Fix your Webinars
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2NHRRDl
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3AyHCUd
Youtube:
Are you tired of boring webinars? Well, we are here to help! This week, we are discussing how to have more engaging webinars that will be more helpful for the audience.
When you watch a webinar, it was most likely an hour of listening to someone talk, right? Maybe there was a 10-minute Q & A at the very end that let a few questions get answered, but that isn’t truly engaging with the audience. When you’re just using a slide, people tend to lose focus because they know that the slides will most likely be shared to let them go through the information on their own time. When the whole webinar could be sent out as a video and people receive the same experience, you will most likely lose people’s attention.
Engagement is the goal when it comes to webinars. The sad thing is, we’ve been taught that learning looks like sitting in a big room and being talked at. Think about school. There is one teacher who stands at the front of the room and speaks to the class. Some teachers have it figured out and include engaging lessons or hands-on learning, but most students are stuck being lectured. The best students will come in after class for a one-on-one time where they can talk directly to the teacher regarding their confusion.
You should think about your webinar like that: a space for people to learn. How do people best learn? By engaging!
Here are some tips for having the best possible outcome for your next webinar:
1. Only have 20 minutes of material to present
Only have the goal of getting through about 20 minutes of your own content. This will allow you more time to answer questions and feel less pressure to rush through tons of different topics. Spend the necessary time on each item; don’t give people whiplash by trying to get through too much content in a short amount of time.
2. Have a second speaker
Bring another person up with you to have a more conversation-style presentation. This will allow you to bounce topics and ideas off of each other and will give the audience the sense of being part of the presentation and the conversation. Also, allow the conversation to be focused on what the audience wants to hear. Keep the topic relevant and on track, but use the questions and flow of conversation to dive deeper into the areas people most want to hear about.
3. Have one person monitor the chat box
The best webinars will have one person watching the chat box constantly, keeping track of questions and interrupting the speaker when necessary. This person can also comment and communicate with the audience while the speaker is presenting to keep everything flowing smoothly.
Ultimately, you don’t want to take your audience on a forced march. You want them to accompany you to the topics and conversations that will keep them engaged and focused. Pay attention to the number of questions coming in during your presentation. If there are too many than can be answered, then you have completed a successful webinar. Happy presenting!
Market Your MSP (Part 1)
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2NHRRDl
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3AyHCUd
MSPs can easily talk to each other about the latest gadgets and gizmos, but talking to other people about that same technology can be more of a struggle. It is the same with MSPs and their conversations with businesses.
Watching someone try to sell their services to people can be like watching a slow-moving train wreck — there is enthusiasm when MSPs talk to business owners, but it can be hard to translate that excitement to the client.
That is where the importance of conversations comes into play.
If you’re an MSP, then your entire training for becoming an MSP has been technical. You learned the tips and tricks and workarounds for all things technology. Now, all of a sudden, you are being asked to work with people and explain your services and abilities to them. You most likely do not have the training or knowledge to have conversations that will enable those business professionals to fully understand what it is that you do and what you can do for them.
When entering those conversations, it is important to approach them as people and not as machines. You cannot simply throw solutions their way expecting them to grasp what it is that you are trying to tell them. You have to listen — find common ground and really understand what it is that they care about.
If you are only talking about technology, it will most likely make their eyes glaze over and feel impersonal. At the selling stage, business professionals do not care about the technology — they care about whether they like you or not. Look at the technology solution through their eyes. See how this technology can truly help them, not from an IT standpoint, but from a personal perspective.
Here’s an example. An MSP makes a business’s internet speed much faster and its bandwidth much better. The MSP will look at this solution as a complete technical solution. But, the business professional is excited about having extra time due to not having to actually drive into the office, letting them attend their daughter’s softball game. Both people had totally different standards to measure success, but both situations were using the same technology.
Ultimately, people make most decisions with their hearts, not their heads. If you are great at connecting with the person before talking business, then selling to them will be much better for both parties.
The 6 Steps of the IT Consultative Sales Process
The currently dominant sales processes aren’t able to generate enough leads nor provide proper differentiation for MSPs. This undermines any chance for predictable growth. When they aren’t able to win new business in a predictable way, managed services providers can’t grow, develop new services, hire the ‘A’ players, develop internal processes or scale. The root problem is that the current transactional (the client is looking for an IT provider) and solution (IT Infrastructure or NIST Cybersecurity Assessments) sales models are reactionary. These methods assume that the client understands the problem and has a pretty good idea of the solution they’re looking for. These models don’t enable the managed services provider to elevate the message, educate the client about what’s important, differentiate the MSP’s offering, set proper expectations, or start a conversation without a buying intent. The IT consultative sales process does all of that and thus provides far more predictability.
