach is needed rather than a quick fix.

 

Holistic Client Engagement Development

Let’s not go into the details too much here. If you feel you have these symptoms and are less engaged with your clients, you need to fix it soon. It’s critical because being an MSP is a “High-Touch” business model. Your foundation is a very close relationship with clients. In the past “Solving the IT Problems Together” created a natural bond with your clients. Now that you’ve been so successfully efficient you need different activities to maintain quality engagement.

Client Engagement Development has four components:

 

1. Client Engagement Foundations

Before we hit the road and cut the Client Engagement Debt we need to lay down the foundations of your Client Engagement.

Essentially, what is the level of Client Engagement your MSP wants to provide, who is going to provide it and what will comprise its requisite activities?

1. Client Engagement Goals and Strategy
2. Client Engagement Roles
3. Client Side Roles
4. Client Segmentation
5. Client Segment Playbooks

 

2. Standardization

Once we have these foundations you have to define your standards. These standards are required to create an overall scoring of the technology health, applied best practices and technology stack adoption by your clients. These make the misalignments actionable for your team and standardize the operation, and will hugely attenuate ticket noise, as well as render the Account Management process easy and repeatable.

1. General Standardization Strategy
2. General Standardization Process
3. Service Standardization
4. Technology Stack Standardization
5. Technology Best Practices Standardization

 

3. Client Engagement Activities

Now you can start establishing your client engagement activities. What is going to happen in the Annual Strategy Meeting, what will you do in the Quarterly Business Review Meeting, what types of Audits will you have (Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Office 365) and so on. This is going to define the various activities you’ll provide to the distinct client segments you’ve defined.

1. Technology Engagement Activities - Technology Roadmap Planning, Quarterly Business Reviews, Technical Audits etc.
2. Business Engagement Activities - IT Strategy Planning, Quarterly Business Reviews, Business Workshops etc.
3. Sales Engagement Activities - Renewals, vCIO Project Scoping, Consultative Sales Meetings

 

4. Client Engagement Operations

Parts 1-3 were about developing your Client Engagement - and now we move to execution. Now you need to manage your people (or your calendar if you are alone), schedule meetings with the right contacts, manage meetings and generate and maintain client roadmaps for governance. This part is about efficiency: less time in preparation, more effective conversations, and productive handoffs to the delivery team. Here’s where we are going to learn how to run an effective client engagement operation.

 

Your Reward: Client Engagement Excellence and Account Management Dividends

Client Engagement Activities done well reduce your Client Engagement Debt and prevent future Debt happening.

1. You run an efficient, profitable operation by adopting technology best practices, a unified solution stack, and well-defined services.
2. Your clients are better engaged, value your services more highly, feel they’re getting what they’re paying premium rates for and generate sustainable growth for you.
3. You can differentiate your brand and demonstrate your value to your clients.

Without a strategic effort, your next Client Engagement initiative will likely stall and never take off for scalability. Let’s do it right this time. 

 

How to Become a Trusted Advisor With Strategic Client Meetings

By Denes Purnhauser on December 13 2019

Most MSPs are facing the commoditization trap. Competition is getting fierce, price pressure is constant, it’s hard to get in front of prospects and selling additional services like cyber security or IT consultation is tough.

There is one telltale sign each MSP should look for of declining client engagement which leads to the downward spiral of less connection, less stickiness (retention) and eventually less profitability.

In this blogpost we are going to learn about this telltale sign, how you can identify whether your MSP is affected and what to do to overcome the problem.

Ok that’s a shameless cliffhanger, but I really think you should check out this post!

 

Get long term client loyalty with regular and strategic QBRs and IT strategy meetings

 

How to identify the issue?

Identifying the issue is simple, but admitting it is hard.

Let's think about the last 10-20 client meetings and answer Yes or No to the following statements.

• The meetings were about tactical discussions like project scoping, project updates, service management, contract renewals etc.

• The meetings were held with office managers, IT directors or Operational Executives

• The meetings covered technical aspects like backup, disaster recovery, tickets, service metrics and technology projects

• The meetings were mainly initiated by an issue, a client request or a pressing technology problem (like windows 7 update)

• The meetings were mainly based on a well-prepared presentation, documents, proposals etc.

