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.

How to Do I Get Visitors to Engage with My Website?

I mentioned this in my last Blog post. We live in a very “noisy” world and we need to grab their attention in less than a couple of seconds.

This is true for our website too. People don’t read website content any longer. When someone lands on your homepage they will start skimming the page very quickly to decide if they want to spend more time diving deeper.

Here are two ways to make your making better.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) most often have really complex solutions. One challenge most people in the IT industry suffer is the “curse of knowledge”. The term was coined by Chip and Dan Heath back in 2006 and then they wrote about it in their 2007 book, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”. Later, Lee Lefever described practical ways to combat the “curse of knowledge” in his book “The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand”. I highly recommend both of these books to anyone who is marketing and selling IT solutions.

Okay, you just exchanged business cards with the owner of an accounting firm during a chamber event. 

He said, “Sure, let’s plan on meeting some time over the next 2 weeks.”

Awesome! You left the event with a qualified lead! Plus, he agreed to meet and he already shook your hand. 

The problem, because we all know it’s never that easy, is that there’s a delay. You couldn’t ask him much of anything, and nevermind describing what makes your MSP unique.

There’s no set date for the appointment, and who knows, he may bump into a competitor or research online in the next 10 days!

So, what do we do now?

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.

We’ve been talking about the 4+1 Website Sins Preventing MSPs from getting more MSP leads. Many of you are asking, "Okay. I know our MSP website doesn’t generate leads like we wish it did, but we don’t have the money and time to re-work it, so what do you suggest?" 

Here we describe a process to add elements to your current MSP website in under 60 minutes and generate leads.

Some of you have been asking us about our background, who we are, and why we’re doing Managed Services Platform. 

Our Challenge

One of our companies at first was an IT managed services provider. We’ve since reintegrated it into our holding company, but think telling its history will be illuminating...

We discovered that while our clients always needed consultancy on IT in general, we lacked a viable model to do it both properly and profitably. We’ve tried to incorporate the consultancy into the MSP high-end package, and tried to do T&M. Neither approach was satisfactory.

But the pressure just gets heavier as we’ve been witnessing the evaporating services on our MSP practice, accompanied by ever increasing needs of the clients for IT management, vCIO, and 3rd-party-project management, all while IT gets more complex in terms of organization management.

MSP 1.0 is not widespread yet as a business model, and there is already the new 2.0 model.

What are the key differentiators between the two models? The following will refer to an average MSP 1.0 and MSP 2.0 practice.

We are assuming that the MSP 2.0 model is heavily supported by an MSP 2.0 framework, which is crucial. The differentiations may seem simplistic, but our aim is to show the possible limitations and challenges of the MSP 1.0 model, and the opportunities of the MSP 2.0.

Keep in mind that MSP 2.0 is not a substitution of the MSP 1.0 model. It is an expansion. You can move your existing 1.0 services forward, but with 2.0 as a companion the new options are going to be very promising.

Many MSPs are not able to well define their target segments. The result can be a huge sales effort with disappointing sales closes. There are three main differentiating factors we could use to fine tune service directed toward the different segments:

• Industry, verticality
• Seats
• Complexity

IT managed services providers could divide their market among three segments described below to benefit from more focused communication and delivery strategies.

The 3 minute video discusses the segmentation based on seats and complexity.