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Differentiate yourself from your competition
and become sales ready
Why IT Consultative Sales important for MSPs?
The IT service market has been saturated, the offerings have matured and the typical IT infrastructure problems are easily solved. Generating demand among high-value, high-maturity clients with business potential is a challenge as they very likely already have an IT service provider they’re happy with. Potential clients are not out shopping.
Once the referral channels have dried out, selling MSP services became a very unpredictable and long process. If a prospect has no visible pain she won't change her provider if only for a better price. It’s difficult to differentiate from the competition as everybody can claim to be a world-class MSP.
The current transactional and solution sales processes have proven to be successful when prospects have immediate and obvious IT needs. That’s why referrals worked so well and why inbound calls get through the website. IT infrastructure or cybersecurity assessments have been a big help to manage the process by qualifying clients and offering an IT solution.
The IT consultative sales process is a proactive one, that does not require the prospect to start the buying process and it performs better on this new landscape.
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What is the process of IT Consultative Sales?
The IT consultative sales process consists of six major steps. Each works toward differentiating your MSP business from the current competition by redefining the market and services. You are not claiming “to be better, faster, cheaper, or more” you are claiming to solve different problems and defining a unique context of your IT services. The process itself helps to set their expectations of their current provider higher and to evaluate them in your context.
- Differentiate Your MSP’s Message - The IT consultative sales process starts by developing an elevated message. This message drives a wedge between you and your market competitors, reframes the problem the prospect has as well as the expectations. Typically this is a new “category” of services they have not used before.
- Capture Leads with Education on Business Problems They Want to Solve - The sales process is supported by specific, unique, and very valuable content. This content helps to educate your potential clients on the business problems they want to solve, relates to your services and exhibits the value of the “category” of your services.
- Qualify Leads Focusing on Quick Win Solutions - The lead generators are followed by a first interaction which is your introduction. This first meeting sets you apart from the current IT service provider “category” and quickly demonstrates many of their current problems you can actually solve.
- Deliver Value Connecting Business Problems to Technology Solutions - The first meeting leads to a business workshop where you are able to lay down the map for success. You can articulate their business challenges, current reality and set proper IT goals for them. This workshop helps them translate the “vision” to actionable steps.
- Gain Clarity with Proposals - Your proposal does not consist of a final and large commitment engagement (such as switching their managed service provider). Instead it’s a “springboard” engagement, which is easier to buy and solves a very specific problem.
- Upsell Your Clients - This process expands the IT strategy where the client starts engaging you, leading to further engagement and value delivery..
HOW DO I LEARN MORE ABOUT IT CONSULTATIVE SALES?
The 3 best consultative sales books:
- Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship
- The SaaS Sales Method: Sales As a Science
- The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation
The 3 best consultative sales videos:
- The Power of Remote Sales
- What is the Difference Between Consultative Selling and Normal Selling?
- What's the difference between Consultative and Provocative Selling?
The 3 best consultative sales blogs:
- The 6 Principles of a Consultative Sales Process
- The Consultative Sales Process: A New Model of Selling
- Digital Maturity Group
3 previously posted Managed Services Platform blogs about IT consultative sales:
- Two Ways to Differentiate Your MSP
- What is the One Business Skill MSP Leaders Can Teach Their Clients?
- Why MSPs are not Closing Business Enough
5 reasons MSPs do not have predictable IT sales
If you are reading this blog, it’s likely that you’re the best managed IT service provider in town, you have the most mature offering, hire and train the best people, and have the best internal processes an MSP can imagine. However, it’s also probable that your sales are just not at the level you want them to be. You are not alone. Even the best MSPs have issues with sales. But underperformance in sales is only one symptom of the problem. The root cause is that your sales are not predictable, and this leads to all sorts of issues. Let's dig into the cause, then see what you can do, then develop a plan to make this happen!
Differentiate yourself from your competition and
become sales ready in 30 days
In the good old days, referrals from your clients came in like clockwork. With your client's testimonials, you were able to close 80-90% of the leads you generated. The competition was weak, and it was pretty easy to communicate why your service offering is superior. IT problems were obvious to clients and business owners wanted to solve those visible issues to grow their business.
