Quick calculation formula for vCIO opportunities
The other day I made some calculation with a client about vCIO services. Fortunately it is very easy to calculate your opportunity in creating a profitable and scalable vCIO service offering.
We’ve simplified things for faster calculation, but it’s good to clearly understand what’s at stake. We see three categories in which we can lose or earn money.
Develop and operate a scalable and structured vCIO operations
1. Cost of Free Advice
The cost of free advice is the lost revenue opportunity resulting from the inability to charge our clients. It can be anything from casually chatting about their plans to putting together project proposals and so on. You know when it’s happening...
Cost of free advice = [Number of clients] x [Average Free Advice in Hours per month] x [Hourly Rate]
For example a small size managed services provider with 20 MSP contracts spending an hour per account giving free advice (yes you spend way more than that), with a $200 hourly rates leaves $48,000 on the table. I know you may not be charging $200 now, but creating a separate service and do value selling can do the work. Just today a client in California sold a $3.000 MRR vCIO to a School District over phone. The competition offered $150/hours rate but he won the deal with $225/hours internal calculation with value based pricing. :-)
2. Cost of unproductive work
The second category is about your IT management, quarterly business reviews, manual daunting document creation, planning, project management, consultation, vendor management and more role. The cost arises from doing these tasks ineffeciently, without processes, templates or even an automation tool, spending more time than you can spare. You’re pushing your tech to be productive, buying all the RMM, PSA, you name it, but the highest paid individuals have nothing to leverage...
Cost of unproductive work = [MSP contracts] x [Hours we may save] x [Hourly Rate]
We will be very conservative here. Let’s say we may save 25% of the time of our vCIO resource today, which we all know is a fragment of the opportunity. Let’s calculate one hour per virtual CIO per account per week: this means the savings will be one hour per month. It leaves another $48,000 on the table. Processes, best practices tools all helps to drive the fat out of the current processes.
3. Cost of opportunities
The third category is all about the opportunities. Based on our experience, prospective clients of more than 20 seats are open for what the virtual CIO has to offer. If the starting service fee is not more than 20% of what they’re paying for the managed services, it’s an easy sell.
Opportunity cost = [MSP Contracts with 20+ seats] x 1.2 x [Upsell effectivity]
Let’s say our MSP has 10 contracts with more than 20 seats. The average MRR contract for them is $3500. In the next year 7 of them will be transferred to a very new vCIO offering, which will generate $4900 additional MRR for the seven clients, or $58,000 new revenue per year. Imagine what can be accomplished if we sell just a basic package for 25 of these companies! Converting existing clients is not that difficult if we know the tricks. Usually an annual IT strategy planning process can create the business case. If the plan is well done, it is obvious somebody needs to manage the execution...
Sum up the numbers
[Opportunity] = Cost of free advice + cost of unproductive work + opportunity cost
$154,000 per year is the toll our managed service provider is paying for the lack of vCIO pricing, packaging and basic processes.
If your numbers are high, you can be happy because the opportunities are huge. If you have a smaller client base and you see a smaller figure, don’t be discouraged. Your competition that’s undeserving of their clients is an easy target for you to go upstream and serve larger clients.
Now do your math and see which is your greatest potential ROI!
Let’s share, what is your number?
How Slack app can be a revenue generator for your MSP
Last week we went through how we can stop giving out free advice and making consultation a revenue generator. Let’s see that in practice. Our example today is Slack app, the latest silicon valley unicorn (1B+ valuation). Slack, in most cases, is a free tool designed to enhance your internal communication. So how can we as cloud service providers deliver value and earn revenue with this great tool.
Customer Segment Profile
First, we need to understand a problem most of our clients have. The sector of the industry we’re focusing on now is companies whose teams work together on processes, projects, and collaborating with both vendors and clients.
Jobs to be done: Like so many other aspects of modern life, most of them need to deliver more value with fewer resources.
Pains: Typically they communicate over email, getting 100 or more emails a day, without a clue as to how to handle this volume. They cc each other excessively just to keep everyone in the loop, and use a host of applications like Project Management, CRM, plus service automation, and so on. Even these are mostly cloud based, with no integration, so every one of these systems needs to be checked separately if they want the whole picture.
