Accelerate Your Growth with the new features just released
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:
- New Software Features for Growth
- Expert Guides for Growth
- Role Specific Programs for Growth
- 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.
- Platform Orientation Meeting - if you have no membership yet, let's start exploring your goals and discover how the platform might serve your growth
- Growth Readiness Assessment - assess your readiness of growth and identify the bottlenecks holding you back preventing your breakthrough
- Smart Growth Action Plan - build a SMART goal and plan your next steps to achieve those goals with an action plan
- 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
- 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
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.
- Platform Orientation Meeting - if you have no membership yet, let's start exploring your goals and discover how the platform might serve your growth
- Growth Readiness Assessment - assess your readiness of growth and identify the bottlenecks holding you back and preventing your breakthrough
- Smart Growth Action Plan - build a SMART goal and plan your next steps to achieve those goals with an action plan
- 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
- 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.
7 Smart Tips to Maximize Your Continuum Help Desk Partnership
After my business grew from a break/fix it tech provider to a full fledged MSP, it was clear that I needed to offer 24/7 Help Desk service. I weighed the options and decided to outsource this role, choosing specifically to partner with Continuum’s Pittsburgh team. This partnership has thrived for the last 4+ years, expanding to encompass our Server Management, Security Operations, Network Management roles and more.
But, even though Continuum is an excellent partner, I learned the hard way that outsourcing a core operational process, like a Help Desk, can not be treated like ‘set it and forget it’. There are instances where it will not fulfil your needs... where you have to tailor it to fit your business. I also learned that the only way to take advantage of all that it offers is by first understanding how it works. It took me years and many mishaps to figure that out.
Outsourcing your Help Desk, easy? Sure... but not so fast!
Let’s get right to it. Here is the issue. Most often, your Help Desk is not integrated or responsive to you and your company’s needs. Certainly when I started, mine was not. I learned the hard way. You don’t have to. Here are 7 tips that will help you Maximize your Continuum Help Desk Partnership. And yes, the devil is in the details.
1. A Good Client Communication Strategy
Be sure to communicate to your clients the REAL benefits of working with a partner like Continuum and their outsourced Help Desk team. For example- they will have a Help Desk service even if Los Angeles gets hit by a missile. Their documentation and data will be safe with a company who can support their business, no matter what disaster might arise. Smaller companies simply can’t provide needed SLA’s without scalability. It’s not only important to share the REAL benefits but also to describe exactly what the Help Desk does, putting all that into a framework and a language that clients can understand.
2. Have Checklists for Complex Tasks
Complex tasks require that the partners have a process in place to keep mistakes at a minimum. The mistake many MSP’s make is not having an actionable process in place for all partnership activities, allowing all team players to understand the process... no matter where they are located or if they are new or old timers. Plus, what is sent to the team is both easy to understand and visualize, making what needs to be done very easy to assign work back and forth, no matter the complexity of the issue.3. Virtual Team Collaboration Process
This is more about collaboration. We already set the stage with proper communication strategy with the client. and managing complex procedures. The third one is about how to manage collaboration, as well as the process itself. First remember, the guys and gals at Continuum are real people.. not automated processes and they must be treated with respect. So instead of just creating a ticket with no communication why not actually talking to them. Ask real questions to help the process work smoothly kie- “Hey, can you tell me if this makes sense? Can you tell me if what I've assigned is correct? Can you make sure that you do this part and then you send another part to a different team?" Many call this team building, I call it collaboration and treating all members of the team as equals no matter where they are located.
4. Tactical Overview
This fourth tip is about having the proper tool set versus not having the proper tool set. Anyone who runs a MSP knows you need to have the right overview of your processes. In the case of the Help Desk, there's a couple of tools that have been really helpful in keeping control of the tickets.
For example, instead of only using ConnectWise which has terrible visualization tools, we use a BrightGauge dashboard that we developed for the purpose of watching our tickets, which are on our help desk board. This is a board that excels at maintaining accountability with our partners in the help desk. Basically we created more of the tactical layer above an operational stack, which has helped us to see what's going on on the higher end.
5. Quality Assurance
The fifth tip has to do with having a solid QA process. Without quality assurance, the chances for mistakes quadruple. I cannot stress this enough. If you are not triaging, managing, and doing ticket closing, you're going to have dissatisfied customers. It's just that simple. And I've never been taught this by any outsourcing partner. This is something I had to teach myself.
One of my colleagues lost a $3,000 a month MSP client last week. One of the major reasons was because tickets were just sitting unattended in Continuum boards, and everyone in their company thought they were being worked on. The solution- Watch things, read things, pay attention. You need to know what's happening. You don't want to go to a QBR and have someone bring up a ticket and you don't even know what the hell happened. You don't even know it existed. Just because you are outsourcing your Help Desk does not mean you should ignore it or not integrate it into your entire company.
6. Know your Partner’s Limits
You might think this is just obvious, but its importance sometimes gets forgotten. You must understand the limits of your outsourced partner.
For example, in any Help Desk process there's a knowledge transfer and without a proper knowledge transfer, the tech team might get it wrong. Plus sometimes there are certain tools better managed by the MSP itself. Basically you have to understand the limits in a capability sense. Do they know how to follow the instructions that are provided? Are the instructions even provided? Do they have access to the system that's in place. Do they have the personal skills to deal with clients? There's so many things from a technical standpoint that must be shared, let alone, the human perspective, it is wise to be clear when your Help Desk should handle something or when your internal team should.
7. Building your company culture- Help Desk and Internal Staff as one
This is to counter the last tip. The last tip is about not understanding the limits of your outsourced Help Desk team. This tip addresses leveraging the collaboration strategies that we mentioned earlier. It's about teaching everyone on the team how to delegate. I'm telling my guys, “you have these partners,” right? Maybe it's the help desk, or maybe it's, “hey, I need you to troubleshoot this server issue overnight.” But again, the cultural piece of outsourcing is teaching your entire team to know how to delegate. That's one of the biggest pieces of building a strong and aligned team.
There is a cultural shift when you can build your virtual network of resources that everyone can use. We're trying to expand the scope of what people do, but it's almost like everyone has to become a little bit of a manager. You have to learn how to see what's happening in a ticket, and how to know what are the limits, but also what are the possibilities with these partnerships? One team looking out for each other... having each other’s back, that is a successful MSP.
Conclusion
Your Continuum Out-Sourced Help Desk supports MSP's by providing superior helpdesk solutions. If handled the right way, it can act as a direct extension of your business. That is why your Help Desk should be utilized as a true partner... so you can offload the tasks that are holding back your business. But as any successful partnership, don’t just ‘set it and forget it’. This partnership needs effort and attention on your part to make it a REAL success.
