As a managed service provider you have the benefit of recurring revenue. With that benefit comes certain areas you must be mindful of. Getting staff, locating clients and creating workflows are the basics. There is another area which seldom comes up, managing the risk.

We first get a client on board and based on certain things we set the price for that customer. One of the things that happens after awhile is the pc’s and servers start aging. Software starts to get added, patches get applied and little by little the support calls increase. It’s usually not noticed and if you don’t watch for it you will get “support creep”. It’s kind of like project creep, but it happens to the environments.

The best way to control this is to assign a risk mitigation officer in the company. They will have to have historical data to work with so make sure you track everything. You do that anyway right? If you do not have a PSA or RMM in place to support finding the metrics needed, use a simple excel spreadsheet to track all calls and activity.

Support creep will eat away your margins and you will not know why. Handling the creep from happening can be anything from proactive cleaning to having clients replace their pc’s every year. You probably won’t get the second, but you can dream about it. If you are large enough, hiring a full time risk mitigation officer is a quick ROI.

I can be reached at djames59@yahoo.com

This realization only comes with experience. I spent many hours building business processes to automate a successful marketing strategy. Still, I spent half of my time focused on it. Now the benefit of automating is that things didn’t fall apart if I had something else to work on.

Marketing your MSP with the right tools and maintaining that edge is the secret to potential clients calling you, not you calling them. Imagine having business professionals call you, looking for that “thing you do”. And once you figure out that formula, it requires your constant attention if you want to have those calls keep coming.

Now I’m not saying the day to day administration of marketing can’t be handled by staff. Hopefully you can build processes that are teachable and repeatable. What needs your attention will be the content of the plan and personally reaching out to those business professionals. Chances are it will be the CEO or CFO who wants to talk about what you can do for them. Your job is to do what you do best, sing loudly.

Client service managers can do the follow up. Your job is to secure the trust and open the door to servicing and revenue. I touched each potential client first, laid the groundwork for trust, then handed it over to the sales team. Their job was to tell the client what was needed after an analysis and team discussion. Once I hit the magic formula, there was never a week I didn’t have a handful of potential CEO’s to talk to. The rest they say is green pastures, dollar green.

I can be reached djames59@yahoo.com

I’m sure there will be different opinions on this, but I am going with what worked for me. My question to you is how do you sell your services? Do you have a menu based marketing where potential clients can pick from “all you can eat”, to basic monitoring? Well stop, I want you to take a moment and think about what you offer.

Perhaps it would be better if we started with the client view of IT support. When you get to the point where they are willing to TRUST you to manage their technology, that is the key. They are now willing to trust your judgement on what is best for them. Imagine being in your doctors office and he talks about your health. Then as you’re ending the meeting he brings out a service card and asks you what type of healthcare you want. Do you want to know immediately if you have a hernia, or would you like to just wait till you’re in pain every day?

Bad analogy, maybe, but you get the idea. OK, so I don’t believe in a gold plan or bronze package idea of selling your services. I think we sell ourselves short and we reduce our talent to a “best buy” frame of mind. So how or what can you do? Only offer one level of support, The one corporate-class, best in show, no one does it like us type of offering. Then if you must, offer additional best in class side dishes such as business continuity.

Reduce your business down to its basic processes, get crazy good at it, and go from there. Offer yourself as a professional service and market in terms the client understands. Create standout moments, things that your client will always remember. We always delivered birthday greetings to ALL the contacts we had for a company. I personally hand wrote the cards and had them delivered by Currier.

So for my two cents today, get rid of the a la carte and sell one thing, your greatest effort. Which is what you do every day, right?

I can always be reached at darrenjvalukis@gmail.com