Being a technically strong MSP owner can be a double-edged sword, costing your business thousands of dollars per month in new customer acquisition.
On the one hand your customer’s value your ability to troubleshoot and solve I.T. problems, on the other hand it leaves you with less time for marketing and acquiring new clients.
Finding staff that are just as skilled as you can often be expensive and it’s common for MSPs to struggle with sales growth while you work extraordinary hours saving your clients from the latest glitch or impending outage.
So how do you transition from being a tech super hero to strategically growing your MSP?
Avoiding “Easy”
It’s very tempting to step in and solve every IT issue your customer has. After all, it only takes a minute to help your favourite customer who forgot their password right?
But those minutes soon add up in to hours or days in lost time that could be better spent growing your IT business.
The first step to MSP sales growth is to focus more on the tasks that will result in more sales. This might be as strategic as developing your company’s vision, or as important as making sales calls. To give you the best chance of success it’s important to avoid the distractions of “easy” 1st level support or answering calls from customer’s who wish to bypass your support desk and go direct to you at any time of the day or night.
Hiring more help desk staff is one option but managing people can also take you away from your goal to truly grow your MSP.
Benchmark 365 addresses the concerns of growing MSPs by providing an on demand team of dispatch, 1st, 2nd and 3rd level support engineers freeing you to focus on the growth of your IT company.
Uber Senior Tech Skills
If you’re a highly skilled senior engineer it can be frustrating and often financially restrictive to hire someone as skilled as you to support your customers. To make matters worse senior tech staff are difficult to find and are often attracted to larger companies who offer bigger salaries than a smaller MSP and your clients can afford.
Wouldn’t it be great if accessing senior technical skills was as simple and cost effective as calling an Uber?
Benchmark 365 offers senior technical resources on demand – a lot like Uber. We offer a team of highly qualified, industry certified, MSP trained senior network and systems engineers that can be engaged for as little as an hour or for as long as you need to design implement and support complex IT infrastructure.
This uberfication of I.T. is a huge competitive advantage, tapping you into the skills you need without the ongoing high salary expense.
With helpdesk running smoothly and sticky technical issues sorted out you’ve got just one important thing to focus on…
Making more MSP Sales
Helpdesk is humming, systems are managed and clients are happy so it’s time to finally promote yourself to Head of MSP Sales.
Sales, like IT, is a discipline in and of itself and the most successful salespeople in our industry know that the more help you get the more likely you are to close more deals.
That’s why Benchmark 365 offers sales coaching and sales support from experienced MSP leaders as part of our service.
In fact, Benchmark 365 was founded by a high performance MSP team and we share the techniques with our Benchmark partners that led to our own success.
Having an Uber-like tech support team is amazing, but imagine also having an on demand sales professional working with you every day to improve your sales skills, develop your products and pricing model and help you close more deals.
MSPs that focus on sales and avoid distraction are growing at an enormous rate. We hope these tips are helpful in getting you from tech super-hero to MSP sales star.