Becoming you Client's IT - Selling Managed Services

If you are attending trade shows or reading technology news, you know that managed services in the SMB market is a hot topic right now. There are a number of solutions out there that offer a platform for building managed and monitoring services; with an emphasis on the SMB market. This is important because many are asking "How do I improve my financial stability, maintain market share, and increase the company's valuation"?

If you have already started selling managed services of some type, you know that there is more to it than buying a monitoring tool, installing it in your office, and getting a junior sales person to make thousands of phone calls. There has to be a value proposition that is compelling to what has been called, "The post chasm buyer". It has to actually meet a business need, provide a return on investment, or move a customer closer to some federal security requirement. Before you move forward, there are four key questions you need to ask:

1. What will you offer?

You know how most SMB companies don't have time to keep up with their IT environment? Patches are often out of date, security is very weak, main business systems are not highly-available, backups have never been checked, and there is either one or just a part time person dedicated to keeping everything going (a major security risk in itself). Now you need a program that solves the problem. Its not monitoring, its much more.

You need a program. Your program consists of the everything you can do to help a manager or business owner forget about IT. Systems have to be assessed for areas of risk (security holes, points of failure, inadequate procedures and personnel, etc.). Then, your client's infrastructure needs to be repaired, optimized, stabilized, and cleaned up from spyware, RATs (remote access trojans), and other security/availability problems. Finally, a program to keep things going must be put into place. This might include periodic planning meetings, reports that forecast disk space and bandwidth constraints, quarterly or monthly onsite proactive maintenance (some of this might be done remotely or through automated systems), and of course, 7 by 24 monitoring. The bottom line is, post chasm buyers are not going to buy monitoring; they are going to buy uptime.

2. How will you build it?

You might have something in place right now - perhaps you do it all yourself. But as Mack Hanan pointed out in his book "Consultative Selling", a book written in 1972 on selling profit improvement, selling hours for dollars is always a commodity and will not build a long term profitable business. You need leverage.

Start by listing everything you could do for a company on a periodic basis and categorize it by system. You might have servers, workstations, network components, etc. Then you have administrative tasks that parallel these devices; Helpdesk services, planning and strategy, user awareness training, etc. I recommend that you add security as a separate section where we will list higher level security options in addition to items that will fall under each component. Now figure out what you can automate through tools that are out on the market today.

Once you have the offerings list, you will want to begin building on a platform that has many of these functions built right into it. Your core offering should include the monitoring functions, while also addressing security. In a recent workshop I conducted at the Level Platforms Headquarters in Ottawa, Peter Sandiford, CEO of Level Platforms made the comment that,