Kaseya approaches this differently. Our RMM solution, VSA, is tightly integrated with our BMS PSA solution, and those tools are getting closer every day. Meanwhile VSA integrates with other PSAs, including ConnectWise. However, the best synergy comes from the VSA/BMS combo, which offers superior ticketing efficiency and a single pane of glass interface that makes the two seem as one.

The Importance of a Next-Generation PSA

Just as important as the RMM integration, BMS is a next-generation PSA, and while purpose-built for MSPs. So what is a next-gen PSA solution? Let’s start with a first-gen solution, which offers too many features that add no value and bring with them confusion, inefficiency, the need to highly customize, and ponderous training. They also include frustrating outdated interfaces, and require enough clicking to induce carpal tunnel. Finally, legacy architectures mean slow performance, and security can be achieved only with third-party plugins.

A next-generation PSA has none of these shortcomings, and a wealth of advantages, including:

• Clean, modern, intuitive interface, which translates into a better user experience
• Born in the cloud with modern architecture for scale and speed that translates into business efficiency
• Easy administration with Active Directory integration and frequent updates/releases
• Seamless integration with VSA, saving critical time and money in a way no other combined solution can

The BMS + VSA Advantage

Combining BMS and VSA drives efficiency across your ticket lifecycle, and reduces ticket resolution time by 40%. Here is how:

• Automatic ticket deduping
• A modern interface with fewer clicks for common tasks
• Advanced automation with reduces manual takes
• Live Connect, which works with VSA and BMS and lets tech launch remote sessions directly from tickets
• Automatic sync, which discovers assets, alarms and ticket changes which are synced across the RMM and PSA.

More Integration to Come

Kaseya is not done making BMS and VSA closer. Here is the near-term roadmap for BMS:

• Merge Ticket Capabilities
• IT Glue Integration
• Contextual Launch of IT Glue
• Two-Way Calendar Sync: Office 365, Exchange and Gmail
• Kaseya One Integration
• Price to Asset (Based on VSA Metrics)

Kaseya MSP Customers Put Them Together

Spectrum Data Networks is a MSP startup in Houston, and needed core RMM and PSA solutions. Kyle Tennyson, a managing partner at startup, already worked with Kaseya, and adopted VSA and BMS. “Without BMS and VSA, it would’ve been more complicated to find a platform we were familiar with. We worked with Kaseya for years. It is home. You don’t really feel like going anywhere else,” Tennyson explained.

Tennyson uses BMS project management capabilities for onboarding, and finds it integration with VSA essential. “One thing we found was you can onboard a client, but if you don’t set certain tasks for the technicians involved in onboarding a client, they fly by the seat of their pants,” he said. “I start with a customer we are onboarding, put all the details of the system in such as address locations. Once you enter all that in, it just puts it over to VSA. It is done from that aspect.”

ConnectWise Hooks

Based on customer demand, Kaseya built a tool that migrates users from ConnectWise to BMS, and Kaseya also has an integration solution. An automated, bi-directional sync plugin, the Kaseya PSA Connector enables seamless integration between Kaseya’s VSA remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution and ConnectWise Manage PSA.

MSPs are fans of the RMM/PSA integration. “Being able to choose the best in breed technologies for our business is one of the keys to our success. Making sure that these solutions work together is the other, equally important part of the equation,” said Matt Burnette, proactive services team lead, Acropolis Technology Group. “Kaseya’s ongoing commitment to ensuring compatibility and interoperability across multiple vendor products makes it easy for us to seamlessly deliver the best products and services to our customers, and maintain the highest levels of quality.”

Learning about BMS will not Cost a Cent

You can check out BMS with a free trial, and if you like what you see, have a conversation with our product specialists regarding the scope of your migration process.

When you download and install BMS Express, the migration wizard automatically exports the data objects from your current PSA and into BMS, including:

1. Companies & Departments
2. Locations
3. Contacts / Portal Users
4. Employees
5. Queues (Service Boards)
6. Tickets & Ticket Notes
7. Projects & Tasks
8. Time & Expense Entries
9. Hardware Assets (Configurations)
10. Knowledge Base
11. Opportunities
12. Activities

Finally, the Kaseya professional services team will ensure your workflows, financial data, and contracts are effectively rebuilt – and that your team is fully trained and enabled to embrace the next-generation features of BMS.

Get the full story by attending our Better Together: VSA and BMS in Perfect Harmony  webinar.

Also, learn more about BMS and get your free trial.

Finally, Get you exclusive RMM+PSA Buyers Guide, here.

Get a BMS demo by clicking: https://www.kaseya.com/get-started/bms-demo/.

The post RMM + PSA – The Very Definition of IT Synergy appeared first on Kaseya.

The Spanning solutions set is now part of Kaseya’s IT Complete platform, an especially important addition, as the use of SaaS applications is growing rapidly in organizations of all sizes, as our 2018 MSP Benchmark Survey indicates.

