How to help executives make strategic decisions in the bathroom
The two most prevalent trends in client engagement are the increased frequency and remote delivery of meetings. We see, however, another trend that may surprise you, and its impact is as significant in your client meetings as in your sales meetings.
The power of the traditional printed collaterals, pdf reports, and personal influence is fading from future decision-making processes. This trend shows that your client executives and prospects might be making strategic decisions sitting on the toilet….
I do not want to bury the lead. Our tool is used to prepare, deliver and follow up important client meetings. We measure engagement with shared reports and we’ve just found out that the majority of follow-up items from client meetings such as QBR Reports, Strategy Reports, and Sales Proposals are opened on mobile devices.
This shows not just a surprising shift in engagement, attention span, information processing and decision making in general, but should send a wake-up call for every client-facing employee: the way to win deals, approve projects and upgrade contracts is not just doing the same thing in zoom.
Every account manager, vCIO and sales executive should rethink how their processes can help them succeed not just in the next 30-60 days but the years to come.
Here are 6 quick tips to think about in this new era of decision making:
1. Pro setup is not a luxury
At Managed Services Platform we’ve been performing ONLY remote meetings. We have first-hand experience with closing new clients more easily and showing off our services with confidence when the quality of our media - visual and audio - is non-amateur. Even your client’s trusted technology company loses credibility if your setup looks like home-movies brought to work.
- Pro lighting front (led lights for $150-400)
- Pro 4K webcam ($150)
- Pro Microphone ($100)
- Pro Background (well lit greenscreen or photo backdrop)
Ask us in chat and we’ll send you a good setup Amazon shopping cart example.
2. Add more engagement to remote meetings
Sales and client meetings are all about human influence. Shifting this experience to remote meetings can introduce a suite of barriers to the communication. Often the sound is choppy, body language doesn’t track, and your audience feels disconnected. Here are a couple things you can do to keep the realism in your remote meetings:
- Send an agenda ahead so people can prepare… even if it’s in the meeting invite
- Send any pre-work the other party needs to do in advance
- Ask questions frequently through the meeting
3. Follow up with a short video
Yes I know you can record a session with zoom and send it to the client. But this is like expecting them to read the 40 page proposal you'd have sent them in the past. This ain’t gonna fly. Let’s record a quick video with your webcam and put that into the report like it was designed for it.
- Use https://www.vidyard.com/ or https://wistia.com/soapbox which will help you record your video inside your browser, share the screen and share with a client in a minute
- Keep it under 5 minutes long
- Summarize the findings of the meeting and the action items
- Make sure anybody who wasn’t an attendee can understand the video (as we hope they pass it onto a teammate for follow up)
4. Create collaterals to promote quick decision making
Now your executive is likely watching your video while cooking dinner with the kids jumping around, or while walking the dog. You can’t count on deep concentration from your audience, and they want a shortened decision-making process. What you need them to do is send an email back with the word “Yes”.
- Send a complete report as a reference only
- Ask one question in one email right in the subject line so they can answer yes or no
- Put only the additional information like parts of the report that are related to the question into the email
- Do not get wordy - send a clear goal and calls to action
5. Always close the loop
Never finish a meeting without setting up the next one. This is Business 101 but in this remote work era calendars are full and chaotic with mixed family commitments and disrupted routines.
- Use an online scheduling tool and open it during the meeting
- Don’t wait until after the meeting or let them pick later (they won’t)
- Make sure you set the agenda and the time for the meeting before you leave
6. Increase the meeting frequency because meetings are cheap!
Imagine doing a meeting remotely with 1 minute to set up and 1 minute to close. You no longer need to travel 30 minutes, park, get in the building and find a coffee. Conducting quick 15 minute follow up calls is easy and cheap. These meetings generate focus on you and on the decisions they need to make. So let’s set up quick sessions to give them this focus time.
- Increase the meeting frequency with short sessions
- Set up recurring weekly sessions until the decision is made
- Put in the effort to use the meetings wisely so you’re not wasting anyone’s time
Even if you’re still doing client meetings or sales meetings things have been changed fundamentally. These are quick tactical tips that you can expand on. It’s just as important to polish your remote meeting style in the new era to ensure your clients make the decisions you’re professionally advocating.
How We Predict the IT Industry Will Adapt to a New Crisis
One of the best things about IT is that we thrive on change. Even when the world is on fire, we are at our best — we have come through for society several times over within the last 20 years alone. Our resilience and adaptability are what make our industry so valuable.
STAY RELEVANT, EXPAND YOUR REACH AND
ACHIEVE YOUR FULL POTENTIAL!
Crisis-Fueled Cyber Security Services
Even in the dial up days, we knew cyber security was important. However, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we saw a boom in security initiatives. Technology personnel stepped up and a whole new realm of cyber security was born.