If you answered ‘yes’ to 2 or more of these statements then the majority of your client meetings tend to be ad-hoc, tactical, technology-driven presentations with technology liaisons.

The next question is how many proactive, strategic, business-driven conversations you have with your client's executives.

The more strategic, business-oriented, interactive conversations you have with people who run organizations, the more relevant, sticky and high-value a business partner you are.

 

What is the ROOT problem?

The problem is that these meetings actually define the quality of your relationship with your clients. This seems to be a norm among the MSP community as (no wonder) your services are typically tactical (infrastructure, office, network) and technical (Information Technology) services. But regardless how awesome you are, how great your services are and how diligent your internal processes are, this defines your relationship as a basic IT service provider. That was great in the past but in the new commoditized market this becomes an issue.

Ok here is the short version: doing proactive, strategic, business driven conversations with business leaders will differentiate you and keep you relevant for years to come. That can lead you to expand your client base and transform you from a basic IT service provider to a high-value business partner.

 

Why Strategic Client meetings help?

Strategic Client Meetings are going to help you get the right audience, have the right conversations and make your clients more competitive with your help. You will be able to redefine what technology can do for them and how you can help reach their business goals.

1. Engage Executives - How to provide the value your executives are looking for.

2. Generate More Revenue - How to design exciting project opportunities and close them quickly.

3. Do More in Less Time - How to prepare, run and manage high-value business meetings

 

I. What makes a client meeting strategic?

Some people think that “strategic meeting” is just a buzzword and there are no clear boundaries or definitions that make a client meeting more strategic. Let’s dive into three aspects to start building your own.

1. Strategic Agenda with Strategic Roles

The agenda of these meetings is strategic, not tactical. The topics are their business goals, challenges, what makes them different, why they’re better than their competition and in-house hurdles to execution of their strategy. These topics can be covered only with the people in their organization involved on these levels full time. You need the individual leading the organization.

Don’t assume just because the individual you’re meeting with is the president you’ll have a strategic conversation. For small businesses the president wears many hats. They might be responsible for the technology part of the business. If this is the case your meeting agenda might still be tactical and the conversation will be not strategic.

 

2. Strategic Client Segments

You are running a tech organization so of course you can’t have only strategic conversations. You have to have some tactical dialogue with your clients as well. However, without a policy of how to allocate finite resources - like people who can deliver strategic conversations - to myriad clients based on their size, you can find you’re overspending on small clients who offer less revenue opportunity. It’s crucial to calculate a “client engagement budget” for all client segments. Then you can balance how much time you spend for tactical and strategic conversations. For example, you can allow an “A Client” with $5,000 MRR up to 60 hours of engagement a year but a “C Client” with $1,000 MRR justifies only 12 hours a year. (We use the 5% MRR formula to calculate client engagement budget).

 

3. Strategic Client Playbooks 

Once you know how much time you can spend on a given client segment you can create a strategic playbook for each client. Like your “A Client” with 60 hours annually can have an annual strategy planning workshop (2x4 hours) some business-related cyber security, compliance or application audits (3x4 hours a year) and solid QBRs with multiple people (3x6 hours). You can put it into a playbook, plan the meetings and execute with scalability. However the playbook for a “C Client” might be a light annual strategy workshop to create a roadmap and have basic QBRs to execute the plan.

These three steps lay the foundation for consistently effective and proactive meetings.

 

II. Examples of Strategic Client Meetings

The other common mistake we see among MSPs is to dump every type of discussion into a QBR: contract renewals, technical assessments, updates, technology landscape or standard stack adoption, all to be covered in one 90 minute meeting. Preparing huge presentations will lead to rushing through the process. Let’s check out three very good examples of distributing disparate topics to different meetings to establish the strategic layer for the clients.

 

1. Strategic Workshops

Strategic workshops are delivered typically once a year. This is a highly business-focused conversation with specific topics you can perform with a whiteboard. Encourage brainstorming around their business. A typical exercise can be a SWOT analysis, industry analysis or simply a summary of their goals and where they’re heading. For many smaller MSPs these meetings are driven by the owner of the MSP, and is still scalable as meeting with a client from the executive level once a year is still worth it. Business owner to business owner conversation is more about high-level topics anyways. The workshop format helps bring about predictable outcomes and materials that can be used for building their business, like IT roadmaps.