They’ll also try out new apps on a weekly basis in their search for solutions, install a few, run the 30 day trial, all while not having the time to properly evaluate them - and like Sisyphus’ rock they keep finding themselves at the bottom of the hill again.
Gains they are looking for: They want an overall improvement in their communication each other, vendors, and clients, so they can focus on their work instead of emails, and would love to get answers, reasonably quickly, from a system, application, or from each other regardless of location - in the car, office or at home.
But they’re already too busy...the last thing they need is the added task of creating this solution. What’s missing is someone to listen to their issues, understand them, figure a solution, and then not only implement it, but also train their people and support them in the learning curve so that they can get back to the business of their business.
We’ve observed that this is quite typical. even though we know the tools are out there...they just don’t get used or aren’t implemented and trained properly. That’s nothing new to us in IT: Owning tools is easy...finding the right one and using it properly is another matter.
Value Proposition Map
Discover how Slack with the proper consultation and implementation can help them achieve this communication improvement.
Gain Creators: As a product Slack helps teams communicate within a single space. This can happen in private channels, one to one communication, public channels, you name it, and it can manage topics according to need. It also integrates with thousands of applications, and so ususally gets the sought after information from disparate sources without logging into those applications. In essence it creates a unified platform for company-wide communication and replaces internal emails almost completely.
The tool is the first step. Also required however is the creation of the business case, context, and the process to properly implement it, training users, creating basic policies and enrolling the entire team and the company overall. Of course we could leave them to do all this on their own, but our value proposition is to make this process successful from the get-go. This is actually more important than the tool itself.
Pain Relievers: Teams are now working in all kinds of venues and access the information from a myriad of devices, anytime, and anywhere. They always have to share files and documents with each other. Even with cloud based file sharing it’s a time wasting task - to copy / paste the links, then use another app to send. Another problem is after sharing, nobody’s aligned on where the file came from, and have to re-check the email to access it again. Slack eliminates this speed-bump entirely, leaving the file in context, and with its robust search engine, one can find it easily with any other system of communication.
Still, most users will have questions, and Slack doesn’t have real one-on-one support that incorporates an understanding of their business context...it’s rather more general help on features. Our support can fill this gap. We’ll often be able to offer our technical skills in integrating many other applications into Slack - a not so obvious task. We can be the ones to make those integrations work and enhance them over time.
Product & Services
The ultimate solution for the opportunities / problems of the client is a Slack Implementation Project.
- Needs assessment
- Project kickoff
- Implementation
- Project management
- Training
- Documentation
Because this implementation project is largely common among all who would have it, it can be templated easily, so from our perspective is streamlined. A Slack implementation project in this sense with initial consultation, implementation, technical set up, training and initial support can fall into a $2500 - $3500 range. It leads to an additional MRR for support and subsequent enhancement projects.
Marketing/Sales
The best way to market this is with an eBook or a Grader. You can see an example of a Slack grader here. It asks the following questions from the client:
We can quickly score their answers and see whether Slack can be useful to them to show, try, and implement. It can lead us to a quick product tour and a kickoff meeting for the needs assessment.
Delivery
The delivery part is a canned project with
- Project Plan
- Process descriptions, hints and tips
- Pricing and packaging document, contract, agreement
- Task lists for the milestones
- Tasks for the necessary deliverables
- Meeting memos, agendas to manage the project efficiently
- One-page checklists for the discovery meetings
- Presentation decks for education/training
- Basecamp.com live client facing workspace with everything necessary to facilitate smooth communication with the client
Conclusion
Slack is a great tool, and boosting the tool with our implementation services is a big hit. Clients will understand that we’re no longer just a general infrastructure service provider but a real business ‘wingman’ or ‘wingwoman’ for them with respect to the creative use and implementation of technology solutions. It ushers us into the trusted advisory role and helps us reframe our clients to see that IT is not just cost-savings, but a huge competitive advantage.
The Fall of the Era of Free IT Advice
Many IT managed services providers (MSPs) and internet telephony service providers (ITPs) are suffering the challenges of charging for IT consultation. The IT industry has taught its customers that we sell big expensive boxed packages that come with free consultation, placing the value in the big boxes and none in the advice. There are no big expensive boxes anymore, but still the advice remains free. However a systemic shift is taking shape finally reversing this conundrum. It is about offering low-cost SaaS applications and solutions with high-grade consultation fees, placing more value in the advice rather than the tool.