Crisis-Fueled Cloud Services
After the recession hit in 2008, we saw a massive change in how we do business. SaaS had been around for years, but it wasn’t until we learned that we needed more robust applications to support a diverse workforce that we saw businesses really invest in them. Stability of budget, consistent delivery models, and able to scale on a moment’s notice? Business signed up!
What New IT Services Will This Crisis Fuel?
The previous two examples bring us to our current situation in 2020. We have been aware of work-from-home strategies in the past, but many companies saw it as just a perk. Well...now it is a necessity. With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have businesses asking questions about continuity and work-from-home now more than ever. Once again, we are seeing technology professionals step up and deliver school, business, and personal connectivity to hundreds of millions of people overnight!
What should we expect as a technical profession? I predict the death of the traditional, brick-and-mortar company. We are about to fully enter the era of distributed workforces. We have been seeing this develop gradually, but now it’s manifested into reality. We should expect high-priority requests for diversified networks that allow users to work from anywhere. We should also expect tech spending to increase dramatically, while other projects get placed on the back burner.
Additionally, I predict another technical boom. Within the next year we will see entire businesses coming to market in order to deliver work-from-home offices, complete with seminars, workshops and best practices. We will see a more open-minded culture toward virtual assistants and other virtual employees. Is your company ready for this challenge?
What do you need to do now to get ahead of the curve?
Once you have some breathing room, will you help your clients create robust home offices that are interconnected as well as their brick-and-mortar is?
I believe every tech company needs to provide their clients with the following over the coming year:
- A STRONG delivery of distributed workforce strategy
- Technology that’s aligned with business initiatives
- Remote assistance that’s better than on-site
Get these three things ready; if you have the distributed workforce product prepared, your next step is to up your game with business alignment. Don’t drive this as a technology solution; it’s a business solution! I may be biased, but vCIO strategies will help you here. You need to be ready to show your clients how your distributed workforce strategy will not disrupt their business.
Lastly, you need to up your game on remote assistance. Remote tech support should not just be “good enough”. You should consistently be delivering your clients an even better IT experience than they are used to. No more pinching pennies here — this is the place to heavily invest in to support those distributed workforces.
Welcome to the new age. I know everything is chaotic right now, but we are about to go on another ride.
Change is in the air. Are you ready?
Why the better MSPs work the less perceived value they have
For a while after our session with Sea-Level something was bugging me. We pondered a conundrum in this seminar: why can’t MSPs not become the victim of their own success? Why does a smooth service have to lead to disengaged clients? How can the MSP remain the hero not justhen the client has problems in their day-to-day operation but even when those problems are gone and the technology just works, and they stop noticing the value of the services?
After many 1-1 discussions we came up with an answer. The issue comes into clear view from a distant overhead, as does the solution. Now having been able to create a model that explains the problems, the solution is far less difficult to manage.
We are going to break down the problem into 3 stages each with a brief explanation.
Develop and operate a scalable and structured
account management and vCIO operation in 30 days
The Model of Perceived value and Maturity
We are going to use a little model here. On the vertical axis you see the level of the Client’s IT operation maturity. The more mature the IT operation, the fewer problems will arise. This is where MSPs commonly focus their energy to ensure reduced ticket noise and a smooth IT operation. The operation maturity is climbing not only on the MSP’s side but on the client’s side, as well.
On the vertical axis you can see the Client’s Perceived Value of the IT services. As you see you are a victim of your own success. The better IT you provide to the client the less value they perceive from Technology Services.
This model is not about the net value that they got but their perceived value. There are three distinct phases along the journey. Let’s tackle one at a time.
Phase 1.: Constant IT Problems
This is the phase in which most MSPs have made the initial sales deal. The prospect had low IT maturity with minimal in-house or outside resources. They were fed up with the problems. When their MSP came on board perceived value of the services skyrocketed. The MSP was able to bring order, standardize operations and improve the quality of their work.
In this case the value was entirely in Technical Services and was very obvious to them. Nobody had to sell the value. Everybody has it laid out in front of their relieved eyes.
Phase 2.: Reduced IT related issues
Now after years of your hard work it seems that IT is no longer on the board meeting agenda as it no longer generates issues. Everybody is working efficiently, the discussions with the MSP become “business as usual”. Some problems arise occasionally but are mostly within development projects and aren’t emergency issues. Complacency grows and clients start to see the MSPs more as a service provider rather than a hero.
Now in this phase, the value is even more clear from the MSP’s perspective. The work is harder, more processed and very high maturity. But this is exactly what prevents problems from germinating and if the client has no metric to evaluate the MSP other than “problem, issue resolution” then the perceived value will start to fall. Cruelly, their net value is rising while perceived value declines.