Now Kaseya MSPs can immediately expand their data protection capabilities, differentiate their cloud services, and generate extra revenue and high margins from their existing Office 365 business.

There is also ample opportunity for internal IT organizations, many of which are moving to Office 365 and other cloud productivity applications. With Kaseya support, Spanning will maintain its laser focus on providing scalable, powerful cloud-based data protection solutions for SMB and enterprise customers.

Kaseya and Spanning had a partnership prior to the acquisition, which resulted in “Kaseya Office 365 (O365) Backup –powered by Spanning,” a new product fully integrated with the Kaseya IT Complete platform and VSA by Kaseya. Learn more about Office 365 backup here.

Kaseya O365 Backup is now part of the Kaseya Unified Backup (KUB) Suite; providing a single, unified solution for all customer’s entire backup needs, managed from a common interface. With the help of Spanning, the Kaseya unified backup offering covers all MSP and IT user backup use-cases: cloud to cloud, direct to cloud, and a cloud/appliance combination.

The Office 365 Backup Dilemma

Office 365 sounds like it has no real backup issues. After all, all the data is in the cloud — what could go wrong? A lot.

Unless you take extra measures, with Office 365 there is often only one core copy of the data in the cloud – just one tier of storage with no easily accessible additional backup. Much can happen to that one data set. Users could accidently delete information they or others need, and hackers could erase or corrupt larger amounts of data.
Meanwhile, when employees leave, they often delete their data – but that data is not necessarily theirs – it belongs to the organization and should be retained. There are two more reasons to back up SaaS data, a report “Back Up Your SaaS Data — Because Most SaaS Providers Don’t” from Forrester Research asserts. Without backup, there is no recourse when these ills occur:

Prolonged outages. An unexpected and prolonged outage at your SaaS provider can be the remote incident that cripples your business. Unless you have a plan for how to handle such circumstances, it is highly unlikely that you will have access to your data.

Insurance brokerage firms in the UK using services from SSP Worldwide were rendered helpless when SSP faced a three-weeklong outage. Seven different brokers could not issue new policies, look up the expiration dates of existing policies, or communicate with clients. SSP Worldwide could not recover some clients’ data from backup instances — and to brokers’ utter dismay, SSP Worldwide assumed no responsibility for losses they suffered due to the outage.

Data retention policy for audit or compliance purpose. While your organization’s policy or regulatory compliance mandates require you to retain data for few months or years, your SaaS providers will not preserve data for that long.

Organizations must have a plan, and a solution to protect their SaaS, including Office 365, data. “Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a popular element of a sound technology strategy. While almost all SaaS vendors explicitly state that protecting data is the customer’s responsibility, infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders usually send critical data to those providers without any plan for ensuring data resiliency. Back up SaaS data or risk losing customers, partners, and employees,” the Forrester report says.

More telling, SaaS providers do not even know if you have lost data. And even if the provider can get your data back, the process is expensive and can take weeks.

As SMBs have migrated from on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers to Office 365, MSPs are rapidly adapting their service offerings. Today, 87 percent of Kaseya MSP customers provide Office 365 services representing over 9 million deployed seats. Our recent Kaseya 2018 MSP Benchmark Survey also found that 49 recent of MSPs have expanded their Office 365 service offering to include backup. The need for full-service Office 365 support and backup is reaching a critical point for MSPs, which is why Kaseya and Spanning came together to develop Kaseya Office 365 Backup.

The Office 365 MSP Opportunity

With Kaseya Office 365 Backup, MSPs will be able to take advantage of recurring revenue opportunities and significant margin potential within their Office 365 customer portfolios. As the fastest-growing SaaS business product in history, Office 365 offers massive opportunity for IT service providers.

One Kaseya MSP understands the opportunity. “As one of the top IT service providers in the US for the past 25 years, the transformation of businesses to Office 365 has been unprecedented,” said Chuck Bubeck, CEO of Ease Technologies. “The ability to backup and restore Office 365 data is critical and the combination of Kaseya and Spanning provides us with the ability to differentiate our offerings to meet this rapidly growing business need.”

Get a demo of Kaseya Unified Backup (KUB) here. You also get a demo of Kaseya Office 365 Backup here.

The post Kaseya Buys Spanning, Launches Office 365 Backup to Drive MSP Revenue appeared first on Kaseya.

Luckily, Kaseya has done a lot of the legwork for you in the form of our 2018 MSP Benchmark Survey, an annual undertaking.

Pricing Best Practices

As mentioned in our recent on MSP metrics, pricing services is critical to MSP revenue and profit.

As you can see by the graphic below, more MSPs sell for the low sum of $25 per user/month than those that do so for a super-premium of over $105 per month. The goal here is to rise to the top, which can be done by selling higher end services, make sure your services are worthy of that premium, have sales pros who are trained to promote your value, and look to increase pricing over time, perhaps through contract clauses that call for increases after a period of time.

