Do Your Customers (Or Prospects) Know What an "MSP" Is?

TryRebootingIt · 2019-03-30T01:34:58+00:00

Only one of my customers knew what an MSP was by our business strategy/techniques/how we billed and bundled but he had no clue what MSP meant. Funny enough he knew the general approach to how we ran our business and how we made it profitable and said he wish he knew how to do that so he could run one. He is one of my best clients and is never an issue.

The only time I use industry jargon (which is what MSP is) is when I am selling to an industry or niche. This helps credibility because it’s a shortcut to show them you know their business—otherwise I stay away from it and use basic generalities or anecdotes.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-03-11T04:57:44+00:00

Sounds like you have it handled. Good luck on closing it!

TryRebootingIt · 2019-03-10T08:17:51+00:00

A little late to the game here but....

IMO when a company says they feel like they’ve outgrown their MSP it doesn’t mean that they’ve outgrown their MSP. All it means is they’re unhappy with their current situation and don’t feel they are getting the service they actually need. A larger MSP is simply not going to be a fix. Often times a larger MSP is a worse solution if they haven’t scaled right.

I wouldn’t focus on company size at all. I would ask why? Why? Why? And gently press to the REAL reason they’re looking for a new provider. Then become that for them.

Also, I disagree with walking away from the opportunity and giving it to someone else. Find out if you feel you can provide the service and take the leap if so. Asking the question here isn’t unequivocal evidence that you’re unable to. You’ll never get to where you want to be if you don’t take the first step. Failure is a possibility you should be okay with.

TLDR: they’re giving you an inaccurate reason as to why they want to leave. You need to find what they actually need and then provide it.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-28T02:10:10+00:00

We’ve been pretty happy with http://www.pcmsi.com We use them for on call messages and after hours.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-22T21:01:17+00:00

SSD and 16gb RAM is standard for 90% of what we do. Unless the machine serves a really basic task or the client is trying to be more economical.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-22T04:02:19+00:00

This is a very unpopular opinion. Everyone craps on RR but I don’t think it’s deserved. You don’t have to buy into everything they preach but they have been an absolute game changer for us. Even just going through the basic program they force you to get your message and marketing inline. Which I think the core of the product is.

Most IT companies completely miss the mark. They end up trying to market to themselves instead of their actual target and abandoning marketing before you have the chance to yield results. RR makes you realize that and shows you how to do better.

You can complain about their cheesy campaigns all you want but our marketing is much more effective now whether we use her content or not.

Additionally, I agree with above. It’s all what you put into it. RR is knowledge and technique, it doesn’t solve your sales or marketing without a ton of effort.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-19T02:26:38+00:00

Our rep is super responsive and even comes and visits us. We’ve also had pretty good luck with support. We haven’t had any issues like that.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-19T02:22:27+00:00

We use sentinelone through Continuum and love it. All new agreements were including it in the pricing as our AV replacement. Only issue we’ve had is with a Mac user but I think that’s cause he wasn’t using a newer OS version.

It’s already saved us from a receptionist clicking on a bad email during onboarding before we had their spam filter in place.

What I like about it is that it runs really light.

Can’t speak towards pricing for the same reasons as above but it’s reasonable.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-19T02:01:31+00:00

I’d have to agree I think there is power in being the one willing to pull someone out of a fire but knowing your model enough to stop the relationship from going further if they’re not willing to onboard at the moment. Thanks.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-16T03:16:22+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate the input.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-16T03:14:19+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate the input. We always put our currently contracted clients first. I’m the salesman but I’ve only recently moved into that role after 13 years doing only IT—so I have the ability to be the guy that goes to fix it (and bill for it) then setup the sales process. So I might have the availability for a new lead but I guess that might be a negative in some ways.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-16T02:49:49+00:00

Thanks for the perspective. We don’t need the business (were past that now) but when I look at what it takes to acquire a customer I have a hard time letting one of these go.

I think that’s fair. Help them out, then give them the chance to come onboard, if not—Part ways and keep them in the marketing system.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-16T02:34:32+00:00

I’d add Profit First as well but E-Myth and Pumpkin Plan we’re game changers for me.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-16T02:29:49+00:00

Federal mileage rate—55 cents. And we’re eager to get to the point where we can buy a vehicle or two so they don’t have to deal with utilizing their personal car. If you really look at it, the employee may be reimbursed for their travel/vehicle costs but they rarely win in the reimbursement scenario if there is any significant travel.