 

2. Strategic Audits 

There are many topics of discussion that can give measurable outcomes. The health of their infrastructure (IT Technology Health Audit), the utilization of the complete Office 365 suite (Office Productivity Audit), the state of their cyber security practices (NIST Cyber Security Audit) and so on. These audits, done in advance, are based on a scoring mechanism and the meeting is where you’ll be validating the facts, educating the client and generating actionable roadmaps to fix problems and unlock opportunities. These Audits can be distributed over the year as “themes of the quarter” and so on. This provides a positive client engagement pulse with executives based on facts.

 

3. Strategic QBRs 

Here is the payoff. Once you have Strategic Workshops with business topics and you do Audits which translate technical issues to business language, you have a solid case of business context for your IT projects. Your Strategic QBRs can be wrapped around the execution of the strategy. Now your tactical components actually have context as well. Talking about the Disaster Recovery plans, and backups and cloud migration is no longer out of the blue. Now the Quarterly Business Review (QBRs) get the legitimacy of business sense so executives can see the progress and understand the big picture. Further, talking with a technical liaison is easier if the “order” comes from the top and there’s not and insulation layer between you and the executives.

These Strategic Conversations lead to strategic decisions and strategic engagements.

 

III. Outcomes of Strategic Meetings

The main goal of these strategic meetings is to become more of a high-value business partner. The decisions you help them make are higher level and more specifically attentive to their business goals. Often you are just a concierge of those decisions and your MSP will execute the project. However, as these projects are technical by nature you can still manage them. Let’s see what outcomes you can expect to govern your high level engagement.

 

1. Strategic Roadmaps

A strategic roadmap is simply the execution plan of the IT strategy. You have identified the strategy with 2 or 3 major initiatives throughout the year and created a breakdown of projects that need to be completed in order to achieve the goals. The roadmaps need clear, strong approval of intent from the executive level. This is going to be a great framework to wrap the year’s activities around. The projects should be outlined if not scoped. Create project outlines defining the cause, vision and expected outcomes of the projects in 2-3 sentences. These are not project scopes yet. The goal here is to have specific initiatives and lists of typical action items to lead to success.

 

2. STRATEGIC BUDGETS

The trick of these roadmaps is that these projects have to be approved and many details will be forthcoming as the projects get scoped out. As the client’s perception clarifies, they might be getting hungrier for more and expand the project budgets. In order to keep things real and see whether the intent will lead to project approvals it is great to have an overall high level budget estimation for the Roadmap. If you know the project outlines you can “guesstimate” the time and effort behind the project as an assumption. The budget is going to give a reality check to the client about their capabilities and you can sort out the “nice to have” projects without putting so much time into scoping and planning. This also achieves great alignment with the client. Once the budget is approved then approving an individual project will be a breeze as long as they’re within your estimates.

 

3. Strategic Services

Besides managing your project incomes, strategic meetings have the power to actually make your current and new services profitable too. For example, many MSPs have trouble upgrading clients to separate, add-on cyber security services. The need is obvious, but the services are expensive to deliver and explaining the need for an updated security plan is harder without the strategic components. However, if the strategic plan has a cyber security audit, cyber security issues move from a tactical level -  “they need more services” - to a strategic level - “cyber security is a strategic level risk.” The “$35 per user” additional cyber security add-on will be accepted more readily. The process is less salesy and it puts the responsibility on their end to make the call, or live with the potential consequences.

The strategic meetings deliver more strategic decisions and this transforms you into a high-value strategic partner.

 

Conclusion

Running an MSP is hard. There are many issues about service delivery, hiring people and growth. Establishing strategic relationships with clients and prospects makes everything easier: better control of the client, higher quality conversations, more visible value, and obvious differentiation. Every forward-looking MSP is getting more strategic, the question is how quickly can they make the transition.

 

Managed Services Platform vCIO Report 2019

By Dr Peter Torbagyi on December 6 2019

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

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

 

DEVELOP AND OPERATE A SCALABLE AND STRUCTURED

ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO OPERATIONS

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See previous parts:

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

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

 

Accelerate Your Growth with the new features just released

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?