Over time your potential clients have been increasingly able to solve their visible IT issues. The market is saturated and it’s now very hard to differentiate. Compounding all this is dramatically decreasing opportunities coming from referrals.
This leads to several issues:
Coming in second against "trunk slammers" who win your well-deserved deals by undercutting your prices. It’s frustrating because you know the service quality will be lacking, and the client will be unhappy.
The new website with expensive marketing materials even promoted by paid advertisements did not yield results. Leads are coming in from all over the place but your well-crafted marketing campaigns.
You hired an IT sales expert or inside sales lead generation company, but the calls were unqualified and you couldn’t convey your message, so most conversations didn’t lead to sales.
"Building an MSP is hard enough, and business owners should have a predictable sales process to fuel the company internal process and service developments."
Without a predictable IT sales process, the company has no fuel for growth. It cannot hire new people so that services can be developed and the owner can delegate work. It cannot stay relevant by developing attractive services to new business problems. You can't work both in and on the business to make sure processes are defined and automated, to ensure the company is scalable.
What are the main reasons for IT sales being unpredictable?
I know you want to jump into the solutions, but the major part of solving a problem is understanding the causes. Let's go quickly through the main issues:
1. You want Control but your IT sales is too reactionary
You may have noticed a trend of business owners getting motivated to switching IT providers or replacing internal IT when "SOMETHING" happens. It can be anything. Their IT guy leaves them, their IT provider finally dropped the ball and they’re fed up, or they’ve realized that they have outgrown their provider.
The key is that "SOMETHING" has happened, which leads to the need for a new provider. After this "SOMETHING" has happened, they google the local managed IT service providers, and the IT sales activity starts without delay.
This "SOMETHING" is out of your control. It can’t be triggered by you, but without it none of your MSP marketing and IT sales activities can start effectively generating predictable demand.
That leads you to invest in MSP marketing and IT sales, but with no control over meager demand being generated for your services.
2. You want to solve real problems but prospects look only for "Better IT"
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Henry Ford
Your prospects are no different. You have been solving root problems they do not even understand need to be addressed. They don’t know why the world needs security policies, an IT roadmap, or moving legacy things to the cloud. They want "better IT", whatever it means. Your sophisticated approach can be intimidating and let them feel "we are not there yet". But eliminating those issues would create "better IT" eventually.
Your "trunk slammer" competition can cater to their needs with deceptive communication. Not that they are bad guys, but they can address the client's needs very inexpensively. Yes, they’re soothing the symptoms, but not curing the disease, because their methods are very cheap. That never actually achieves "better IT" so they keep changing providers, and repeating the trial. That can engender a negative view overall - "IT guys are all the same... they just don’t get it".
That all means you lose deals even though you are the clear choice for the discerning business and were confident at the IT sales meeting that you got this.
3. You want to solve business problems but "they just don't get it"
Remember how IT sales used to be much easier when your value was more obvious and naturally presented? They had slow computers, and you gave them fast computers. They had slow internet, you gave them fast internet. They had devices, cables, and applications all over the place and you uncluttered it. Primarily your solutions were DIRECTLY addressing their obvious tangible pains.
Unfortunately, your other values such as proactive support, IT Roadmap, unified stack, employee education, and security policies don’t perform so DIRECTLY. They have to burn calories to understand why an IT roadmap and a lifecycle management plan lower the cost of their IT investments. They just don’t see any of this as clearly as they understood the faster computer benefits.
Now you’ve become disconnected from most of your prospects. You feel like there are no "ideal" customers out there anymore.
4. You want to Differentiate but the "other IT guys" are all around.
"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." - Anonymous
Your marketing and sales effort is geared toward the "problems" and "pains" you can solve. And no wonder all your competition promises to solve the same sets of problems. As more providers start up, more people are fishing in your pond. As fewer clients can perceive the less obvious IT problems, the smaller the pond is.
However, there is another pond. A pond which is getting bigger and is still mostly undiscovered. It takes courage to leave the pond everybody is fishing in for an empty pond nobody seems to be interested in.
This pond is full of mature, financially stable companies with leadership teams that have already invested in IT, and have no VISIBLE IT problems. They have their managed IT service provider already and they are happy with it.
However, these companies are suffering different problems that seem unrelated to IT infrastructure, like weak employee productivity, lack of excellent internal communication, the management team lacking proper data in their weekly reports or the need to automate many cumbersome processes. These are NOT VISIBLE IT problems, but you can solve them, and communicate this to generate interest.
Without finding the right pond to fish in, you are lost in the noise and have no chance to differentiate.