Generate client engagement with five quarterly business reviews in 30 days
What has happened?
Let's go back over what happened. We sold expensive systems to SMBs such as MS Exchange with servers. The process of selling these projects included high-level consultation: checking the environment, creating architectural designs, and putting together migration plans well before we got the deal signed. Part of the sales process was to create a complete Project Plan (many unbilled hours) for the investment, deployment, and implementation of those items. Because everybody made a decent margin on those package items plus the accompanying service project and because the closing rate was high, we were happy to include the initial consultation work in the sales process.
But over the last few years most SMEs have been moving into the cloud to some extent. They are buying Office 365 monthly subscriptions instead of buying servers and exchange licenses paid upfront. We do earn commissions, but is there more? Do we need to plan things out? Do we need to integrate the systems? Do we need to do consulting work? Sure we do, and it’s just going to grow as the system gets more complex.
The fact is that clients never really get used to paying us for IT advice and IT consultation, but now we don’t have those big lucrative projects to cover our work.
Rise of the SaaS applications
The SaaS model is widely misunderstood. Most people think that the main benefit of SaaS was that you don’t have to install the application, making it easier to use. That’ just one of the perks along with all the other technical advantages such as mobility, platform independence, data storage and so on.
The big deal of SaaS is the business model. You might think that this is all about paying monthly instead of buying the license. This is a different and very important aspect. Paying $100/user for a decent CRM for five users is $18,000 for three years. The same with on premise, is you’ll pay the upfront license + 20% upgrades every year. Without the hosting fees it’s around a $12,000 CRM package just to start; we often forget that there are always implementation costs - we’ll get back to that later.
From a psychological point of view, paying $500 per month is a much lower hurdle than committing to a $12.000 upfront fee, if you sign a 12 month contract, which is now less often required. It makes SaaS applications selling easier.
From the perspective of the application developer however, this is a whole new game. Now the application company does not get $12,000 for the license upfront, and risks losing the client at any time. The app developer has a bunch of upfront costs developing the tool, and then more selling it. You (believe it or not), marketing, and sales and customer management can quickly eat up 50% of the lifetime value of the client. That means the motivation for the application developer is no longer just to sell the tool, but to acquire and keep the client as long as possible, and to upgrade to the highest package possible.
Now the goals of customer and the application developer are aligned: get as much value out of the application as possible. The big deal of SaaS is common motivation.
Distribution of work with SaaS
The second big shift very few people yet see clearly is the change in work distribution. Providing a $500 CRM service for five users is a pretty lean operation. This equals 3-4 hours of consultation rate, so the SaaS provider has no financial support to do the work for the client. The client has to do it for themselves.
Take a look at Hubspot. Hubspot is an inbound marketing application. It helps you put together a decent website, blog, email workflows, calls to action and to run a great web based system.
They have to educate their customers on inbound marketing strategies, copywriting, blogging, sharing content, grow-to-hack, choosing the right color for the calls to action - you name it. If they don’t, the customer is not going to build up a decent system, and won’t see the expected successes, benefits, or value, and will eventually drop out.
Hubspot is an extreme example of how much a client needs to put in to make an initiative successful, even with a great starting product.
The best part is the following: most clients have been there, done that and know that IT initiatives are the hardest to manage, and that they require their investment. Buying Hubspot and figuring it out along the way doesn’t work, and the costs of not paying attention are higher.
However most customers don’t have the resources or the people available to learn the best color for the calls to action and how to increase the traffic in the Facebook page. They rely on Hubspot certified partners to do the job. These partners are helping clients implement the tools, and further along the way. They have a huge upfront charge to kick things off as well as additional monthly recurring charges. In most cases the overall payment for the partner far exceeds the payment for Hubspot for the tool itself.
The paradigm shift: they are paying for the success, not for the advice...
The latest IPO and stellar growth of the Hubspot partner community is proof this is happening.