The move away from break/fix is ushering in dramatic changes in pricing models where MSPs are no longer just matching the pricing and pricing strategies already established by the market and competitors, so-called price matching.

In fact, price-match approaches have gone down for the second year in a row, replaced by cost- and value-based pricing. Over the last three years, value-based pricing has led the pack, increasing from 51 percent of respondents in 2015 to 64 percent  in 2016, and then dipping to 62 percent in our most recent survey.

Meanwhile, what MSPs charge for is changing, albeit it not dramatically. As you can see below, there is a slight increase in per-user pricing, but the largest pricing category remains “both per device and per user” at 41.92 percent despite a modest 1.80 percent decrease.

Picking the Right Markets

For years, service providers have been moving from break/fix to offering services such as remote monitoring and management, backup and various forms of security. Some services are more valuable than others, and high-value MSPs focus on the best. In this case, security is top of the heap. More MSPs, provide security services than any other specialty. Smart move, as security dramatically outpaced all other areas in growth.

At the same time, close to 70 percent of MSPs saw revenues for security increase, again a larger number than any other category, and one third of respondents see facing security challenges as their number issue, making it the top challenge by a factor of more than three.

Revenue results mirror, to some extent, participation levels in these markets as providers gravitate to more lucrative areas. Security had the highest growth, but more than half of MSPs said cloud management was also a growth area, which is in a bit of sync with the growth of MSPs involved in managing Office 365. Office 365, in fact, is the cloud service most leveraged by MSPs, with 86 percent taking advantage. That is almost double that of Microsoft Azure, leveraged by 45 percent of respondents.

Download our whitepaper “Two-Factor Authentication: The Solution to the Compliance and Protection Challenge” to learn more about how you can offer additional services to protect your customers and your business.

Compliance is Key

More and more organizations are falling under compliance rules, rules that get tougher all the time with enforcement likewise becoming stricter. As a result, regulatory compliance is top of mind for many MSPs – 75percent of North American MSPs said they or their customers are impacted by HIPAA and 59 percent by PCI DSS. Following that is Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) with 33 percent

In our survey, 52 percent of MSPs worldwide already do compliance assessments. These assessments benefit the MSP and its customers, providing the MSP with opportunities for new revenue streams as well as awareness of changes that must be implemented to protect both businesses.

The Kaseya 2018 MSP Benchmark Survey report is based on detailed data provided by owners and operators of over 800 MSP firms of all sizes spread across over 40 countries.

The post MSP Benchmarking: Understanding Where You Stand to Get to Where You Want to Go  appeared first on Kaseya.

There are many reasons why HIPAA compliance is so critical. One, a data breach exposes patients’ confidential records. This not only breaks the trust, it is a major privacy invasion. Not only that, if the breach is somehow made public, the health care provider’s reputation is damaged.

There are also serious financial consequences. In fact, both the health care provider and their MSPs could be on the hook for fines and penalties.

Roy Herron, systems analyst for the Methodist Healthcare Ministries (MHM) in San Antonio, was well versed in HIPAA and the compliance benefits of VSA by Kaseya. Prior to working for the healthcare organization, Herron had worked for a managed services provider (MSP), where he became acquainted with the remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution. He knew the software would be able to bring IT efficiency and compliance to the fast-growing healthcare system.

Compliance and Security

As a healthcare concern, MHM has serious compliance regulations to meet. “VSA is a big help in keeping costs down and allowing us to stay in compliance with HIPAA and the HITECH Act,” Herron said. While complying with these regulations takes a lot of effort, it also creates a safer environment. “The HITECH Portability Act is a big component of our security checklist. It helps keep everything up to date, which is a big thing to protect from breaches,” he added.

VSA also comes in handy when dealing with breaches. “I use it to correlate data if we have a suspected breach. I correlate between our Active Directory, DNS, who logged on to the machine, and what is going on,” Herron said.

Value of Auditing

Auditing is important to understand where your IT infrastructure has been and to protect the network. It is also absolutely critical for compliance. “Auditing allows me to change local usernames and disable them to keep well-known usernames from being used against our system for breaches. Instead of having to change the administrator password, I send out a bulk one and it is done like that,” Herron said. “I have auditing trails on every one of our computers and see who is logged in currently or who logged in.”

Remote Control and Management

MHM employees are scattered throughout rural areas in South Texas. With “half of our people in San Antonio and 100 to 120 users in remote very rural areas,” according to Herron, sending technicians to these sites was becoming unwieldy.

VSA has been a total game changer. “VSA has made it way more efficient. I do not have to take four hours out of my day where I cannot take calls, do tickets, or help anybody out,” Herron said. “VSA keeps us from having to send a technician out to fix their computer. I remote-on to it to help them with whatever they need, such as email or our next-generation health system, and fix it in five to 10 minutes.”

The Power of Patching

With most breaches impacting unpatched computers, keeping machines up to date is an essential safeguard. “I use VSA  for Windows patch management instead of having to have three or four different servers just to manage the patches. Everything is agent-driven right now. I have about a 92 percent patch rate within a week of when a new Microsoft patch is released. It is easy to set up. I did not have to tie in with everything else. You set up your policies and automation — and let it go,” Herron said.

