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.
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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.
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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.
Terrible buying process for Managed Services
People are talking about MSP sales processes when it comes to discussion of new client acquisition. I believe we should see the process from the customer's perspective and realize that the buying process for them is terrible. Given the current typical buying process, a working future strategic relationship is becoming less and less likely. Let's take a look why the process is broken and see if we can figure a fix.
There are three major underlying issues causing this trouble:
- Unknown criteria of the decision
- Vague decision making processes
- No compelling differentiation among choices
Differentiate yourself from your competition
and become sales ready in 30 days
Issue 1. Would you buy a car for your spouse through an RFP?
A request for proposal (RFP) is a solicitation, often made through a bidding process, by an agency or company interested in procurement of a commodity, service or valuable asset, to potential suppliers to submit business proposals. (Wikipedia)
RFPs are useful tools for firms who can precisely define a request, the services involved, that is innovative and isn’t yet mainstream. Some, however, are just fishing, and end up selecting by price. They don’t know how to make the best decision on the provider, so it comes down at the cost.
The problem for us of course is that if they’re not looking at the other (non-price) properties of the decision, we’ll have a hard time to winning the deal at a rate that will let us provide excellent service.
RFP does not permit the two parties to get to know each other, which hinders the ability to align on a strategic relationship which will lead to the maximized value creation.
Quickfix 1. Actively define the criteria of the decision
If we’re able to precisely nail down the criteria of a decision, our job would be easy. Unfortunately like the car choice for our spouse, most decision making is not logical but emotional, and the criteria seem to be endless. A car can be sold or left in the lot based on its colour alone, or entirely on its reported performance in crash tests.
Our truly superior approach, that actually does help our clients streamline, isn’t getting the chance. We have to use an emotional metric to sway an emotional decision - that you are the genius of technology and have the relevant attributes and skills to assuage any doubts they made the right choice - even at double the price.
We’ve been using the ITCq - IT Competitiveness Quotient to measure how competitive a client is with their technology. These have 56-165 criteria respecting customer size, all logically related to long-term success through better adoption of technology, but at the end of the day when they have a score like 35 out of 100, there will be an emotional aspect to the decision. This is something that needs attention... and we know how to make it better, and can show measurable results.
Issue 2. Would you teach a farmer how to sell potato?
Prospects will always try to second guess the pros on how to buy Managed Services Provider services. They don’t want to be involved in the discovery process (just gimme a price), want shorter meetings (I’m busy), try not to make business decisions on IT (moving to the cloud is a technical issue) and so on.
Every client is different - their circumstances, legacy systems, people, management maturity and so on. For an Managed Services Provider to be in a position to offer anything substantial takes time. The client may see this as a sign you’re not moving forward.
If they don’t see any specific process of engagement they start trying to control the situation and sidetrack you even with a process in your mind.
Quickfix 1. Show them your process and stick to it.
One awesome member showed me a laminated card the other day. It showed a process of how to create an excellent IT Service provider relationship in 7 steps.
It started with a first meeting to check the potential fit. Then it went to an IT Strategy discovery workshop (used the ITCq process) to understand the business related problems and how the IT needs to align with it. Then it moved to data gathering on systems, documentation and infrastructure followed by a technical audit. The next step was the first instance of any talk about price and a contract.
Visible steps were required for a great relationship and none of them was redundant. Our member showed their client that this is how it works. The Managed Service Provider was able to drive and lead the process.
Again the process was visual on a laminated card...I wish I could share it...drop me an email and I’ll get you in contact with the author.
Issue 3. Are you selling a freaking winter tire?
When looking for commodities, there’s a few criteria, and there’s price. But MSP isn’t a winter tire, is it. You need to make the distinction.
Before you go relying on your track record of fast and professional service, consider this: everybody makes the same claim.
Quickfix 3. Eliminate competition with consultative approach
One: let the client be understood. We have to understand their priorities, realities, goals, personality and then only then can we differentiate ourself.
Two: let the client find out what makes us different rather than telling them yourself. Let them make the decision unconsciously that we are the right fit for them.
Both of these are a natural result of a perfectly conducted consultative sales process. This process focuses on probing questions, listening, summarizing the findings, and expressing the solution and the results.
Probing questions on typical pain points (again an example for that is an IT Competitiveness Quotient questionnaire and report) gives you the talking points to explore the different IT related opportunities and dig deeper only where needed. The questions help drive the conversation and will tell way more about you, your company and your thinking than you can get across by yourself.
