The Remote Working Scenario has indeed brought a change and has completely shifted the way everyone works. Although many businesses had to shut down, it has surely opened doors of opportunity for MSPs and Cloud Service Providers alike. But to become the best IT Service Provider of choice for your clients, it’s not just the “technology” aspect you need to take care of.
Want to serve or offer the existing market with new offerings? Well, the MSP growth strategy that you should be adopting amongst the 4 types should be “Product Development”. It doesn’t mean that you should be developing something entirely new but you can expand your current offerings.
We at Infrassist, being a Master MSP, often keep trying something new. To leverage technology in a way that helps our existing clientele and promising prospective MSPs boost their business. Indirectly helping them serve their customers better with our IT Support outsourcing services.
Upsell to your existing clients
Who doesn’t like to receive something new and unexpected? Who doesn’t like a surprise add-on? Who doesn’t like to hear about ideas that could help them grow their business? The answer is – Nobody.
Yes, clients like it when you provide them quality service but there are high chances of them staying with you if you have something new to offer. There are chances that you may or may not get new business from your prospects but what you can do is to derive new business. Serve your existing clients with new services so that they not only value it but also would associate with you for a longer period of time.
Provide Consultations
Don’t always keep talking about technology and boast about your expertise all the time, talk about how you can help your customers grow their business. Engage in conversations that make them see the value they get in being associated with you. Build a framework and know and understand what the end goal for the customer is. Yes, you will offer them technical help but if you guide and show them how you can help them build their business, they are bound to be more intrigued.
Offer Freebies/Combos/Discounts
Just to set a foot in the door and for you to get a chance to get started, offer freebies. Do a free pilot test, a partial or a full network discovery and audit, an RMM Audit or a Firewall Audit based on the requirement or the need of the hour. Once the prospect is satisfied with what you have offered, and once they have gauged your capabilities, they’ll be willing to proceed. Offer Festival or Anniversary discounts to your clients. It prompts your clients to stay partnered and they will likely stay associated for longer.
Innovate and Upskill
Experiment. Nobody likes the same old service for long. What is something new that you can offer to your clients or prospects? Maybe curate a bundle of your existing services, or add a new service to your existing service package, or you can even create an in-house team that focuses entirely on the new service sector. If your newly department needs you to add resources and more skilled people to your team, so be it. Add them.
Irrespective of the business that you run, you always need to keep yourself and your team updated. Keep track of the latest trends, see what your competitors are offering and what they aren’t offering. Stay ahead of the competition and come up with a service that could actually add value to your clientele. Nobody knows their needs and demands better than you, so give them what they want.
For an MSP, a good sector to invest in would be cybersecurity. As the former FBI Director Robert Mueller said, “There are only 2 types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be hacked”.
Cyberthreats and hacks will only rise to prominence now that almost every device is connected to the Internet. Barriers need to be strengthened to protect the IT Network. Invest in engineers that are skilled enough to maintain a Firewall and enforce security measures that are impossible to penetrate.
Invest in Marketing
Now, in a perfect world, you can have the flexibility to spend money on paid online advertisements, carry out promotional marketing campaigns, and increase spending to grow your brand’s visibility and generate more traffic and enquiries. But money surely is still a hindrance for many small and medium-sized businesses, in reality.
Marketing doesn’t necessarily mean heavy investment, your in-house team, the tech team who is in constant contact with the customers, can be excellent marketers as well. And based on the trust factor they have formed, it becomes easier for the customers to believe what you say.
Apart from that, you can also provide value by sharing insights and knowledge with your target audience via blogs, whitepapers, e-books etc. You can record the projects you’ve done and present them in the form of case studies and success stories. These make it easier for the audience to trust you.
Don’t lose heart, keep prospecting
Even when times are tough and cracking new business seems to be a far-fetched goal, keep prospecting. Many get disheartened and withdraw themselves from the cycle but you can protect your business by continuing to run the race. Show your prospects and clients the bright side, show them the bigger picture. Serve them with technologies and tools that are in demand and can that change the business scenario for them.
Growth Mindset
It’s not just the CEO and the directors who need to have a vision and a growth mindset, it’s important for everyone in the organization to have it. Unless everyone is on the same page and understands the value and the offerings and the vision, it’s difficult to serve and give your best.
Bonus: Always offer something extra. Go the extra mile to serve your clients. Always give more than what they expected. Give them an add-on, a new suggestion, ways they can improve. Anything that can help their brain juices run and actually think “Why didn’t I ever avail this service before? This is exactly what I needed”.
How are we expanding our business?
Back when we started off on this Master MSP journey, Infrassist only offered NOC Services; monitoring, maintaining and troubleshooting errors that popped up in the MSPs RMM Tool. But as we kept growing, the team kept innovating. We started doing RMM Audits, Firewall Audits, we started providing dedicated resources instead of shared resources etc. We found a golden opportunity in the cloud and started leveraging on M365 Services. A team was built around it and we ventured into Azure, Automation, Scripting etc. We used to audit M365 tenants but then we took a standardized approach and adopted CIS Benchmark guidelines to perform the same.
The innovation is still on and the hunger to serve our MSP Clients with services that prove beneficial to them, in the long run, is our goal.