5. You feel you got the deal this but the prospect goes dark on you.
The last issue is not something new for you. Engaging with you takes a bold move from your prospects. They need to trust they can give you the keys to their kingdom, they need to invest in their infrastructure, they need to talk to the MSP they’re leaving, exposing them to security risks, they need to face some internal challenges of adopting new processes and come to terms with why they are paying twice what they did before.
The barrier of entry and the switching of costs are enormous for your clients. I know you try to offset this with "free onboarding" or very generous project prices upfront. But this is a fact that the better your services are, and the better your solution stack is, and the higher your maturity is, their switching cost is going to be even higher. The switching cost can be the sole cause that kills your deal.
Without the experience of being a client, they do not understand why they should be a client. It’s a Catch 22.
Without being able to engage them with low-risk, low-switching cost engagements, your competition might steal your deals as the perceived switching costs might be way lower.
What can you do to make your IT sales predictable?
This article is geared toward the realization of the problem rather than the presentation of the solution. But I do not want to leave you hanging without any hint of what can be done. So here it is in a nutshell.
1. Elevate the message
Your IT Infrastructure, Cloud, or even cyber security theme do not provide the necessary differentiation and the leading edge you need.
Your theme has to address the pains and problems of executives, not the subject of your service offering.
Your theme has to be exciting and forward-thinking enough to attract the business owners who have NO VISIBLE IT problems yet.
Your theme has to make your competition puzzled and too scared to even try to copy.
I am not going to spoil anything here, and you know why.... because we do not want to educate your competition, right? More later...
This elevated message helps you to build a marketing and sales funnel that actively attracts your ideal target clients. It makes lead generation more natural and has conversations with prospects without requiring the "SOMETHING" to happen to them to look for providers.
2. Implement a IT Consultative Sales Funnel
IT Consultative Sales Funnel is a very special funnel. It is a thorough, slow, and step-by-step process to educate your prospects and provide value along the way. It is not for the impatient ones. The IT sales process consists of a well-crafted landing page leading to a well-crafted lead generator leading to a well-crafted call to action, then to a well crafted first conversation to a well-crafted consultation meeting and then a well-crafted proposal leading to a well-crafted paid consultation engagement leading to well-crafted processes to expand to ongoing services.
Wow... this is a process of eight different well-crafted things... you might feel overwhelmed. The exciting thing is that as the process is linear, pushing people to the top of the funnel and optimizing the steps to help them get through is pretty simple. Also, it gives you a unique process, and is invisible to your ever-catching-up competition.
3. Kickstart The IT Sales with Specific Campaigns
Your IT consultative sales process has enormous advantages:
It can be applied to any part of the sales funnel. It can be at the top of the funnel for people who don’t yet realize they have problems down to prospects with whom you had some engagement recently and lost a deal.
It can be applied to existing clients as well. As the process has consultative elements, you can perform those events with them for client engagement or even expansion.
It can be a great source of referrals. Not to become a client directly but referrals to get more qualified leads into your IT consultative sales funnel. You can distribute this funnel quickly to your clients and ask referrals for the consulting engagements. (like your consulting sales process has an attractive lead generator, or you have a Workshop of any kind that can be referred to). This can be viral, meaning the leads can be generated automatically based on your IT consultative sales activities. Just like, you may remember, for dropbox.
With only parts of the IT sales funnel ready, you can kickstart campaigns for prospects and clients to start fueling your referral engine.
Plan to make a predictable IT sales funnel
I know this is a lot to take in—many new concepts from the "SOMETHING" to different ponds to fish in and entry barriers. There are many new concepts from fueled referrals and IT consultative sales. I know... this is good news... the more overwhelming this is, the more difficult it’ll be for your cheap competition to emulate.
Also, you might feel this is a "ton of work" you cannot commit to.
But you have a choice to make. To step back now or to push this further. Ignore the opportunity or move and learn more. If you are the brave type, if you are like the cutting edge, if you are thinking forward, you know this is worth exploring further. We know you need a plan to put this together and have a process to implement the ideas.
A blog can’t cover it all, and we wanted to do more...
We created a 7 Day Video Series to go into the details. Why 7 days? Because you can leverage a 5 Step Framework and a 2 Step Implementation Process. We want to give you time to digest all steps separately and let the different action items sink in. It will provide you with a quick but comprehensive look at the actions that need to be taken for predictable sales.
