A total of 85% of MSP respondents believe there is opportunity for them to grow their business in 2021. Confirming this, Datto reported in 2020 that MSPs recognised that cloud-based infrastructure design would be a top service within the next year and was the service they were most planning to offer.
This is evident with the amount of MSPs recently implementing cloud-based services through third-party vendors. MSPs have been trusted by customers to speed up their digital transformations during COVID-19 and now these same customers are looking to MSPs to aide them in determining the right place they should be spending their IT budgets.
It’s not about adding more to your plate to generate success – it’s about removing things so you can gain more time to focus on the areas that benefit your business. However, doing this may seem as though it’s easier said than done.
So how do you eliminate these challenges, increase productivity and then in turn, boost revenue? With 56% of MSPs revealing they saw managed services as the biggest sales/revenue opportunity for 2021, there is a huge potential for them to succeed even when faced with challenges. Let’s find out how.
The Challenge…
Skills Gap
With the demand on MSPs to provide the best and most current services, products, and solutions, keeping your IT team up to date with all the skills required is a near on impossible task. While your team has an extensive list of expert level skills relating to your current products, as well as an invaluable amount of knowledge specific to your business, introducing and learning to a high level about new technology is time consuming.
As users and non-technical staff rely on your team to keep their services available and resilient, fitting in the amount of time needed to gain a high-level amount of additional knowledge is difficult. With this skill gap any resolutions or repairs that are made are less likely to be of the highest standard, as the knowledge simply isn’t there. This can result in an increase in operating costs, create additional stress to staff and be a drain on resources. It is then likely that customer service levels will drop causing a decline in sales and retention levels.
The Opportunity
Provide expert level knowledge through teaming up with a partner and get the best of both worlds. Once in place, your partner will be there with the relevant skills that will enable you to offer additional products to your portfolio with confidence. However, finding the right partner for you business is key to ensuring you maximise your product offering.
The Challenge…
Choosing the Right Technology
Remote working has accelerated the complexity of customer’s needs with the demand for access to documents and data from anywhere – and this isn’t stopping any time soon. With this in mind, many MSPs find themselves without the right technology for the job. In an industry with new technologies continually becoming available it can be overwhelming to ensure the right one is implemented that suits the needs of your customers and business.
The Opportunity
Rather than choosing the most recent tech that may not add value to your business, choose the ones that will benefit your team by making them more efficient and enable opportunities to be taken. Doing this will capture a larger market space. MSPs identified cloud-based infrastructure design and management as a top service they plan to offer within the next year.
If this is the case for you, make your new products your strength by utilising third party vendors to help you deliver an expert service. When selecting new technologies ensure you choose a partner that has the same values as you. Is it important to you to offer high level customer service? If so, when choosing something such as a cloud hosting vendor choose a partner with a high SLA.
The Challenge…
Internal and External Barriers
At Synextra we often talk about the compound effect of small matters and how they can create internal barriers. Although these issues are more prevalent for IT teams within a non-technical organisation, they still play their part in MSPs. As the pressure on MSPs continues to grow internally and externally, barriers are formed. From compliance to regulations, protecting data to the management of users the obstacles, these factors may have a negative impact on productivity.
The Opportunity
With data protection one of the biggest external barriers many businesses are facing, MSPs can alleviate these worries and take the opportunity to provide products and security solutions that make the protection of customer’s data top priority.
The Challenge…
Customer Retention
All of the challenges previously discussed can have a serious knock-on effect when it comes to the level of confidence customers have. This can be compounded by an increase in operating costs created by lack of knowledge, creating additional stress to staff and acting as a drain on resources. It is then likely that customer service levels will drop causing a decline in sales and retention levels.
The Opportunity
The chances are your customer may have come from another MSP that did not meet their expectations, now is your opportunity to rectify this. During the onboarding process ensure your customer’s expectations are clearly outlined and how you can meet them. Alongside this, tasks such as standardising processes, communicating often, creating the right technology stack and championing consistency will help turn this challenge into an opportunity.
Putting effective marketing and advertising in place to communicate new products and services in place is an effective way to gain new customers and retain current ones. Alongside this, emphasise that you value the importance of security and incorporate security solutions as a standard in all you provide for customers. Be proactive and create solutions for potential problems before they have a chance to negatively impact their business.
Get in touch with our team and find out how you can turn challenges into opportunities in your business.