To maintain your well-deserved perceived value to the client in this phase is no longer a technical service-related task, but communication-related. This is the phase when the MSP needs to establish a proper Account Management / Technical Account Management practice to be able to communicate the value of the services. These are the technical reports, and roadmaps to be able to show to the client the hard work the MSP is actually doing. Nothing fancy, just let them see what they are paying for. Without introducing Account Management, the perceived value will diminish. That is the beginning of accruing an Account Management Debt.
Phase 3.: No IT related issues
The next phase is where very few MSPs can increase the perceived value without stretching the boundaries of the initial Managed IT Infrastructure Contract. In this phase, the IT infrastructure is not just good enough, but probably overshooting their need. Just think about how much advantage most aren’t taking of their Office 365 subscriptions outside of email.
The client’s IT maturity cannot be raised more without them actually implementing applications and leveraging the opportunities of technology. This part is hard as now the client’s willingness will essentially decide what’s next.
This is the place where churn becomes likely even with very satisfied clients. Why? Because they start shopping for “cheaper” alternatives. The majority of the developments have been done and no more technology projects are on the horizon. They start feeling less value in their services.
This phase is no longer just a technical and communication related one. If the MSP cannot connect the application of technology to their business then the client will not see value or opportunity within IT. If the IT only keeps firewalls and emailing with Office 365 then it will not be seen by them as a real business relationship.
The MSP has to establish a business conversation with a client to be able to stay relevant. The client management team should believe in the future and the opportunities that technology can bring to the table. This requires a true IT consultancy mindset and services. Without a business consultancy, digital transformation or business vCIO mindset and services the perceived value will stagnate at best.
Your Decisions:
1. Treat Clients differently based on their maturity: Check your client base and determine at which stage you are with them.
- If they are in phase one, you need to push awesome technical solutions.
- If they are in phase two, you need to add high-touch account management to be able to communicate the given service value.
- If they are reaching phase three, then brace yourself…you need to introduce a new way of thinking and sets of services to generate business value outside of the technology focus. It’s that or create many mechanisms to lock them in even as their perception of value declines.
- Defensive Strategy - shoot for the clients on Phase 1 and 2 then monetize the opportunities along the way. Once they’re reaching Phase 3 do whatever it takes to keep them even with a declining engagement
- Offensive Strategy - do not even try to sell to Phase 1 clients but focus your efforts to catch Phase 2 clients. Invest in development services for Phase 3. (vCIO, Application Management, Cyber Security Compliance etc.) Then go out to the market and steal clients from MSPs playing the Defensive Strategy. How? Simply offer the client’s executives “business value” with IT strategy planning sessions and Digital Transformation services.
Conclusions
The trends are obvious.
- Fewer and fewer small and medium businesses will be in the Phase 1 stage.
- There will still be a great deal of clients in Phase 2 but the competition will be very fierce here.
- More and more clients need higher-level IT services - it’s a real emerging market with little competition. Here the challenge is service development and a consultative sales process.
None of the options is easy to manage but all are predictable from the big picture standpoint.
Why your meetings suck
Imagine sitting in an operational meeting with your accountant. They are telling you about reconciliation and collecting receipts. They then tell you how many transactions took place and where they need clarification on spend. Bored yet? I am typing this and I am bored…
This is how your clients feel when attending your quarterly or monthly operational meetings on connectwise tickets. The SLAs and project status are important to YOU and they are kind of important to the business but the method in which you are portraying information is wrong. How do I know this? I have been an IT professional for over 20 years. Today many clients will ask me to sit in on meetings with their MSPs to help them understand what is going on. It truly is horrible, clients have just accepted that this is the way things are.
Lets go a bit darker now. The truly sad part is that even the account manager and techs are bored in these meetings. They are viewed as a necessary evil because someone told them that a MSP best practice is to meet with the client on a regular basis and give status updates. So here you are, in another boring meeting, wishing that it were time to leave.
“Everyone is miserable but you keep moving forward
because it is what you are supposed to do.”
Now lets flip the tables for a second, that is right, just grab the top and flip the whole thing over. Screw what you are supposed to do, let's talk about what you want to do.
Take Your Remote Presence to the Next Level
What you want to talk to your client about is the new tool that is available and how it will help their business. You want to talk about how if they would just upgrade their internet most of their problems would vanish. You want to convince them that you can help their business thrive in spite of their restrained budget.
Guess what. Your client wants this too! Your client WANTS to talk about how you can empower them to do better things. Your client WANTS you to show them how to best use their technology budget to empower their company!
So how do we get from the boring operational meetings to stimulating meetings? Have a conversation about the future. Stop talking and presenting about technology today and change focus to 6 months from now. Ask your client what their biggest problem is today. Ask them what the biggest event coming up is. Ask questions, ask a lot and listen. Then take some time and think about what they said and ask yourself some honest questions about how you can help them.