Put it together
Ok. Let's recap the points:
- we see that the old model was to sell the big upfront project with free advice,
- we see SaaS companies motivation is now 100% aligned with the customers’ success
- we see clients are willing to pay for success if it is made tangible
What’s the point, you might ask? How do we make money as MSPs, we don’t know Hubspot!?
Many SaaS based applications are more affordable than complex packages and usually solve one problem, such as:
- Project Management tools (Basecamp, Asana, etc.)
- Lightweight CRMs (Zoho, Sugar, etc.)
- Process Management apps (ProcessPlan, ProcessStreet, etc.)
- Collaboration (Slack, Hipchat etc.)
- Meeting Management (Lucid Meeting, Do.com, etc.)
- Integration tools (CloudHQ, Zapier, etc.)
- Vertical based solutions
We can continue this list for a long time. Any ordinary 20+ sized company would need one application at least from the app categories above.
Let's check our SaaS application grader which helps you and your clients understand what part of the business is not leveraged with a lightweight web app:
The problem is still that they don’t have the resources to master these applications; they don’t have the time to choose, learn, implement and integrate. Even though these apps are solving basic problems, understanding the business process and implementing a Trello.com card system for managing it isn’t a trivial effort. Most companies don’t perceive a part of the potential these tools could do for them.
That’s the void; what’s missing. Both the application developer and the customer need this role filled.
How do MSPs make money with that?
A traditional MSP is not going to make a dime with this model. They are infrastructure focused companies, not application focused companies (yet). But they can easily step into this role, because they have the support and the client base, and are already familiar with the applications world.
1. Do not do hourly rates, but fixed scope projects
Selling it for $150 per hour is not going to work. But selling Slack the internal chat tool, putting together the basic processes and rules, with ten channels and five integrations for $2000 and $100 support per month is workable, predictable and drives success. The vCIO is the ideal candidate for those projects. He knows the business, understands the processes and can communicate the need.
2. Oversee the portfolio, not just the individual apps
As you deliver more and more apps to clients, someone has to be the owner of them, or there will arise islands of different types, with no integration and no control. Again the vCIO is ideal for the control of that management role: making decisions on which apps to implement, governance, subscription management, etc.
3. Come from the business world, not the technical
Don’t provide "ProcessPlan" as an app. That is not a value. Provide operational excellence with well defined processes and automation that uses ProcessPlan to deliver value. Again, being a virtual CIO, you are going to easily spot these opportunities and make it happen.
4. Have a platform, a business application solution stack, and vertical focus
For a base IT infrastructure, Office 365 or Google should be among your choices, and for all the typical applications - calendar, note, workflow, project, collaboration etc. - there should be a stack the engineers know can bundled together and integrated. Also be familiar with vertical based stacks for accountants, law firms, professional services, etc.
5. Test it, live it, support it
It’s important to use the same stack internally (you probably already are) so that your team has experience with it. The support will be more “User Enablement”, helping them with hints and tricks, to take away some of the heavy lifting from the vCIO’s shoulder. The Virtual CIO is busy doing the planning and the implementation. Then the team is backed to support it.
There are cases where managed services providers have bundled together a “SaaS Office Suite”, reselling, implementing and supporting many applications per user. In this case it’s an addition to the current MSP package but with licenses, subscriptions and services inside as well.
Our MSP switched to this mode 18 months ago and are now packaging the full SaaS application suite with all desktop support and remote monitoring in one bundle. That is a client experience of value.
Conclusion
Let's shift the paradigm from "Expensive boxes with free advice" to "Cheap applications with paid advice."
This is the fall of the era of free advice and the dawn of the profitable vCIOs!
Execute your IT Strategy: interview with Gary Harpst
We are continuing the “MSP 2.0 bestseller” series in January, as well. The pick for this month is Gary Harpst - Six Disciplines of Excellence. Gary has been a part of the IT industry since being the founder of the well known ERP solution Solomon Software that was sold to Great Plains then to Microsoft. After the acquisition he shifted his focus to one question: how to help companies to execute their strategies. He has put together a very solid methodology in a program called “Six Disciplines” and written a book about this topic. This book is in my top 10 business books and has changed my way of thinking. I was privileged to meet him in person and have a long talk about these challenges.