Why did we do that? We believe that MSP owners have been working too much too hard on their business and deserve more predictability. One thing that seems out of control for you is sales. We want to help solve this problem so you can predictably grow your business. You can provide predictability for your employees and their families and get rid of the anxiety of being unable to control your business's primary source of fuel: new clients.
How to transition to High-Value Business Partners during the recession
The narrative is about to change now. With the recession coming only high-value and proven partnerships are going to last. All fat is going to be on the chopping block. High-value strategic relationships with technology providers will be critical for all organizations. In this blog I teamed up with Rich Anderson to probe some thoughts on the opportunities and conduct a practical walkthrough with inspiration on how to actually do it.
1. What are the opportunities?
This crisis has been demonstrating to executives worldwide how technology readiness, agility and remote work are key to business. The expectation for service providers is shifting quickly from "give us computers to work from home" to "help our people adopt applications quicker, be more tech savvy and grow a culture of ready remote work." Here are some tips to transition to the high-value partner model as quickly as possible!
- How to shine as an MSP during the crisis
- Why adoption of technologies is now a must for clients now
- How to take credit if your clients were prepared
- Why IT can be again a visible and important business resource in the future
- How to show a plan and become a guide of clients
- How to redefine the narrative and become a business advisor
- How to communicate with different types of clients through the crises
- How to flatten the curve internally to cope with the overload of work
- How to become a coach, mentor and guide
- What is the role of leadership
- How to create a contingency plan for your MSP
2. How to make this happen?
Epic effort came from our team, members and Virtual-C to make this COVID-19 Remote Work a reality. Rich is sharing his process and thoughts on how to take leadership and clarify communication with the COVID-19 Remote Work Readiness Self Assessment Grader and Audit Report.
- How to generate a mini questionnaire to gather input from clients and prospects quickly
- How to qualify clients to run an in depth audit to create a technology roadmap to make them ready for remote work
- What are the key points of the readiness assessments?
- How to gather input and evidence from your tech team
- How to gather input and evidence from their users to strengthen your case
- How to fill the project roadmap with valuable projects
My Conclusion:
This is the time not to brake, but to push the pedal to the metal. Let's seize this opportunity! In spite of the current unprecedented stresses this is your time to shine and lead your clients through the crisis.
If you are able to assess your client's current position, communicate that effectively, then generate a vision and plan for them to move into the future, then you are recession-proof, and your business can only come out of all this stronger!
Remote Work Readiness Insights from MSPs
Thoughts from our Covid-19 Remote Work Readiness Webinars
We're certainly living in unprecedented times right now. With many businesses looking to stay productive while sending staff home to work, there's never been a time when technology has been so crucial to the economy. Now is the time for MSPs and IT Solutions Providers to leadership with technology solutions that will save their clients.
With the help of our Member Community and Virtual-C, we put together a few tools to help MSPs clearly articulate the value of their remote work technologies and support. We see it as 3 primary areas of focus:
- Effectively communicate with your clients that there are remote work solutions which will allow them to keep their businesses running. This is done by auditing your clients current remote work readiness.
- Create an action plan, with clear deliverables and defined steps that both the clients and your team can understand and follow. This is done by creating a roadmap of projects for deployment.
- Manage your teams resources and triage clients needs using readiness self-assessments. This is done by letting clients answer a short survey to gather insights into their perceived needs so your team can focus on those in need.
We hosted a couple of webinars and asked approximately 100 MSPs their thoughts on remote work readiness from their clients' perspective, and their own. Here's what we learned.
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In looking at remote work readiness from the clients' perspective, MSPs were split between feeling their clients were unsure or feeling somewhat prepared with help.
From the MSPs perspective, it was overwhelming that there is a great deal of work to do in getting the clients working remotely.
IT will undoubtedly be an essential service throughout this difficult time. By uniting our communities and empowering businesses to survive, you will be the hero.
Managed Services Platform Account Manager Report 2019
In our previous blog post, we reviewed how we typically see our vCIO community members from 2019, so now let’s look at another report regarding our other active community of more than 700 account managers that are working with us today.
Generate client engagement with five qbrs in 30 days
Like in the case of our vCIO community, the language composition shows a clear majority of English-speaking countries. 62% are from the United States, 10% for both Australia and Canada, and 5% for the United Kingdom and New Zealand respectively.
The most active movement of account managers is concentrated in the United States, Eastern Coast. However, the most numerous account manager nucleus is scattered in California, North Carolina, and Texas. The largest city groups are in New York and San Francisco; furthermore, we should mention Toronto, Canada and London, UK as well.