Do you know what this is called? Strategy. Forward thinking contextual conversations that marry technology and business goals. This is how you create engaging meetings that really focus the client on where they can be.
Do you know what happens to MSPs that do this? They grow a crazy amount because now their clients are actually engaging in conversations. Whether you are meeting annually, quarterly, monthly or weekly. By changing from presentations to conversations you are able to get their attention.
Want proof? During your next client meeting ask this one question “Tell me about the next 12 months here” sit back and listen. I can cite many MSPs who will talk your ear off about how they started conversing with their clients and have so many projects that their biggest problem is getting them all on the schedule! I can cite MSPs who went from small contracts to $15,000+/MRR clients because they listened!
Stop the monotony, turn your presentations into conversations today!
How to get out of your “Client Engagement Debt”
As a Technology Provider, you’ve undoubtedly encountered the symptoms of your clients' "Technology Debt." This is the manifestation of the inherent costs of perpetual support for less-than-optimal technology. This is a drain on both you and the client. Client Engagement Debt is a similar concept that encompasses the implied cost of not having enough quality Account Management, Technical Account Management, vCIO or IT Consulting activities with your clients. This costs you money, erodes trust, loses opportunities and even lowers the value your clients see in your services. Let’s take a look at how much debt you have and how to get rid of it this year.
STRUCTURE, MANAGE AND AUTOMATE YOUR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO PROCESESS
7 Symptoms of Client Engagement Debt
Let’s cut to the chase and see whether you have Client Engagement Debt. The following list will provide symptoms of unhealthy Client Engagement Debt.
- Meetings are ad-hoc - meetings are set not well in advance but because of an issue, opportunity or client request
- Conversations are tactical - issues have piled up so the discussion is long and strategic topics go unaddressed
- Too much preparation time - there are no snapshots or baseline reports so conversations have to start from scratch every time
- Conversations are technology-focused - the lack of business discussions leads the meetings to technology discussions usually with non-executives
- There is no Strategic Governance - the quarterly meetings stand on their own and aren’t supported by a strategic roadmap
- The MSP owner is the only one who can do QBRs - the MSP owner is overtaxed with integrating all the missing pieces to present to a client
and this symptom is very tricky… as it presents as a great outcome of hard work..:
- Efficiency gains - reduced ticket count and efficient operation generate less natural facetime with a client. This is positive in general but it might relegate the MSP to a “low touch” partner role if there are no consistent proactive Account Management meetings in place.
Potential implications for different MSP size
Client Engagement Debt is not something that happens overnight because of a sudden issue or problem. Rather it’s a result of a slow eroding process of various inhouse and external factors.
External factors like technology commoditization, more millennials in the workplace, general technology adoption, tech savviness and the overall maturity raise the managed services market.
Internal factors like Account Management processes, quality of client meetings, time invested on client meetings, discussed topics, previous attempts of developing client engagement initiatives.
Here are the potential implications for MSPs of different size and maturity:
Small MSPs
If your company has less than 5-7 employees the chances are high that the owner is the only resource capable of delivering engaging client meetings. The obvious time pressure limits the resources available for developing programs or delivering quality interactions with proper follow-ups. The challenges are in streamlining the process and becoming more strategic with these conversations. This goes back to defining an Annual and a Quarterly process with clients, and support it with an application that helps the sharing of conversations and action plans.
Mid Size MSP
If your MSP has 8-20 employees the chances are high that there is a full-time individual responsible for Account Management and/or vCIO activities. The challenges at this point are related to accountability, scalability and a unified experience through the process. Properly set expectations for the client segments, proactive playbooks for activities, measurement of engagement as well as defined and adopted technology standards. These are the foundations of a process that will scale.
Large MSPs
If your MSP leadership were able to pass the 20 person mark then your 2nd layer of management should be in place and, due to your size, multiple people are responsible for different levels of client engagement. Account Managers, Technical Account Managers and vCIOs are working together as a team to drive client engagement. Now the challenges are more on the management and scalability side of the house. Processes, unified workflows, shared information, productivity and duplicate-able client meetings are the priority. As the team has to work together, a single QBR process might include 3-4 people in various roles to prepare a report, deliver the meeting and follow up all tickets, projects or opportunities. This leads to internal client engagement operation initiatives.
Regardless of the size of the MSP the real solution for managing Client Engagement Debt is similar to getting out of financial debt.. First create a momentum to start paying back the debt, then stabilize the operation to prevent future debt arising. That is why a holistic approach is needed rather than a quick fix.
Holistic Client Engagement Development
Let’s not go into the details too much here. If you feel you have these symptoms and are less engaged with your clients, you need to fix it soon. It’s critical because being an MSP is a “High-Touch” business model. Your foundation is a very close relationship with clients. In the past “Solving the IT Problems Together” created a natural bond with your clients. Now that you’ve been so successfully efficient you need different activities to maintain quality engagement.
