The 4 roles that make you a high value business partner

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

Client Engagement Roles

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

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

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

The reasons for doing this:

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

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

Examples:

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

Client Engagement Responsibilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Client Engagement People

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

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

Best Practices:

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

Conclusion:

By clarifying roles you may find it much easier to

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

Building blocks for Strategic Engagements

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

Generate client engagement with five qbrs in 30 days

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

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

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

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

Let’s discuss the 1st goal: Stack Alignment  

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

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

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

How much time should you spend on account management activities?

Are you spending all your Account Management resources on your noisiest clients? Does this mean some clients are being overlooked and underserved? What’s the best way to segment your clients and assign the appropriate resources?

Denes spends a few minutes explaining the best practices and how you can setup Client Experience Playbooks to empower your team to always deliver the best experience, that drives MSP client engagement.

Generate Client Engagement with 5 QBRs in 90 days