After getting deep, summarize the issue and get an understanding about priority. Hint to a solution with a client story to give them the confidence that you’re on the top of the game.
As the process unfolds we cover all their pain points, and differentiate ourselves. They’re confident we’ve already solved these problems (priorities for them) and are a great partner to consult.
Conclusion:
We can blame our clients, the markets or the competition because we are facing price pressure and commoditization, or we can embark on many proactive solutions. Let's apply these three quick fixes and rock your next sales meeting.
Two ways to differentiate your MSP
Two weeks ago we posted the interview with Verne Harnish, author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up! The interview has inspired many of our clients and readers to think about particular aspects of their business. I’ve personally been experimenting within two of those aspects lately, based on his thoughts: Hyper Specialization and Service Productization. I just wanted to share an update on how we’ve developed what we learned.
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Hyper Specialization
From the chats I’ve been having with many of you about this topic, it’s apparent that this is going to grow in importance in the future. The classic Managed Service Provider business is still all about solving the same problem for everybody: keeping the lights on and delivering peace of mind, regardless of the industry, size or client maturity. As we move forward as an industry these problems and challenges are going to deal more with the business model or vertical specific issues rather than general infrastructure.
For example:
The problems we’ve traditionally faced have been slow email, backup fails, need for cloud storage, etc. These issues are general needs for every type of company.
The problems we might see now and will see more in the future will be more like “We need to store tons of videos and music files in a searchable format”, “ I have many outsourced people doing production for me, how can I work with them and easily share documents on different projects ?” and so on.
These examples come from a real-life small record label. So this label’s MSP - a member of Managed Services Platform - collected all the issues the music distribution company had and polled a couple others too quickly about general challenges. They then designed a special package called “Cloud Office Suite for Small Record Label Companies”. It included the traditional MSP stuff such as endpoint security, help desk and proactive maintenance, but also bundled together the service with a special storage application (managing the meta tags and media files), project management app (Basecamp license + implementation + support) and many other integrated small applications solving their problems from their perspective as a record label.
As I witnessed this coming together it became pretty clear to me that to getting in front of this kind of prospect with Hyper Specialized Package offers will be a natural process. I can easily imagine pulling out problems relevant to the client to create interest, and am also sure these problems aren’t likely solved by their current MSP or internal staff.
This kind of package addresses our customers’ problems precisely and bundles a solution together that specifically speaks to their needs. I’m curious about the results of others, but I’m confident that this will be making a big change in the marketing of MSPs.
Productize the MSP services
One other thing I’ve gleaned while talking with some of you - these ideas have been started already but actually creating the hyper-specialized bundled packages for the verticals is, at least, non-traditional, and something quite new. This is the principle of productizing the service.
Because we can’t just bundle services together from a marketing perspective, this is actually a great opportunity to wire these processes together with the execution.
I see people playing with special service bundles aiming at micro companies (fewer than 10 staff and low budgets). Putting their data and systems to the cloud, and giving some basic support and value added applications like Office 365 + Todo + Calendar scheduling + note taking applications together solves their problem in a non-traditional way. Giving them classroom or webinar based training can help them adopting the basic applications. There’s also a way to eliminate the helpdesk (and its cost): to support only an internal champion rather than every individual. Now again MSPs are able to attract these small enterprises and do a profitable business.
So if you’ve kept up with our updates lately, we support those initiatives with new service bundle functions too, helping to put together service bundles based on your standard processes. Also because you’re now free to create services, your imagination is the only limit to creating offerings to verticals and productizing your services. Last but not least, graders and the new questionnaires will dramatically help you communicate with and qualify those prospects quicker and sell more.
I am quite excited to see how this trend develops. Looking forward to your stories!
Scaling up your MSP with Verne Harnish
We are continuing the “MSP 2.0 bestseller” series in March, as well. No question, one of my all time personal favorite books is Mastering the Rockefeller Habits from Verne Harnish. It helped me to apply the paradigm of “work on your business instead of in your business”. For many Managed Services Provider leaders this book has been a foundation to building their businesses. He’s followed this with his new book Scaling Up - Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0. I had a chat with him about the required steps for Managed Services Providers to stay on top of their business and to start Scaling Up!