Multiplatform is also essential. “It patches third-party software, not just the Microsoft Windows updates. I patch Firefox, Java, and some Flash. That is a big help. Otherwise, you probably have to send somebody out to physically patch each system, or spend tens of thousands of dollars on SCCM or SCE from Microsoft,” he said.

Meanwhile, the unified interface makes tasks easier to perform and manage. “The single pane of glass lets me see a group of our users and patching states. I can push everything out from my desk. Over the course of the day, it saves me probably two to three hours walking around,” he said.

Role of Reporting

Reporting is another key VSA attribute. “VSA lets me do reports to see which machines don’t have a service running or if something’s wrong. It tells me if they have not been patched, or how many patches are missing. That is big for compliance. One of the big factors in keeping your environment secure is patching,” he said.

Connecting with Live Connect

VSA’s Live Connect brings remote access to a completely new level, providing fast access to the computer even while an end user is working. “I am a heavy user of Live Connect, using it for command prompt scripts or VBS scripts that need to run, and to transfer files between computers. I also see in real time the processor usage and memory usage so I can tell that a machine may need more memory, or something on the computer is eating up the processes,” he said.

VSA and Live Connect are a big part of the IT efficiency story. “The time savings is plus or minus 20 to 30 minutes on a single call. It keeps call volume down, and our throughput has gone up significantly — probably by as much as 75 percent,” Herron estimated.

Two Factor Authentication Adds an Extra Layer of Protection

MHM has just acquired AuthAnvil by Kaseya, which offers two-factor authentication (2FA). Herron is contemplating ways to put it to work. “We are looking at use cases like tying it into our electronic health record system and using it for sign-ins and sign-outs,” he said.

Herron also likes the idea of password cycling. If a password changes every five minutes, even if an intruder gets the password, it will change in a matter of minutes – blocking access.

Read the full case study here.

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How often do you evaluate your organizational culture? Not often, right? Organizational culture is one of those amorphous concepts – you know it when you see it, but it’s just so difficult to pin down, and even more difficult to change. Yet, changing your culture is often necessary, especially when the entire MSP industry is transforming itself around you. If the constant flow of new tech and new business opportunities wasn’t chaotic enough, there’s also the fact that MSPs are becoming more operationally mature every day. If your company culture is static, you risk being left behind.

Take documentation for example. In our experience, most MSP leaders are fully aware of the value of great documentation. The problem is getting their teams to do it. But how? After working with 1000s of MSPs to implement IT Glue, we have a pretty good understanding of what it takes to build a documentation culture in your team. So we’re going to share some of the wisdom we’ve gained.

It Starts at the Top

Leaders lead. There’s no other way to say it. If your executive leadership is not engaged in documentation, nobody else will be either. But when the CEO declares documentation to be a priority, that sets the tone. But it can’t be just talk. Management needs to create incentives to get the team to document, make investments in automation to make it easier, and make sure techs have enough time to document properly. Documentation must be built into your processes.

Automate

Your techs don’t want to do a bunch of routine tasks any more than you do. They’ll do it if you ask, but that’s not building a documentation culture. Automate as much documentation as you can. Where native integrations don’t exist, they can be built. The more routine work is automated, the more engaged your team will be with the work that’s left.

Gamify

Create incentives to complete documentation. Have rewards for the top documenter of the week. Tie a small bonus into team documentation completion so that it’s a team effort. If you want to bring people in over the weekend for a heroic blast of documenting, definitely make that a fun weekend. But gamification provides intrinsic motivation to document, especially when coupled with small rewards.

Positive Feedback Loop

The more you document, the more your techs will see the benefits of documentation. We hear this all the time from our partners – even skeptical techs are won over when they see how much easier their work is with a beautifully documented environment. There should come a point when they hold each other accountable, too, for making sure that documentation is complete.

Each of these four steps can help build a documentation culture. It starts at the top, no question, and ends with everybody on your team being all-in on documentation. Responses from our partners vary as to how long this takes, but we know that the more of these elements you have in place, the stronger your documentation culture will become.

Learn more about IT Glue.

The post Building a Documentation Culture appeared first on Kaseya.

Penalties for violations can be huge, and non-compliance is practically a welcome mat for cybercrime, resulting in loss of reputation and financial disaster.

Whether you are an IT pro or service provider, you cannot create a compliance plan unless you understand the current state of your business. That requires an in-depth and disciplined assessment.

RapidFire Tools Inc., which supplies HIPAA-compliance assessment tools, surveyed MSPs about the value of assessments. It found that service provides use these assessments to start conversations with new prospects, and ultimately gain new clients. One MSP respondent increased revenue by over $12,000 a month.