Client Engagement Development has four components:
1. Client Engagement Foundations
Before we hit the road and cut the Client Engagement Debt we need to lay down the foundations of your Client Engagement.
Essentially, what is the level of Client Engagement your MSP wants to provide, who is going to provide it and what will comprise its requisite activities?
- Client Engagement Goals and Strategy
- Client Engagement Roles
- Client Side Roles
- Client Segmentation
- Client Segment Playbooks
2. Standardization
Once we have these foundations you have to define your standards. These standards are required to create an overall scoring of the technology health, applied best practices and technology stack adoption by your clients. These make the misalignments actionable for your team and standardize the operation, and will hugely attenuate ticket noise, as well as render the Account Management process easy and repeatable.
- General Standardization Strategy
- General Standardization Process
- Service Standardization
- Technology Stack Standardization
- Technology Best Practices Standardization
3. Client Engagement Activities
Now you can start establishing your client engagement activities. What is going to happen in the Annual Strategy Meeting, what will you do in the Quarterly Business Review Meeting, what types of Audits will you have (Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Office 365) and so on. This is going to define the various activities you’ll provide to the distinct client segments you’ve defined.
- Technology Engagement Activities - Technology Roadmap Planning, Quarterly Business Reviews, Technical Audits etc.
- Business Engagement Activities - IT Strategy Planning, Quarterly Business Reviews, Business Workshops etc.
- Sales Engagement Activities - Renewals, vCIO Project Scoping, Consultative Sales Meetings
4. Client Engagement Operations
Parts 1-3 were about developing your Client Engagement - and now we move to execution. Now you need to manage your people (or your calendar if you are alone), schedule meetings with the right contacts, manage meetings and generate and maintain client roadmaps for governance. This part is about efficiency: less time in preparation, more effective conversations, and productive handoffs to the delivery team. Here’s where we are going to learn how to run an effective client engagement operation.
Your Reward: Client Engagement Excellence and Account Management Dividends
Client Engagement Activities done well reduce your Client Engagement Debt and prevent future Debt happening.
- You run an efficient, profitable operation by adopting technology best practices, a unified solution stack, and well-defined services.
- Your clients are better engaged, value your services more highly, feel they’re getting what they’re paying premium rates for and generate sustainable growth for you.
- You can differentiate your brand and demonstrate your value to your clients.
Without a strategic effort, your next Client Engagement initiative will likely stall and never take off for scalability. Let’s do it right this time.
How to Become a Trusted Advisor With Strategic Client Meetings
Most MSPs are facing the commoditization trap. Competition is getting fierce, price pressure is constant, it’s hard to get in front of prospects and selling additional services like cyber security or IT consultation is tough.
There is one telltale sign each MSP should look for of declining client engagement which leads to the downward spiral of less connection, less stickiness (retention) and eventually less profitability.
In this blogpost we are going to learn about this telltale sign, how you can identify whether your MSP is affected and what to do to overcome the problem.
Ok that’s a shameless cliffhanger, but I really think you should check out this post!
Get long term client loyalty with regular and strategic QBRs and IT strategy meetings
How to identify the issue?
Identifying the issue is simple, but admitting it is hard.
Let's think about the last 10-20 client meetings and answer Yes or No to the following statements.
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The meetings were about tactical discussions like project scoping, project updates, service management, contract renewals etc.
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The meetings were held with office managers, IT directors or Operational Executives
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The meetings covered technical aspects like backup, disaster recovery, tickets, service metrics and technology projects
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The meetings were mainly initiated by an issue, a client request or a pressing technology problem (like windows 7 update)
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The meetings were mainly based on a well-prepared presentation, documents, proposals etc.
If you answered ‘yes’ to 2 or more of these statements then the majority of your client meetings tend to be ad-hoc, tactical, technology-driven presentations with technology liaisons.
The next question is how many proactive, strategic, business-driven conversations you have with your client's executives.
The more strategic, business-oriented, interactive conversations you have with people who run organizations, the more relevant, sticky and high-value a business partner you are.
What is the ROOT problem?
The problem is that these meetings actually define the quality of your relationship with your clients. This seems to be a norm among the MSP community as (no wonder) your services are typically tactical (infrastructure, office, network) and technical (Information Technology) services. But regardless how awesome you are, how great your services are and how diligent your internal processes are, this defines your relationship as a basic IT service provider. That was great in the past but in the new commoditized market this becomes an issue.
Ok here is the short version: doing proactive, strategic, business driven conversations with business leaders will differentiate you and keep you relevant for years to come. That can lead you to expand your client base and transform you from a basic IT service provider to a high-value business partner.
Why Strategic Client meetings help?