Verne is straight to the point, so put on your seat belts and get your notepad open, this is going to be a high-paced trip!
Differentiate yourself from your competition and
become sales ready in 30 days
My take-aways from the video:
- Focus on marketing - start with a weekly meeting and make marketing a priority. The most successful tech companies always have a non-tech member in the team with a strong marketing focus. If you would like to excel with velocity, check the least obvious of the 4P (product, place, price, promotion) - the pricing. This is the most undervalued aspect but has the most impact on your differentiation and bottom line than the rest.
- Hyper Specialise - differentiate yourself by specializing in an industry, vertical, or specific problem and become the number one IT service firm in that specialty. It gives you the differentiation power while lowering your marketing expenses dramatically, and gives your clients a huge competitive advantage from working with you.
- Strategy also includes saying no - saying yes to every opportunity is great if you’re finding your place in the market; after that it’s going to hinder you in scaling up. Once you reach 3-5 years experience, you should have a firm scope of what you do and for whom, and how integral that focus of your expertise is to your and your clients’ success. Stick to that.
- Get into the Executive Suite - getting to the executive suite and being included in the client’s strategy is not an option anymore. Everything outside of that conversation is a commodity. If a service provider wants to be in the high margin arena, they have to take on a strategic role with their clients, period. Becoming a trusted advisor or a consultant is not difficult is you follow the next point.
- Leaders are readers - “read the freaking manual about business” not just technologic manuals. Or listen with Audible, read some Kindle, watch YouTube, whatever. Learn, learn, learn and make it a policy for your team too. Pick 40 books, get others to read some, report on the great ideas found in them and get implementing. Start checking out Verne’s reviews of the best business books every year on Fortune.com: 5 Best Business Books in 2015.
- Use Demand Driven Pricing - The hidden gem here is in Confessions of the Pricing Man: How Price Affects Everything by Hermann Simon. Demand-based pricing (or customer-based pricing) is a powerful shift, turning low and non-profit industries into revenue successes. In the US airline industry alone this shift brought $22 billion in increased revenue. The "all in one" pricing strategies were successful for MSPs in the past when execution was the bottleneck. Now, however, those who don’t accommodate the customer’s requirements and adopt some sort of customer-based pricing can suffer.
- Be agile working on your business - use sprints, agile methodologies (Scrum for example) like software developers do. Set your bi-weekly goals and work on them every single day. If you want to move faster you need a faster pulse. Use daily huddles and focus on the one or two things you’re going to do that day to close on your goal. For more advanced Service Providers, set goals for your clients - quarterly and monthly - and keep on top of them together in your weekly huddles.
- Have a peer coach - and hold yourself accountable. First have a quick chat with him/her and detail those things you commit to every single day. It has the effect of making you accountable, and choose wiser goals in your personal and corporate life. Verne has had his peer coach for years now! (We should organize something like that internally, come to think of it).
- Productize your services - product based companies are adding services and service companies try to productize their services. It’s the trend. Service providers who deliver defined, “tangible” products offer more choice to their clients and give a better buying experience. This is part of demand driven pricing - implement a service catalog with service bundles and balance your productized services with the customer's demand.
Verne is a generous teacher: check his site for all the goodies:
- Sign up for Verne’s weekly insights and join the 75,000+ business leaders every Thursday for a handful of easy to digest business ideas.
- Check out all the free goodies in the Scaling Up website. You can find many one pagers, templates resources to Scaling up your MSP.
- Grab his books in Amazon - Master the Rockefeller Habits, The Greatest Business Decisions of All time and Scaling up (with all the downloadable templates) and work on these ideas right away.
- Join in the movement and get the equivalent experience of 1000 books at the Scale Up Summit, May 24-25 in Atlanta. Meet other purposeful business leaders like yourself and get inspired!
Thanks to Verne for taking time to share his wisdom!
What is your pink cable?
This is a motif that’s had some traffic in the last few weeks in several situations, coming up in conversations about differentiation, going the extra mile, remarkable service, engaging clients, building a brand and the use of stories in this business.
One of our managed services provider clients told us a story about a fashion design client in Los Angeles with fashion conscious California team members. The office is artistically designed of course, with bricks, standing desks and an open cafeteria with bar tables. Lots of nice, creative radiant people having lattés while working makes this the place where techs are making up reasons to go every day.
He had some work out there and got inspired by the environment to get expressive, so he bought pink cables instead of the boring black ones.