According to the Kaseya 2018 MSP Benchmark Survey,  52 percent of MSPs worldwide (and 55 percent in EMEA) offer compliance assessments. These assessments benefit the MSP and its customers, providing the MSP with opportunities for new revenue streams as well as awareness of changes that must be implemented to protect both businesses.

Accounting, consulting, and technology firm Crowe Horwath has a step-by-process that starts with defining the goals. “Assessments work to determine the scope of compliance activities throughout the organization, the effectiveness of the compliance program, and to what extent the organization’s culture is conducive to compliance activities. An assessment can give the organization an idea of its compliance program’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas in which it can improve,” the firm explains.

Assessors should have to start from scratch but rely on existing documents related to compliance. “Examples of relevant documents that typically are collected and reviewed during an assessment include:

• Organizational charts of executive leadership and the compliance office
• Policies and procedures related to the compliance office or high-risk areas
• Examples of employee compliance training exercises and samples of communications made to employees about compliance code of conduct
• Samples of compliance monitoring and compliance work plans
• Previous compliance program assessments
• Compliance risk assessments and compliance risk assessment policies”

Getting to Know the Players

Assessors need to not only understand the organization’s structure and roles, but also get to know the people themselves. This can be done through interviews. The document review helps prepare assessors for these conversations. The goal is to understand how well key players understand compliance and if they are able to define their risks and take action to mitigate them.

Individuals who might be interviewed include people directly responsible for managing compliance, employees whose jobs requiring following compliance guidelines, and business leadership.

Conducting Gap Analysis

A Gap Analysis will show where the organization is already in compliance and what steps need to be taken to ensure complete adherence. The analysis “should reveal existing compliance program trends within the organization, including program strengths and opportunities for improvement. In addition, the assessor should make recommendations to the organization based on best practices observed in leading organizations that are of a similar size and structure to the one being assessed,” the firm explains.

This should all be codified in a final report that defines what is good and recommends specific improvements.

Financial advisory firm Deloitte explains why compliance assessment isn’t enough in its whitepaper, “Compliance risk assessments: The third ingredient in a world-class ethics and compliance program.”

Many organizations may think they are all set with compliance because they have performed a risk assessment. However, compliance and risk, while related, require different processes. “How is a compliance risk assessment different from other risk assessments? Organizations conduct assessments to identify different types of organizational risk. For example, they may conduct enterprise risk assessments to identify the strategic, operational, financial, and compliance risks to which the organization is exposed. In most cases, the enterprise risk assessment process is focused on the identification of “bet the company” risks – those that could impact the organization’s ability to achieve its strategic objectives,” Deloitte explains.

“The compliance risk assessment will help the organization understand the full range of its risk exposure, including the likelihood that a risk event may occur, the reasons it may occur, and the potential severity of its impact. An effectively designed compliance risk assessment also helps organizations prioritize risks, map these risks to the applicable risk owners, and effectively allocate resources to risk mitigation.”

Who Does What?

Once you identify who is who and who does what, you can define clear assignments. “Establish clear risk ownership of specific risks and drive toward better transparency: A comprehensive compliance risk assessment will help identify those individuals responsible for managing each type of risk, and make it easier for executives to get a handle on risk mitigation activities, remediation efforts, and emerging risk exposures,” Deloitte advises.

Part of this is an assessment that calls for clear steps. “Make the assessment actionable: The assessment both prioritizes risks and indicates how they should be mitigated or remediated. Remediation actions should be universally understood and viable across borders. Be sure the output of the risk assessment can be used in operational planning to allocate resources and that it can also serve as the starting point for testing and monitoring programs,” the firm concludes.

Compliance work is never done, Deloitte cautions. “Treat the assessment as a living, breathing document: Once you allocate resources to mitigate or remediate compliance risks, the potential severity of those risks will change. The same goes for events in the business environment. All of this should drive changes to the assessment itself,” Deloitte writes. “Periodically repeat the risk assessment: Effective compliance risk assessments strive to ensure a consistent approach that continues to be implemented over time, e.g., every one or two years. At the same time, risk intelligence requires ongoing analysis and environment scanning to identify emerging risks or early warning signs.”

Learn More

To discover more best practices for surviving a compliance audit, download the whitepaper, “Compliance: How a Layered Approach Helps you Breeze Through Audits,” and to see how MSPs can turn assessments into a revenue stream,  attend the on-demand webinar, “Compliance Audits: The Opportunities and Risks for MSPs.”

The post The Importance of Compliance and Risk Assessments appeared first on Kaseya.

More recently Kaseya updated IT Complete with new solutions that can drive even more managed services. One of the main new staples of the IT Complete Platform is cloud management in the form of the newly acquired Unigma. Also critical are strong authentication in the form of AuthAnvil, and Unigma’s network monitoring partner Traverse, which focuses on internal and hybrid networks.

So what is IT Complete?

Kaseya IT Complete gives MSPs solutions that help drive and run their business, and the industry’s most comprehensive set of revenue-generating solutions.