Strategic Client Meetings are going to help you get the right audience, have the right conversations and make your clients more competitive with your help. You will be able to redefine what technology can do for them and how you can help reach their business goals.
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Engage Executives - How to provide the value your executives are looking for.
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Generate More Revenue - How to design exciting project opportunities and close them quickly.
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Do More in Less Time - How to prepare, run and manage high-value business meetings
I. What makes a client meeting strategic?
Some people think that “strategic meeting” is just a buzzword and there are no clear boundaries or definitions that make a client meeting more strategic. Let’s dive into three aspects to start building your own.
1. Strategic Agenda with Strategic Roles
The agenda of these meetings is strategic, not tactical. The topics are their business goals, challenges, what makes them different, why they’re better than their competition and in-house hurdles to execution of their strategy. These topics can be covered only with the people in their organization involved on these levels full time. You need the individual leading the organization.
Don’t assume just because the individual you’re meeting with is the president you’ll have a strategic conversation. For small businesses the president wears many hats. They might be responsible for the technology part of the business. If this is the case your meeting agenda might still be tactical and the conversation will be not strategic.
2. Strategic Client Segments
You are running a tech organization so of course you can’t have only strategic conversations. You have to have some tactical dialogue with your clients as well. However, without a policy of how to allocate finite resources - like people who can deliver strategic conversations - to myriad clients based on their size, you can find you’re overspending on small clients who offer less revenue opportunity. It’s crucial to calculate a “client engagement budget” for all client segments. Then you can balance how much time you spend for tactical and strategic conversations. For example, you can allow an “A Client” with $5,000 MRR up to 60 hours of engagement a year but a “C Client” with $1,000 MRR justifies only 12 hours a year. (We use the 5% MRR formula to calculate client engagement budget).
3. Strategic Client Playbooks
Once you know how much time you can spend on a given client segment you can create a strategic playbook for each client. Like your “A Client” with 60 hours annually can have an annual strategy planning workshop (2x4 hours) some business-related cyber security, compliance or application audits (3x4 hours a year) and solid QBRs with multiple people (3x6 hours). You can put it into a playbook, plan the meetings and execute with scalability. However the playbook for a “C Client” might be a light annual strategy workshop to create a roadmap and have basic QBRs to execute the plan.
These three steps lay the foundation for consistently effective and proactive meetings.
II. Examples of Strategic Client Meetings
The other common mistake we see among MSPs is to dump every type of discussion into a QBR: contract renewals, technical assessments, updates, technology landscape or standard stack adoption, all to be covered in one 90 minute meeting. Preparing huge presentations will lead to rushing through the process. Let’s check out three very good examples of distributing disparate topics to different meetings to establish the strategic layer for the clients.
1. Strategic Workshops
Strategic workshops are delivered typically once a year. This is a highly business-focused conversation with specific topics you can perform with a whiteboard. Encourage brainstorming around their business. A typical exercise can be a SWOT analysis, industry analysis or simply a summary of their goals and where they’re heading. For many smaller MSPs these meetings are driven by the owner of the MSP, and is still scalable as meeting with a client from the executive level once a year is still worth it. Business owner to business owner conversation is more about high-level topics anyways. The workshop format helps bring about predictable outcomes and materials that can be used for building their business, like IT roadmaps.
2. Strategic Audits
There are many topics of discussion that can give measurable outcomes. The health of their infrastructure (IT Technology Health Audit), the utilization of the complete Office 365 suite (Office Productivity Audit), the state of their cyber security practices (NIST Cyber Security Audit) and so on. These audits, done in advance, are based on a scoring mechanism and the meeting is where you’ll be validating the facts, educating the client and generating actionable roadmaps to fix problems and unlock opportunities. These Audits can be distributed over the year as “themes of the quarter” and so on. This provides a positive client engagement pulse with executives based on facts.
3. Strategic QBRs
Here is the payoff. Once you have Strategic Workshops with business topics and you do Audits which translate technical issues to business language, you have a solid case of business context for your IT projects. Your Strategic QBRs can be wrapped around the execution of the strategy. Now your tactical components actually have context as well. Talking about the Disaster Recovery plans, and backups and cloud migration is no longer out of the blue. Now the Quarterly Business Review (QBRs) get the legitimacy of business sense so executives can see the progress and understand the big picture. Further, talking with a technical liaison is easier if the “order” comes from the top and there’s not and insulation layer between you and the executives.
These Strategic Conversations lead to strategic decisions and strategic engagements.
III. Outcomes of Strategic Meetings
The main goal of these strategic meetings is to become more of a high-value business partner. The decisions you help them make are higher level and more specifically attentive to their business goals. Often you are just a concierge of those decisions and your MSP will execute the project. However, as these projects are technical by nature you can still manage them. Let’s see what outcomes you can expect to govern your high level engagement.