Considering that the most active account manager groups are scattered throughout the United States, its no wonder as to why their educational experiences aren't centralized in any American university. However, at the beginning of the list, classic technical education centers can be seen: Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and Harvard.
The account manager function is related with technical account management topics like sales, information technology, engineering, support and only partially related with business management topics such as IT consulting, business development, finance and project management.
Between the groups and forums, hot topics are more technology-related than any other; virtualization, Microsoft Office 365 and recently cloud computing, NIST cyber security. It should be noted that smaller MSPs usually deliver these services through outsourcing or assistance from an MSSP or CCSP partners. 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.
Unfortunately, only a small minority of account managers feel the importance in developing their business management skills, like consulting, communication, decisiveness, problem-solving and leadership. The technology dominance usually happens when owners of MSPs with less than 15 employees perform the account management role themselves, among many others. And most of these MSPs are challenged with the commodization trap of their service offering. So they look for new cloud or security services that can differentiate themselves from other MSP competitors.
Regarding their experiences, we can say that qualified and veteran account manager experts are a majority in managed services providers with more than 15 employees: 70% have more than 10 years of experience in the technology market and the other 21% have between 6 and 10 years of experience. That’s why they have a high percentage of account managers at seniority level positions. The other reason that account managers find themselves in senior level positions, as mentioned further above, is that CEOs are usually the executives of small MSPs with less than 10-15 employees, but are also often the Account Managers as well.
Often small MSPs do not have dedicated Account Managers, while the mid-size MSPs with more than 15 employees are challenged with MSP Account Manager turnover problems, because more than 50% of them have less than 2 years experience with the organization. That's why MSP owners try to give their account managers a clear playbook of activities that they can manage and fulfill with clients. Likewise, they would visibility gain access into their account manager activities.
So what are typical and successful MSPs like with account management services?
- Small MSPs usually have resource problems because the owners or executives try to provide account management services themselves, among many other roles, which is the reason why they can not be full-blooded professionals who don’t always have time resource problems.
- Account managers are dedicated professionals from a mid-sized MSP with more than 15 employees but owners of these businesses are challenged with employees for which the solution should be developed into a scalable business consultative service with processes, predefined segments and tools that support their executive and monitoring demand.
- Account managers have strong technological backgrounds and interests, but only a small minority are interested in developing their consultative and business-related skills. However, like vCIOs, should feel comfortable talking with small to mid-sized business executives, and last but not least, they should understand how to put technological solutions into a business solutions context.
Be sure to download our growth guide below, and for more information on how to build, strengthen or create a more efficient Account Management offering, check out our account management Growth Solutions here on our homepage.
- vCIOs in United States
- vCIOs in New Zealand
- vCIOs in Australia
- vCIOs in Canada
- Managed Services Platform vCIO report
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!
5 Reasons You Lose Deals to Your Competitors
Are you struggling to sell Managed Services?
If you are struggling to sell services, don't worry, you are not alone. MSPs of all sizes are feeling the pinch when it comes to sales, so this struggle is not exclusive to you.
Factors such as increases in competition, frugal clients, poor product positioning, diminishing referrals and lack of overall strategy, cumulatively contribute to a continual decline in sales.
Leads are at an all time low and the cost of generating leads is at an all time high. In light of this, it is more important than ever to utilize ways to set yourself apart from the crowd, secure your role as an industry expert and thus, gain credibility from existing and future clients.
With referrals being fewer, and certainly further in between, it is increasingly harder to grow your business with any sort of consistency. And, SMBs are bombarded with sales and marketing messages from IT companies every day, making it increasingly difficult for you to land meetings with qualified companies.
This makes it imperative that you find a way to stand out from the competition and find a way to convert leads into clients. If you look like the current IT provider or, just like every other MSP out there, with similar service offerings, you are virtually giving the prospect a reason to buy on price.
If you want to put an end to the dreaded ‘Lead-Proposal-Closed Lost’ cycle you will need to become more effective at creating the vision of a higher value experience and demonstrate you have the ability to deliver that experience.
Does this sound like you?
"We'll be just fine once we find a way to get in front of more prospects." While this sounds logical, nothing could be further from the truth. Even referrals do not have the high close ratios which we came to expect for so long. And, leads generated by your own efforts are much more skeptical, with the industry average close ratio well below 30%. Because of this you must have a strategy and a process that sets you up for success.
DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF FROM YOUR COMPETITION AND
BECOME SALES READY IN 30 DAYS
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.