Execution is one of the biggest issues of managing any type of company. As a vCIO or trusted advisor you not only need to have great insights and offer solid advice, you need to actually execute their IT strategy as well. If you’ve read “E-Myth” by Michael Gerber you’re familiar with this idea of working on your company. Gary put together the practice behind it - how you actually do it!
Listening to Gary and reading his books not only can teach you to be a better leader of your IT company, but make you a better service provider as well. It shows you practices and processes to reliably create rock-solid strategies, align your people to them and then execute flawlessly.
Read Gary’s books, check his blog, and learn the wisdom of someone who’s been there and done that!
7 Requirements for a Scalable vCIO Offering
The MSP 2.0 model is catching fire around the world. Many MSPs have already started to design, sell and deliver vCIO services. Adding $2.000 - $4000 of vCIO monthly recurring revenue (MRR) to a current 40 seat $5000 MSP MRR is now doable but requires some preparation. We’re going to take a look at the requirements (which can be easily overlooked) of the delivery to make sure we make it profitable.
All seven requirements center around a common set of principles: realizable expectations, efficiency in execution, excellent communication, and transparency.
Let's see the requirements one by one:
1. Cycle based pricing
We’ve emphasized all along the proper pricing strategies of the vCIO... how and why to separate it from the MSP package (except for the vCIO Light type services that are boosted Account Manager or Technical Virtual CIO activities attached to the MSP package). The key is to put the defined vCIO activities into separate cycles, define the resource allocation for each cycle, then annualize the hours needed for the certain activity and divide it by 12 to arrive at a Monthly Recurring Revenue. Also for each and every activity the vCIO will do is a process and defined deliverables are set in advance. It is not a consultation on an ad-hoc basis. Rather there needs to be a clear, planned process behind every service we offer.
Example: We do a Quarterly Planning Session, a Project Review, a Selected Application Training and a Budget Review. These are the services we do every quarter, and altogether eat up 10 hours per quarter, or 30 hours per year. (We have just three quarterly cycles because the fourth is considered the annual cycle). Our expectation of hourly revenue for this (just for internal planning) will be $200. That means a budget of $6.000 budget for the year. Therefore, the MRR requirement for that will be $500. Of course, we add up the annual, monthly, and weekly activities as well in the calculation of the full MRR requirement for delivering this service.
Tool Hint: the given calculation sheet is used to create different plans for different sizes/scopes of vCIO plans. See what is and isn’t inside the package, and do "what if" analysis based on the given time and expected revenues.
2. Separated Ongoing and Project-based agreements
In the MRR pricing, we can only include ongoing services. Do not even start on projects without separate vCIO Project agreements. What we can do regarding separate projects in the ongoing plan is to manage a Project Portfolio...review projects from outside, report to the CEO, have a fixed amount of resource to coach, help internal people managing different IT related projects like application implementation and so on. That leads to predictability. Individual projects have to be managed individually.
Example: let’s say during the annual planning the customer has five projects: two of them are technical MSP focused projects, one is an Application Integration project managed by the vCIO, and the other two are smaller projects managed by the internal team. The responsibility of the vCIO is two-fold. First is to make sure the projects are well defined and ready to go for both the vendor (MSP) and the internal team. This is part of the annual process, and the time is allocated ahead for those project kickoff meetings, planning and so on. The second responsibility for the vCIO is a secondary agreement that manages the Application Integration project. First, it manages the planning of the project and then the project management itself.
Tool Hint: the methodology and tool can give the best practices to maintain proper scope and clearly separate the ongoing and project-based activities. Doing both will allow us to leverage the synergy, while reporting will still occur separately.
3. Well defined services
Each and every service line item needs to be well defined over several properties. We need to get an overview of what goes into the agreement and establish the needed skills within the service, the marketing and sales materials, tools being used and a time budget. As well the service cycles must be integrated. To this end the Annual plan is going to be the base of the Quarterly Plans, the Quarterly Plans will include Monthly Progress Reviews, and so on, set up as a visible framework. The more specific we are in a service the clearer and more effective we can be both for the client and internally.
Example: The IT Strategy Planning Process is done every year. It takes 7 hours to complete and consist of three meetings on Preparation, Planning, and Finalization. The defined deliverables based on templates are an IT Development Roadmap, Quarterly Execution Plan, and Strategy Governance Plan. There are nine steps in the process, with warnings and pro tips.