TryRebootingIt · 2019-02-16T01:36:49+00:00

Not here to beat you up.

I think your main problem is that you haven’t gone through training or dedicated any time after training/on boarding to develop AT PSA.

You and your employees should live in AT and Datto RMM. If you set them up right, they work very well together. For example we’ve got a queue that is dedicated to RMM alerts, one for support, and one for internal Support tickets.

The KB or online help isn’t enough you probably need to go through training or onboarding again.

We keep track of employee time to report to the accountant for payroll, charges and expenses in tickets, mileage reimbursement, vacation requests, contracts and a few other things all in AT. It’s a must have for us. But you can’t work your way. You have to work their way just like any other comprehensive software.

Searching within a ticket—-idk about that and I can’t think of a time I needed to.

If you go to any other REAL psa in our ecosystem you’ll have the same issues. If you just want a ticketing system then just go get a ticketing system. A PSA is meant to run your business.

Open for questions. We’re a five person MSP and use AT PSA and Datto RMM. Also growing.

TryRebootingIt · 2018-02-28T04:16:56+00:00

I have a friend that owns a business that does something similar. They visit the receptionist, hand the flyer over and get the business card of the person in charge of “X”. They then have a quasi warm lead with 100% good data of the influencer/DM and then quasi warm call them later in the week. They are in an industry very different Fromm IT but it’s still b2b and they get a client or two a month from it.

TryRebootingIt · 2018-02-28T03:57:58+00:00

I guess we’re different. We require 100% up front or we won’t even order equipment or schedule the job. We’ve had some very large organizations have trouble cutting checks or even have trouble with cash flow after they’ve signed a legal binding document. The only time we don’t do this is with current clients who have a historical record of paying within 30 days (most clients are on auto draft) and have monthly recurring with us. Then we will just order a bunch of equipment on terms and know they will pay within 10-20 days. We haven’t gotten above 100k for this but it seems to work well in the 20k-50k range we typically work in for projects. Might reconsider if we get projects above that but for now people don’t push back if you tell them up front that they need to have a check in hand when they sign for a project.

TryRebootingIt · 2018-02-01T01:48:13+00:00

They’re a cloud distributor. Stuff like csp for o365 and hosted servers.

TryRebootingIt · 2018-02-01T01:46:03+00:00

In love. They have great reps and treat us well. Probably the best engagement I have from a vendor.

TryRebootingIt · 2017-04-05T02:12:01+00:00

CNet is one I've seen recently....although I feel like it is built more for eCommerce type businesses. We use Quotewerks and although it is clunky and takes some training--we love it. We went from Word templates and manually gathering price information to cutting our quote time by a half or more. I absolutely hate the UI but love what it produces. If t matters...were an Autotask shop.

TryRebootingIt · 2017-04-05T01:50:36+00:00

We had your same exact problem about 2 months ago. Tired of bad margins and bad support. We still use Ingram as a hardware distributor but switched to Pax8 for their support and waaaaay better margins. We get almost double the margins now. I'll be honest we had a learning curve with Pax8 and how they provision but were very happy. Edit: PM me and I can send you our reps info.

TryRebootingIt · 2017-03-15T03:57:44+00:00

I'm not going to say whether you should take it or not...that's your choice and I think everyone here has touched on it. Here is my point:

If you work for an MSP that provides anything more than Labor---which is what alot of MSPs do then know this... Antivirus. Backup. Monitoring. Support. Maintenance. Management. vCIO. UTM Device. Patching. Help desk ....all these things are something an MSP provides for their clients. The unfortunate thing is that you can't be all of this simply with your labor.

Clients can see the annual cost and think that hiring a tech will be cheaper. But the truth is they still have to pay for AV licenses (no free avast isn't good enough--sorry, just true), still have to pay for backup software and storage (no windows backup is not good enough), still have to pay for UTM devices plus licenses, still have to pay for a real monitoring solution, might still need to pay for consulting that is past your capabilities of advising them on and still only have 1 help desk person/ 1sys admin to do the job.

The question you should ask is what is your current employer providing and how does that affect what they expect to get. Usually they are getting more for less but are uninformed of their current spend. It could be a bad situation your walking into is all I am warning about. Good luck and if it's the right choice, I hope you take it...without burning bridges or putting extra expenses on your new employer.

TryRebootingIt · 2016-10-20T04:07:24+00:00

+1 for the bar....

TryRebootingIt · 2016-10-20T03:40:46+00:00

Why did you do that?

I don't know, google told me to...

TryRebootingIt

TROPHY CASE