He was just having fun. He didn’t predict the result...
Differentiate yourself from your competition and
become sales ready in 30 days
The reaction was extraordinary. The whole staff gathered quickly, coming out from their offices telling each other “hey check this out”. He was surrounded by people in no time, inspired by his one little choice.
This is the kind of situation service entrepreneurs dream about.
From “the IT guy” he became an instant star of customer care and known for remarkable service. He got everyone’s attention and for a little while IT became the important thing. Not because of well designed backup, virtual servers or smooth applications, but because of a set of pink cables.
This was instant differentiation from the rest of the IT companies sniffing around, make him the lovable service provider who cares. He became part of the team instead of being a cost line item in the books.
I like this story…. It tells a lot.
The ultimate question you should be able to answer with your team is the following:
What is your Pink Cable?
6 strategies to make MSP services more tangible
One of the most common and largest hurdles for MSPs is difficulty expressing our value proposition properly, and hence differentiating ourselves.
There are two fundamental aspects of our industry responsible. First is the abstract nature of the proposition. The problems we solve are less tangible, like “competitive edge” or “staying ahead of the curve” rather than “keeping the lights on”. The second is the more managerial and higher level services such as solution selection, and team alignment and integration rather than executable defined processes like device management and remote monitoring.
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Without a doubt that which is more tangible and more clearly defined is easier to explain, sell and even deliver. We try to answer the question: how we can make our vague and complex services more tangible.
The process below will first identify the different types of services you have, then set up a structure to help manage this process. Then we’re going to demonstrate the practices to enhance different types of less tangible items into a more tangible format. You’ll see how you can actually transform the most difficult to monetize services and make your service portfolio more ready to explain, sell and even deliver.
Let’s go through this short process quickly and see what is going on…
We’ve created a mapping tool to help us visualize the suite of different services we have regarding their type and degree of clarity. The service can be any activity or process you do for your clients.
You can do this easily with your team. Get out your flipchart/white board and sticky notes. If you’re more tech savvy you can use the given PPTx template.
1. Determine the type of service: Management or Execution
On the vertical axis we see a grade of services, management type or execution type.
Managerial type activities include making plans, having meetings, brainstorming new ideas, thinking on the big picture, managing people, aligning your team, and educational initiatives. Professional Services, Account Management, Technical Account Management, and vCIO related activities are typically managerial activities.
The execution part is where you actually implement something, fix things, solve particular IT problems, manage devices, deploy applications and so on. Level I, II, and III support, engineering and solution architect works are execution type positions.
2. Determine whether the service is more tangible or less tangible
On the Horizontal axis you see whether the service is more tangible (clear) or less tangible (less clear).
More tangible services have more physical attributes. These may be attached to a device, an application, a specific deliverable (like an excel sheet, word document), are easy to define and explain. They also include services defined by events or processes such as regular meetings, calls, emails, feedbacks etc.
The less tangible services have no firm definitions, no real processes behind the task, instead consisting mostly of ideas, goals, and vague offerings: starting a project, brainstorming a business problem, evaluating processes and so on.
3. Find the most problematic services
As you can see you’ll often find that Management type services tend toward the less tangible region of the chart while Execution type services are usually more tangible by nature. This means as your clients are pushing you to be more “strategic” or more “business savvy”, what they’re asking is that you deal in services that are inevitably less tangible.
Let’s apply this personally. I bet if you go through your service portfolio you’ll find that the services you call “problematic”, “less profitable”, and “annoying” are on the right hand side - less tangible. It’s no surprise, less tangible services are harder to manage.
Let’s choose the services you want to improve by making them more clear and explainable. Circle them
Now we’re going to apply one or more of the Six Strategies and see which function to move them into the more tangible side.
We’ll use an example here to go through these items. The service that probably eats most of your time is setting up projects. Taking some issues your client has mentioned from discussion to proposal is a long process that we are likely to do without being able to monetize. We’re going to take this service which we give them for free and construct a solid, tangible service with the following strategies.
Strategy 1: Apply a specific deliverable to the service
This first strategy is all about having outcomes with more tangible deliverables. It can be any type of document that demonstrates to both the client and our team member what is expected to be the end result of the service.