Tool Hint: gathering all services related to the vCIO is critical in setting the right expectations and ensuring we deliver what we promise. Create a framework and tie the services together.
to view this video.
4. Customized Agreements
When setting up our vCIO plans, we are going to present three or four different templates, like Light, Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. These templated vCIO service offerings are designed to ease the process of setting basic expectations. However we can’t think that our clients will sign up to any template precisely. Each client is different and has individual needs. We want to avoid the need to generate custom pricing every time of course - it’s too much work to deliver ten different agreements to ten different clients - so we fine tune the templates and just slightly customize the parameters. We can take out one or two line items or change the needed time allocation for select services. The backbone of the contract will follow the template but will have room to conform to the individual client as well. Like successful automakers you offer a choice of a few sizes and models, and then further customize on a finer scale.
Example: A manufacturing company of 50 people is aligned with the Pro package ($2500 MRR), and they have two main locations. The Annual Planning will be in one place but the because the team is separated the quarterly activities will eat up more time. We can allocate a little more to the quarterly activities and delete the user training entirely. Overall we get retain the $2500 MRR with the same profitability by adapting the plan to the situation.
Tool Hint: in the tool the contract module allows you to customize the agreement based on the template. You can add and remove service line items and adjust the hours. Further since you may be utilizing junior vCIOs for some cases, or your CEO will be in on the Annual Planning, you can adjust the internal hourly rates line by line. It promotes the right expectations and strengthens your profitability.
5. Executable deliverables
You know you have the skills, tools and resources to operate a vCIO service at a high level. You are ready to do annual planning sessions, discovery business sessions and so on. But how precisely defined are those activities? You don’t want to engineer a new launch system for every spaceship. Have a standard best practice with todos, notes, agenda items, templates to make it a smooth practice. If our deliverables are not specifically defined with properly set goals, even with these processes, we can neither manage the vCIO service nor the client involvement. The devil’s in the details.
Example: The vCIO goes to a manufacturing company and starts the Project Visualization workshops. He has the meeting agenda items in a template, the goal he has to reach, the time slot for the meeting and knows the next steps. The vCIO can explain the process quickly to the CEO, that they were just gathering basic information now, and the next step is to make the selection criteria for choosing vendors. The client likes that there is a process for that, sees the momentum and decides to let the vCIO initiate the planned service right away, and skip the next sessions. Thus clear definition of deliverables reduces the disruption and time involved as a result of client-side disruption.
Tool Tip: Every vCIO service line item is well defined yet gives room to adapt for the vCIO. There are task lists, tasks, agenda items, meeting memos and template files. It has all the execution ability for the vCIO and full option to improvise if needed.
6. Transparent workspaces
A vCIO performs a very high-level management job that can be boring and not so visible sometimes. Negotiations with vendors, internal project meetings and keeping people accountable in weekly huddles are usually not seen by the client executives. Things are going to go well, and projects will be delivered on time, yet directors can get complacent and forget they were ever issues. We can’t just create value, but must also prove and demonstrate it consistently. Smart Client-facing Workspaces are the tool to keep our sponsors informed about our activities. An intelligent collaboration tool, it can send the essential digest to the upper level.
Example: The vCIO is finishing the monthly review and checks off the items done that week, and the projects completed. Then in the chat he applauds a job well done and thanks a particular member for the overtime last weekend. Then come the plans for next month based on the activity templates, and updates completed items of the IT annual plan. Now the system sends a daily digest to every team member showing the last items on the discussions, the completed todos, the updated memos and so on. The CEO has a quick glance on the incoming email and gets a reassurance that his vCIO is working 24/7 for his company.
Tool Hint: While most IT companies are using PSA solutions like Autotask and Connectwise, they are limited. These applications work best for IT teams and not for client executives. We integrate with Basecamp as a lightweight project management and collaboration application to make things light enough but still easy to manage.