Kaseya IT Complete is the platform and technologies MSPs need to both manage clients, and gain a low cost structure that comes from embracing new MSP 2.0 market economics.

Kaseya IT Complete helps MSPs to:

• Operate more cost-efficiently with the use of a next-generation PSA built specifically for MSPs
• Expand revenue by exploiting next-generation RMM functionality
• Redirect money saved through efficiency to MSP 2.0 Emerging Solutions that address deepening SMB technology needs

Learn more by reading The Kaseya IT Complete Playbook – Your Roadmap to Success in an MSP 2.0 World.

With IT Complete, MSPs can reduce costs, and use this freed up money to create new revenue generating activities. These can include improving existing services, launch new services, or invest in sales and marketing.

Below is a graphic that shows the solutions in IT Complete.

IT Complete is the MSP 2.0 Platform

An effective MSP Platform should contain tools and technologies to help MSPs efficiently and professionally manage clients, and take full advantage of the flexibility and low cost structure derived from new MSP 2.0 principles.

Our IT Complete Playbook went a bit further. “Statistics tell us that SMBs are requiring more new and more complex IT service delivery capabilities from their MSPs. MSPs must offer these emerging services to their customers in order to A) prevent the customers from leaving and going to another MSP, B) grow their revenue from their existing customers, and C) ensure their ability to acquire new customers, as these emerging services are growing very rapidly and your competition could beat you to the punch,” the playbook explained.

The AuthAnvil Proposition

AuthAnvil is a two-factor authentication (2FA) solution that includes single sign-on (SSO). Here are customer prospects we rate as an A.

Customer Size is 40+. Here are key industries to target:

•         Banking/Credit Unions (FFIEC)
•         Healthcare (HIPAA)
•         Retail (PCI)
•         State/Local Gov (CJIS/NIST)
•         Legal (ABA Rule 1.6A)

With AuthAnvil, you can roll out an effective and profitable Security-as-a-Service. In the graphic below, you can see the impressive margins, and even more impressive return on investment (ROI).

AuthAnvil Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS)

AuthAnvil is a two-factor/multifactor authentication (2FA/MFA) solution that also includes password management and single sign-on (SSO). For MSPs, the SECaaS version is not just available on-demand, but is packed with resources to help providers quickly launch effective identity management services and fully monetize the solution to increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

These resources include:

•         “Go-to-Market in a Box” training to teach MSP staff to sell AuthAnvil two-factor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) as a service to customers
•         White-labeled sales and marketing materials to bolster the MSP selling process
•         Educational webinars for prospective MSP clients to help drive service demand

For more information on AuthAnvil Security as a Service visit: https://authanvil.com/msp-solutions/security-as-a-service

Traverse Network Monitoring-as-a-Service (NMaaS)

Traverse is a network monitoring and management solution that works with internal networks, the cloud, and hybrid networks. It tracks performance, uncovers problems, performs root cause analysis and resolves problems.

‘A’ prospects are companies with more than 40 employees, and target industries include:

•         Banking/Credit Unions – distributed/can’t close business
•         Healthcare – critical care
•         Retail – distributed
•         End User Service (call centers, etc…)

The new Traverse-based NMaaS solution offers:

•         Access to one of the most powerful infrastructure monitoring platforms on the market
•         Sales and marketing training and resources to help get new sellers to market quickly
•         A valuable multi-tier, multi-tenant monitoring service that fits customers of all sizes
•         An easy source of monthly recurring revenues from new and existing customers

For more information on Traverse Network Monitoring as a Service visit: http://www.traverse-monitoring.com/solutions/msp-monitoring-software

The Unigma Cloud Management Suite

Unigma has three core components:

•         Cloud Manager – The core of the Unigma Cloud Manager is an intuitive dashboard that offers a single pane of glass to monitor and management AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure instances, as well as other popular public clouds. With this dashboard, both MSPs and IT pros can correlate events with performance metrics, and share this data with clients or other internal IT staff. Moreover, since many shops now use multiple public cloud services, the dashboard offers that same single pane of glass view of multiple services and clients, and supports troubleshooting and performance metrics across all these clouds. Once the analysis is done, reports can be produced immediately. Another key part of Unigma Cloud Manager is the ability to automate common public cloud tasks and perform maintenance on schedules you create, and all from one single cloud control panel.
•         Cloud Billing Manager – MSPs these days handle a large roster of client companies, many with their own choices of clouds and often multiple providers. MSPs equipped with Unigma Billing Manager can give clients highly detailed usage reports that gives them an exact understanding of what they are using and powers your accurate client invoicing.
•         Cloud Cost Optimizer – Understanding existing cloud costs is a great thing. Even better, with Unigma Cloud Cost Optimizer you can turn your cost insights into a deep analysis of potential cloud savings. MSP clients or IT shops can optimize and manage their costs and boost cloud utilization. A big part of this is understanding both unused and oversized instances and then rationalizing them.

More on IT Complete

Click here to learn more about IT Complete.