1. Strategic Roadmaps
A strategic roadmap is simply the execution plan of the IT strategy. You have identified the strategy with 2 or 3 major initiatives throughout the year and created a breakdown of projects that need to be completed in order to achieve the goals. The roadmaps need clear, strong approval of intent from the executive level. This is going to be a great framework to wrap the year’s activities around. The projects should be outlined if not scoped. Create project outlines defining the cause, vision and expected outcomes of the projects in 2-3 sentences. These are not project scopes yet. The goal here is to have specific initiatives and lists of typical action items to lead to success.
2. STRATEGIC BUDGETS
The trick of these roadmaps is that these projects have to be approved and many details will be forthcoming as the projects get scoped out. As the client’s perception clarifies, they might be getting hungrier for more and expand the project budgets. In order to keep things real and see whether the intent will lead to project approvals it is great to have an overall high level budget estimation for the Roadmap. If you know the project outlines you can “guesstimate” the time and effort behind the project as an assumption. The budget is going to give a reality check to the client about their capabilities and you can sort out the “nice to have” projects without putting so much time into scoping and planning. This also achieves great alignment with the client. Once the budget is approved then approving an individual project will be a breeze as long as they’re within your estimates.
3. Strategic Services
Besides managing your project incomes, strategic meetings have the power to actually make your current and new services profitable too. For example, many MSPs have trouble upgrading clients to separate, add-on cyber security services. The need is obvious, but the services are expensive to deliver and explaining the need for an updated security plan is harder without the strategic components. However, if the strategic plan has a cyber security audit, cyber security issues move from a tactical level - “they need more services” - to a strategic level - “cyber security is a strategic level risk.” The “$35 per user” additional cyber security add-on will be accepted more readily. The process is less salesy and it puts the responsibility on their end to make the call, or live with the potential consequences.
The strategic meetings deliver more strategic decisions and this transforms you into a high-value strategic partner.
Conclusion
Running an MSP is hard. There are many issues about service delivery, hiring people and growth. Establishing strategic relationships with clients and prospects makes everything easier: better control of the client, higher quality conversations, more visible value, and obvious differentiation. Every forward-looking MSP is getting more strategic, the question is how quickly can they make the transition.
Managed Services Platform vCIO Report 2019
Managed Services Platform's vCIO community has been growing year by year since 2014. In fact, we are most likely now the largest active vCIO community in the world with more than 600 members. With this news, we have decided to create a short report regarding how we typically see our vCIO members across the globe.
This community’s largest attribute is the language composition where more than 98% of our vCIOs are from any of the English-speaking countries around the world: 58% are from the United States, 10% are from Australia, and 8% are from Canada, while the rest are from the UK, New Zealand, and South Africa.
DEVELOP AND OPERATE A SCALABLE AND STRUCTURED
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND VCIO OPERATIONS
The most active vCIO movement is in the Eastern coast of the U.S. These numbers extend from New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee; however, there are two other states, Texas and Washington State, where the movement is growing most rapidly.
Other typical attributes from our community members are their unabashed professional and academic experiences. It has been confirmed that the vast majority of our vCIOs have university degrees and have each amassed more than 10 years of experience. More than 80% of them share these attributes.
The single largest essential trait for a vCIO is their IT prowess (50%). However, sales, IT consultancy, process and business development planning are also significant skills of their expertise. Interestingly, 8% of these vCIOs themselves are MSP entrepreneurs in their off-duty time.
Their offerings come from the fact that most of them are entrepreneurs in their own right, with most of their active companies coming from small businesses with 1-5 employees (This equates to about 15% of them) and 5-25 employees (48%). Many times their efforts, unfortunately, are in vain because the owner(s) are neither often able to delegate the vCIO role nor do they have enough time to fulfill that role themselves.
The other typical problem is that they try to implement the vCIO service quickly without any previous development training. They then continue a technical conversation with their clients without any business and strategic purposes. If a vCIO cannot deliver an engaging and recurring business consultancy in a determinate time, they will lose the profitability of these vCIO services. Ultimately, clients will keep looking at them as an IT technician and not as an executive-level business advisor.
Middle-sized MSPs with 25-50 employees already have dedicated vCIOs and can deliver profitable vCIO services while providing a valuable business consultancy. But based on our experience, the most successful MSPs with vCIO services are large-sized companies with more than 50 employees. These organizations can dedicate enough resources to scale their vCIO program and establish their own service definition, processes and best practices.
Most of our MSP members in the community with vCIOs typically have client sizes with 25-200 employees and offer between 10 and 20 services, most of which are related to the core IT infrastructure.