7. Management Dashboard
Many IT managed services providers see offering vCIO services as a good idea, but without proper processes, vendors, and management maturity, scaling the standard MSP practice can still be a nightmare. If an MSP is able to reach 12-15 people level it can accommodate 1-2 vCIOs full time. Even with workspaces and processes in place some activities will become overwhelming pretty soon. How can we stay efficient and overlook 10-20 clients with 1-5 projects and ongoing services for each without losing our minds or our clients? That’s why we need one dashboard for someone overlooking the vCIOs, and one for the vCIO as well to prevent overlooking the team's tasks and responsibilities.
Example: An average quarterly cycle defines 40-50 tasks easily for a vCIO. Having ten clients is going to scale up 400-500 tasks for the cycle. We need a way to reduce the clutter, to hide the less pressing tasks and show what matters. We can slice and dice the dashboard quickly for individual accounts, contracts or projects. This gives us the peace of mind that we can handle that load of activities, and stay sane.
Tool Hint: We’ve designed a layer as an umbrella above every project, and ongoing workspaces for vCIOs to operate. We get every task, deadline and assignment there. At the start we see just the big picture, then as we delve into accounts and then to projects we drill down to the specific tasks and deliverables.
Conclusion
Take a moment to think of each of these 7 requirements not being in place. What if we don’t have the proper process for the vCIO, how would it affect efficiency, the management, the headaches and so on. How could each one enhance your current possibilities, profitability, and peace of mind? How could they help you build up a professional service company and distinguish yourself from the competition?
Transform your MSP sales approach
Branden Baker, President of Integration Technologies from Hawaii is a modern Tom Selleck. He shares a story about the transformation of his IT sales approach.
His team had not been able to close any managed services provider deals for more than a year. But he got involved in the virtual CIO conversation and after only a few weeks he landed his first monster six-figure deal.
START GROWING WITH MSP SALES RELATED RESOURCES FOR FREE
5 KEYS TO GENERATE, QUALIFY AND CLOSE MORE SALES
Have you ever wondered why you struggle to communicate your values to your prospect, why prospects stay with their current provider even when they’re not happy, you have a hard time closing deals that weren’t referrals, or you just can’t find a way to consistently close sales? This recorded webinar with our MSP sales expert guide, Mark Woldman, will show exactly where you are going wrong and help you develop a plan to move your sales forward.
CLOSE MORE DEALS WITH A PREDICTABLE AND REPEATABLE MSP SALES PROCESS
Watch this interview with our MSP sales expert guide, Mark Woldman, to win over new prospective clients by finding best practices that will help your MSP become Sales-Ready. Here you’ll learn key concepts and practices that will move your sales forward!
Break Your IT Sales Barriers with Ian Altman
We are starting our "MSP 2.0 bestseller" monthly book review. We want to start strong, so the first book of this series is the new consultative selling holy bible, Same Side Selling. The co-author, Ian Altman, CEO of Grow My Revenue, is a sales visionary, bestselling author, Forbes contributor and keynote speaker.
While speaking with Ian it became clear he knows how to win the hardest battle IT managed services providers have ever faced: commoditization of the IT infrastructure services and the resulting price pressure, shrinking margins, and the lack of differentiation from competition.
One of our MSP 2.0 movement members suggested I read the book: Same Side Selling - A Radical Approach to Break Through Sales Barriers. He had told me that this is 100% aligned what we do in the Managed Services Platform IT Consultative Sales program. I read it and I was flattered. Most of what I’ve read on the subject involves large complex concepts, but this book was very simple, very practical and quite an eye opener. I think everybody who’s a little serious about MSP 2.0 should read his book.
You can read his articles each week on Forbes.com. If you do a search in business trends, he comes up #1. Business luminary Seth Godin recommends Ian’s latest bestselling book, Same Side Selling, as one of two must-read books on consultative sales. Ian is host of the Grow My Revenue Business Cast. He started, sold, and grew his companies worldwide to values of more than one billion dollars.
I had a chance to chat with Ian last week and he was able to carve out time with us for a quick interview. The fun part is that he knows the industry well, so we had a great chat. I am not going to try summarizing the interview, as I think it’s better to just hear him for yourself.