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“GetApp’s Category Leader ranking is for business owners and decision makers looking for a comprehensive list of the leading cloud-based software products in the industry,” the company explained. “The ranking serves as a point of reference highlighting key factors that small businesses should look at when assessing a piece of software.”

While Kaseya was named one of the 25 best solutions for IT, it is purpose-built for MSPs, making it an even more optimum solution for service providers. “Kaseya BMS has placed consistently in GetApp’s Business Management Category Leader ranking since Q1 2017. A score of 13 for its security features, 8 for both its media presence and reviews, and an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars on GetApp contributed to its overall score of 31, solidifying its spot as one of the top 25 business management solutions in the cloud,” said GetApp researcher Suzie Blaszkiewicz.

Other criteria include integrations (BMS integrates with QuickBooks and VSA by Kaseya), security, media presence, and mobile app availability.

BMS’ main attributes have universal appeal: It is low cost, starting at $5 per user per month, and stacked with professional services automation (PSA) features such as accounting integration and management, CRM,  time and expense tracking, financial analysis and billing, and service desk. Additional highlights of its rich feature set include:

• Customizable reporting
• Data visualization
• Forecasting
• Inventory control, management, and tracking
• Project planning, estimating, accounting, and management
• Prospecting tools
• Real-time monitoring and reporting
• Support ticket tracking
• Workflow management

From the Mouths of Customers

One of the key factors of BMS being recognized is not what a reviewer found in a lab, but experiences of real-world users.

One commenter has been using BMS for over two years, and noted it is the “Best ticketing system I’ve used. Have used ConnectWise and Tigerpaw and Kaseya service desk. Much easier to keep track of tickets efficiently.” This user particularly likes the “ease of use, speed of new feature request implementation, clean/modern interface, and mobile interface.”

Another user explained that the ease of use and the adaptability of the design made the learning curve almost nonexistent, noting “My team is up and running with all features in a matter of days. The experience has been an amazing transformation of our Help Desk.”

Yet another customer said the “management of modules is very easy, and it’s easy on the eyes. I like how the pages flow when navigating, and a bunch of different windows don’t open all over the place.”

A fourth customer has been using the solution daily for six to 12 months. “Ticket creation and time tracking makes doing my job much easier. Ability to assign multiple engineers is nice too,” this customer said, also pointing to its “positive learning curve.”

Finally, a customer who has uses BMS daily said: “We use it for managing our customers, so it is easy to gain remote access, set customers in the system, and manage our internal users. We use the VSA and BMS hosted version of Kaseya, and the ability to access it anywhere is great. It’s easy to gain remote access and set control.”

Learn more about how BMS can help you manage your business here.

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You must be provably HIPAA-compliant. An MSP can’t do any HIPAA-related work without being HIPAA compliant. The good news is that once you are certified you can vie for HIPAA contracts, and because you are credentialed and knowledgeable, you can charge a premium for your services.

1. Penalties are serious.

Huge healthcare operations all know HIPAA. They have to. They are the ones most impacted by the rules, and most likely to be subject to frequents audits. Smaller operations aren’t always prepared for the risks. But penalties are more than serious.

Here are just a few of the fines dished out in the United States in recent years:

• Affinity Health Plan paid $1.2 million because it didn’t erase the drives on its advanced photocopiers before returning them to the company that leased them.
• WellPoint didn’t secure an online health database and paid $1.7 million.
• The Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary failed to encrypt physicians’ laptops and was hit with a $1.5 million fine.
• Phoenix Cardiac Surgery posted patient appointment on an online calendar and paid $100,000.
• A Walgreens in Indiana breached a single patient’s privacy and paid her $1.44 million.
• An Idaho-based hospice lost a laptop due to theft. The fine was $50,000.
• A medical practice in Phoenix sent patient data over insecure email, and was fined $100,000.
• A pediatric practice in Massachusetts lost a flash drive and settled for a $150,000 fine
• Another stolen laptop in Boston had the doctor paying $1 million.
• A lost backup drive cost the Alaska State Health Department $1.7 million.

This only scratches the surface. The HSS keeps an extensive list of violations.

2. Encryption is your friend.

HIPAA calls for all PHI data that is transmitted electronically to be protected, which is best done by strong encryption. In fact, if the data is strongly encrypted the MSP and client are pretty much immune from penalty if that data is somehow breached, or a lost device is already encrypted.

3. MSPs are responsible when clients run afoul of HIPAA.

Clients are known as covered entities and by definition are responsible for being in compliance with all aspects of HIPAA. MSPs that work with healthcare are called Business Associates and are just as responsible as the client themselves.

4. Your potential clients probably don’t care about HIPAA nearly as much as you do.

Very large hospitals and other big healthcare organizations care about HIPAA. And they can most afford to take HIPAA seriously, pay for the technology to support compliance, and train their workers. Unfortunately, the majority of small practices don’t much care about HIPAA – they haven’t been audited and don’t expect to.