Example: Our service is quite intangible at first: “solve a problem”, “manage an issue”, “create a business case”. We can easily turn this into a very specific item with a template. We use the “10 point exercise” for these type of cases. It’s a quick exercise and at the end we’ll have the issues and problems spelled out and prioritized by the team, plus a list of possible next steps as action items. Showing the client such a completed template will bring substance and help them understand the value. Instead of just saying “have a meeting” we are going to deliver tangible evidence of our managerial activities so real value gets recognized.
Strategy 2: Apply specific meetings, workshops to the service
The second strategy creates clarity by applying some sort of specific “workshop” or “meeting” to the service. This is an active strategy of making a vague pursuit more tangible.
Example: We have a slick template for the “10 point exercise” and it gets completed during a “10 point exercise workshop”. We start with vague issues, problems and a misaligned team. We gather them into a workshop and ask everyone their main concerns, issues, problems and perceived opportunities about a given topic. We write it all down, then ask them to distribute 10 points across the answers on the chart. After summarizing points we see together clearly which major items are aligned or misaligned and we can expand on them. Have another round and convert those major items to specific action items. It all takes 30-45 minutes in a workshop that turns a vague input into a specific output.
Strategy 3: Apply a specific process to the service
This third strategy is to attach a very specific process to the service. We can have deliverables and we can have events, but we should also have a set of very specific steps we go through. Standardization like this creates clarity.
Example: We can put on paper the specific process of a 10 point exercise, and present the client with the plan for a workshop, with a briefing in advance. Explain what they can expect as a follow-up, like a template message with the appropriate action items. Even better we can chain together these exercises to encourage a wider vision of these esoteric processes as well. For example the first exercise will be the definition of the problem that leads to different options. We can then manage those options in other 10 point exercises which can lead to continuous solution selection process.
Strategy 4: Apply a cadence to the service
The fourth strategy is going to make the individual service item to a recurring service item. If we give a cadence to a service - such as annual, quarterly, monthly or even weekly - it will tremendously increase clarity of purpose.
Example: Clearly our clients need problems solved and business issue resolution all the time. Every company is working on their bottlenecks, so even when we do ‘fix’ something, something else will come along to keep us busy. Nobody wants to sit back and say “good enough.” In this case we can turn this “Business Issue Management” 10 point exercise of ours into a recurring service. Let’s say we have three 10 point exercises every Quarter to manage different issues with our client’s IT. We use the Quarterly Business Reviews to identify the problems we need to manage and to review the results of exercises.
Strategy 5: Put the service into a clear context
The fifth strategy is to address the problem/solution couplings within a bigger context. This is communicating the function of a given service in context of your overall service portfolio. Ask questions and lead discussions that exhibit your other services working together with this one. If you show the services next to each other you’ll demonstrate their value when playing together nicely. It’ll be seen as a higher level service built up from smaller components designed to fit together.
Example: We have our “Business Issue Management” service now quite nicely defined with templates, workshops, process and cadence. However we do many other things as well and they need many other services too. Let’s list those services in a questionnaire and put some structure around it all. Let’s say this service will be the part of the “Business Alignment Service Type” which falls into virtual CIO services. From that perspective it becomes clear that the virtual CIO has the job of identifying issues and problems of the business and addressing issue management and resolution. Again it gives the service a higher touch and puts it to a context with other activities all critical to a successful structure.
Strategy 6: Put the service into a framework or tool
The sixth strategy is to put the service into a bigger set of services. We touched on that in Strategy 5, with the catalog discovery perspective, and now we’re going to use it as a delivery perspective. If you use tools to group your services together they will communicate more fluidly and foster aligned synergies and notable efficiency.
Example: We have our “Business Issue Management” small service defined among many other services the vCIO can do. Implement the services to a tool that lets us interact with a client for another boost in clarity. For example, use a Customer Management - Project Management tool like Basecamp.com. We can put the 10 point exercises results into it, collaborate with the client and facilitate chat and discussions, and even use it during the Annual Planning. We’re creating a supportive environment where we and our clients are executing services together.
Next Steps:
Now go through your service portfolio and pick some to focus on making more tangible. Apply the strategies one by one and see which work best.
If you can see the process make sense but want to save some time, we’ve applied the six strategies for most of the IT management type services already. It makes Technical Account Management service pretty clear and made vCIO service very sellable and executable from a $1.500 - $5.000 Monthly Recurring Revenue range (with all related vCIO Projects excluded of course).