Thanks again to Ian. Check out his webcasts at his website: http://www.growmyrevenue.com
MSP Financial Intelligence with Larry Cobrin
Larry Cobrin, CEO/Founder of MSP CFO, has been working on a project to make financials available for IT managed services provider to make better decisions. In my first call with him I knew we needed him to talk about finances! I was fascinated by his insights about clients’ profitability trends, classifying them and taking actions for better profitability.
He shares a lot of hints and tips about different data you need to look into (which are mostly available already in your PSA) for your organization to make better decisions. If you feel you are leaving money on the table check out this interview!
Larry’s interview is available in a Podcast format here.
START GROWING WITH MARK'S MSP SALES RELATED RESOURCES FOR FREE
5 KEYS TO GENERATE, QUALIFY AND CLOSE MORE SALES
Have you ever wondered why you struggle to communicate your values to your prospect, why prospects stay with their current provider even when they’re not happy, you have a hard time closing deals that weren’t referrals, or you just can’t find a way to consistently close sales? This recorded webinar with our MSP sales expert guide, Mark Woldman, will show exactly where you are going wrong and help you develop a plan to move your sales forward.
CLOSE MORE DEALS WITH A PREDICTABLE AND REPEATABLE MSP SALES PROCESS
Watch this interview with our MSP sales expert guide, Mark Woldman, to win over new prospective clients by finding best practices that will help your MSP become Sales-Ready. Here you’ll learn key concepts and practices that will move your sales forward!
MSP 2.0 Podcast
We have been producing interviews with MSP Thought Leaders and with our clients for more than a year now. We started this as an ad-hoc practice to usher great MSP 2.0 insights into the community. People seem to be enjoying the free interview format without presentation, special offers and other sales tactics.
Now with over 16 interviews we’ve received a ton of feedback and the message we’re getting most often is to make the content available in a podcast format. Many people like listening to these inspiring talks during their commute, or just in the background.
So we have transferred all videos to a Podcast format and it’s available here. What we started as a fun exercise to get people talking had a great impact. We’ve seen that many people:
- started to work on the execution skills after the interview with Chris Day - IT Glue.
- were inspired by the way Greg Tanner restarted his MSP with virtual CIO.
- got started selling vCIO after Rich Anderson explained the model of transition.
- started to think about the cold calling as a strategic lead generation effort after the inspiring talk from Carrie Simpson.
- started implementing high level services after Colin Knox from Passportal told us stories about his managed services provider's vCIO services
- started to work on Process Management initiatives after a talk with Ryan Williams.
I could go on with examples, but these are the people who inspire, educate and share their thoughts and dilemmas.
That is why we are going to take this to the next level: to get ad-hoc interviews as well as more organized talks with more background information. For example next week I have an interview with a bestselling author about sales transformation, and we’ll share more collaterals, and practical information after the interview.
So stay tuned! In 2016 we will have more great content from more smart people who have compelling things to say and will help to push the MSP 2.0 movement forward!
Closing 11 Virtual CIO contracts in 3 weeks
Greg Tanner from Denver is a maverick, no question about it. His “Technology Quarterback™” slogan has become a meme among the MSP 2.0 community. We spoke the other day and I am still speechless. He started crafting this vCIO offering back in June, piece by piece, and started selling it in early October. Since then he’s closed 11 virtual CIO contracts with over 20K MRR! In this video, Greg shares the secrets to these amazing results. Be aware, he has very strong opinions about MSP 2.0. (Even stronger than me - Haha!)
I shared this video with some of our Members a month ago and received great feedback full of inspiration and praise for his efforts. A big THANK YOU to Greg for sharing his thoughts with us!
Greg’s approach is somewhat disruptive, but very effective. Grab your seats and get ready to take some notes. This is going to be an intense ride!
Delivering Business Focused QBRs
ADAM WALTER AT VIRTUAL C
You would like to be a high-value business partner in your client’s eyes rather than a basic technology service provider. Your QBR process is a critical part of influencing their engagement up to a higher level. Watch this recorded webinar with our vCIO expert guide, Adam Walter, who has shared his 5 step process to make any technical QBR into a business-focused one.
6 Best Practices of Top Performing vCIOs
ADAM WALTER AT VIRTUAL C
Watch this interview with our vCIO expert guide, Adam Walter, to learn how to be more engaged with clients by finding best practices for becoming a trusted business advisor in 6 single steps.