What this means is that although the core IT Infrastructure services and project revenues decrease constantly, cloud-centric and advanced security service revenues grow in their place. It should be noted that smaller MSPs usually deliver these services through outsourcing or assistance from an MSSP or CCSP partner. In order to develop these transformations internally for MSPs, we have launched our “Build a Better MSP” expert guide program with a wide range of building business solutions for the SMB space. New services, like cybersecurity, identity management, EOS, cloud-centric solutions, are now all integrated, providing easy access for MSPs to learn and develop.
So who is a typical and successful vCIO based on what we see? vCIOs are dedicated professionals in a mid-sized MSP. They always have strong technology and consultative backgrounds as technical account managers. They tend to be systematic and process-oriented thinkers. They feel comfortable talking with small to medium size business executives. And last but not least, they understand how to put technological solutions into a business solutions context.
See previous parts:
If you currently do not have vCIO services, but still intend to implement them in the future, we will be able to support your efforts with an exclusive coaching package and our client meeting report tool as well.
Accelerate Your Growth with the new features just released
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.
Why your QBRs are costing you, customers
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For those of us who have been in technology for a while, we have seen some pretty crazy setups from well-meaning people. Largely this is because we have very smart capable people trying to work in environments with limited knowledge. Most were trying their hardest but just didn’t know any better.
Some of the crazy things I saw back in the day were “vlans” that were actually just subnets, firewalls with giant holes in the ruleset, and unrestricted VPNs that were completely insecure. These mistakes were not made by lazy admins, they were made by well-intentioned technicians that didn’t know they were doing anything wrong. All they knew was that things were working smoothly.
But how do we know when we are doing something incorrectly?
This is how it works in the technical industry, new items come out so often that we do our best to learn what we can. Most of us will reach out when something isn't working. Google is always there. We can also hire a consultant who specializes to review our work and can show us the ropes. But how do we know when we are doing something incorrectly? After all ‘Any-Any’ firewall rules will get the job done right?
The same problem exists within vCIO programs and QBR delivery. How would you know if you are doing them wrong? Are you assuming things are going well just because your client is present and getting details? If this is the case then it is very much like putting an Any-Any firewall rule in place. Sure it will work, but what happens when your client experiences the right way?
There is definitely a ‘right’ way to deliver a vCIO program and definitely a ‘right’ way to deliver business-focused QBRs. We have many stories of MSPs who lose customers when the customer sees a better way and realizes what they have been missing.
The best way I can think to help you identify whether or not you are running quality QBRs is to compare and contrast a tactical vs a business-focused QBR. Tactical QBRs are very useful when talking to technical professionals, business QBRs are best suited for talking to...yes you guessed it...business professionals. Let's take a look at a QBR delivery by a vCIO. The first situation will focus on a tactical delivery and the other will focus on the business.
Tactical QBR:
MSP R Us comes in to deliver a review of their activities for the quarter. They do a fantastic job of showing the customer how many tickets were processed and give them progress reports on the firewall upgrade. There is even a review of the new features the firewall offers. The customer is happy with the progress on the upgrade and they can see that tickets are being handled in an appropriate amount of time.
Business-focused QBR
MSP R Us comes in to deliver their review of activities for the quarter. However, they do not talk about tickets or the firewall upgrade. Instead, they talk through how the business is doing and review major business objectives from the previous quarter. It is brought up that last quarter the training team was having issues sharing videos with clients and hosting webcasts so a firewall project was started to stabilize the connection. The conversation centers around how things are going with the training team and if they are meeting their goals now. It turns out the upgrade has helped significantly.
They have noticed though that while the streaming has stabilized, they are not getting high resolution and would like to know if someone could help them out. The vCIO notes the request for the coming quarter as a project and will open a ticket.
The conversation continues with any other areas of business that need to be addressed in the next quarter. The client states that they have an big product release coming up and are feeling anxious. The vCIO also notes this and creates a change freeze during that time to ensure that disruptions to workflow are minimal.
Review
In either situation, nothing was done “wrong” persay but you can see the business-focused QBR was much more fluid and quite a bit more information was gathered about how to help the client.
Most MSPs will run tactical QBRs because it is familiar and sticks to their wheelhouse. However, they are missing out on a big piece of customer experience. They are also missing out on valuable insights as to upcoming projects and whether or not project delivery is meeting business goals.
The question is, how do you get your QBRs to be less tactical and more business-focused? The good news is, with focus and hard work you can build this. The bad news is that just like learning appropriate firewall design it is a bit of a process. You need a few pieces:
- An annual framework for delivery where you have created a relationship with your client.
- A continuous feedback loop for business objectives.
- Give your staff the confidence to lead non-technical conversations.
You can create this process with hard work, or you can also hire a consulting/coaching agency to come in and develop the process and employees.
The one thing we know is that if you do not start delivering business-focused QBRs someone else will. So the real question you need to ask is:
Do you want to be the MSP clients switch FROM,
or do you want to be the MSP clients switch TO?