There are more than 30 services with all six strategies applied with templates, processes, events, cadence, and a sales questionnaire in a customer facing delivery tool.
If you’re interested in these practices, let’s have a quick chat and learn how quickly you can implement them.
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Trending Topics in the MSP 2.0 Peer groups
A few months ago we started sessions of real peer groups, to get people together to discuss real issues, problems and challenges we’re all facing and hopefully to come up with some individual plans that boost the accountability of process execution. From these I’ve compiled a list of topics that are front-of-mind among participants. I can report that the discussions dealt with the problems in a very forward looking manner, with creative solutions and not stuck in status-quo thinking. In my opinion these sessions are giving a unique insight into where the industry is going.
Let’s see the topics one by one
Develop a Scalable
Account Management and vCIO Operations
in 30 days
1. Structure needed in vCIO services already sold
There’s a growing number of cases where IT managed services providers are able to sell a $4000 - $8000 MRR stand alone vCIO service. These sales are happening usually with a client or prospect who’s been looking for a full-time CIO as an option already, but the vCIO service were more appealing with their flexibility. The challenge is to reverse engineer back to structured, processed deliverables that meet the value agreement.
2. Differentiation with business consultancy on the website
This is a general trend of changing the focus of our websites from a collection of IT related items into a suite of IT strategy related consultation. There is still some debate on whether the original website should be fixed, or a new website is needed in a separate domain. Most people agree however that the website’s goal is not to be a “marketing engine”, but rather to function as a substantial support through the sales process; helping to qualify prospects and to differentiate this MSP from the herd.
3. Modular pricing methods instead of all in one
Not surprising is that customer needs are changing dramatically in the IT scene. The traditional “all in one” value models no longer seem to help close deals. Modular pricing balances out the standardized delivery with partially customized offering, while retaining the efficiency and accountability of standardized prices. Contributors are currently working on the model for the service stack, offering both traditional MSP related IT management services and even general SaaS applications as well.
4. Capturing the Micro SME (5-15 people) market in a profitable way
Many MSP have difficulty selling to micro clients in a profitable way. Since these firms tend to function entirely in the cloud, most of the traditional MSP package is an overkill for them. They do need some kind of support, but more likely a self-service rather than a fully managed service. Models are being formed for a solution applicable to this demographic with higher performance and lower resources based on 100% cloud stack.
5. Clearing the difference of the MSP 1.0 and 2.0 offering
The MSP 1.0 and the 2.0 model can nicely play together, however mixing the two without a clear separation of roles and processes can be harmful. Letting a virtual CIO manage ticket escalations and focus on infrastructure projects can easily kill the initiative. The best way to achieve clarity is to design a Business Model Canvas with MSP 1.0 and MSP 2.0 items separated. This will help managers, employees, and clients alike understand the non-obvious differences.
6. Ways to start the stand-alone vCIO
For many MSPs there exists an internal mental hurdle to offering the virtual CIO as a separate service not bundled in. It seems easier to bundle at first, but the lack of clarity, agreement and expectations make it impossible to execute profitably later. Different stand-alone one-time services are instead created to trigger the monthly recurring vCIO services.
7. Annual IT Strategy process to upsell vCIO to existing clients
Related to the previous topic, this challenge is to start pitching the vCIO to our clients. Many members have been working on the “IT Strategy Process” to kick off their vCIO initiative. Most understood that pitching the vCIO service without clearly stated needs and benefits doesn’t work. But creating an IT strategy (the process is 7-8 hours) is worth the time and a well presented IT Strategy with many deliverables will pave the way for the vCIO monthly recurring work.
8. Closing deals faster
Lastly we noticed a common lament: that for many IT companies it’s fairly easy to get a positive conversation about the Virtual CIO or other high level MSP services, but that the discussion often remained abstract, in the realm of possibilities, and deals were not closed. That’s why picking 1-3 items to quickly solve will show the tangible value to the client, leading to closing more - and more expensive - vCIO deals. The group actually together summarized that this experience was needed, as it is a new product/service category unlike traditional MSP services.
Conclusion:
If you see the value in these 8 major topics the Peer Groups are working on you’ll see that this is a unique and powerful tool, and very forward thinking. I’m impressed by people’s creativity, entrepreneurship, clarity and persistence - a room full of people from all over the world, not complaining, and doing what it takes to put their IT companies ahead of the curve. So thumbs up, good job!