Your job is to convince them otherwise. They need to know that a HIPAA fine could be financially devastating and ruin the trust between them and their patients – a real business crusher. Smaller healthcare organizations are most in need of MSP HIPAA services since they aren’t closely aligned with large insurance companies and hospitals.

5. The security assessment is the first major step in an MSP HIPAA engagement.

In some cases, an MSP may do a basic security assessment to convince a healthcare prospect that HIPAA compliance is actually important and they need outside help to achieve it. Once a client is hooked, a deep-dive security assessment will define what needs to be changed immediately, what new technologies should be put in place, and how MSP services such as RMM and authentication and access management can help achieve HIPAA compliance. With a rich-enough set of offerings, you’ll be able to sell Compliance-as-a-Service to healthcare – and hopefully beyond.

6. It pays to document.

HIPAA rules require that MSPs, as business associates, must document the protective measures in place for ePHI. These documents must be given to all staff and they should understand what they mean.

7. You need a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA).

The HIPAA Omnibus Final Rule required that Business Associates get BAAs with their clients, the covered entity. This basically says that the BA promises to stay in compliance with all HIPAA regulations and keep ePHI safe.

8. Encryption is a confusing aspect of the rules but errs on the side of caution anyway.

Encryption is one area where HIPAA isn’t completely explicit. Instead, the HHS talks about doing “what is reasonable and appropriate” to protect ePHI, and then says:

In meeting standards that contain addressable implementation specifications, a covered entity will do one of the following for each addressable specification:

• Implement the addressable implementation specifications
• Implement one or more alternative security measures to accomplish the same purpose
• Not implement either an addressable implementation specification or an alternative

This basically says the healthcare player or BA must find an effective way to secure data. One of the biggest issues is data in transit. Here the only way to know the data is protected is to strongly encrypt it. So while HIPAA doesn’t specifically require encryption, encryption is the only reasonable and viable way to meet HIPAA demands that ePHI is always protected.

9. Why you want encryption anyway.

Chances are your risk assessment, even an early stage assessment, called for encryption. That makes it a need. Encryption can keep you out of trouble. Many HIPAA fines are due to lost or stolen devices containing ePHI. The good news is there are no fines for lost or stolen devices if the device is encrypted – you don’t even have to report it.

10. The risk assessment is your friend.

This is another great idea that is codified by the HIPAA Omnibus Ruling. The assessment is required for covered entities and Business Associates.

The assessment covers:

• Security policies relative to HIPAA
• An analysis of vulnerabilities, risks and system threats
• A plan for protecting and securing ePHI no matter where it is

11. You must have a security incident response plan (SIRP).

Also, a HIPAA need-to-have, SIRP details, and documents what will be done in the case of a security breach or other security events. Part of this is tracking security events, hopefully, to prove no successful exploits have taken place. In the event of an attack or breach (even just an attempt) you should document what happened, and the incident’s severity. Attacks of organizations with more than 500 employees, patients or partners must report the incident to HHS.

12. An MSP is the best defense in the case of an audit.

An audit is when a healthcare organization is vetted to make sure it is in compliance. The aim is to define the state of the organization and see what steps are needed to improve performance. These are supposed to be annual. Most healthcare organizations, even large ones, are not generally equipped to handle an audit, with all its complexity.

An MSP is best equipped for an audit because the MSP has put in place all the needed security measures. The MSP has all the event logs and reports on who accessed what and when through Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM).

13. Access safeguards and controls require a new approach to authentication and access management.

One of the biggest issues, in fact, the crux of the HIPAA matter, is making sure only those with the proper authority can access ePHI and the systems that contain it. Information access management policies and procedures are key to locking down unauthorized access to ePHI and other health data.

Download the ebook “The IT Pro’s Guide to Minimizing Healthcare Compliance Risk” to discover the functionalities essential to an IT management system that will help ensure your compliance needs are met.

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And it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a small MSP where the owner wears the sales hat or global MSP with a large international sales team: selling well depends on having the fundamentals right. Before you pick up the phone and make your first prospecting call, you need to prepare.  This means more than going to the prospects’ website and finding out the name of the IT person.

This blog assumes that you’ve already read the chapter on marketing and demand generation — that you’ve already taken stock of the main customer pains that you address; positioned the benefits and value of your services versus other competitive options; and have created a prospecting and demand generation program to bring prospective clients to your attention.  If you haven’t, you might want to workshop through that chapter before reading ahead.

The Power of a Documented Sales Process

The point of creating a documented sales process is the same point as creating any other process, such as a customer onboarding process.  By documenting a series of defined steps, you increase the chances that the process routinely results in:

• Predictable outcomes – you need to be able to predict how much new and recurring revenue you’ll have next month, next quarter and next year. This type of predictability will enable you to effectively make sound business decisions around staffing requirements, investments in new service offerings, and so forth.
• Repeatable activities – each sales opportunity may be unique, but you can’t afford to create a totally unique sales process for each opportunity.
• Scalable process – if you have a set of actions that lead to a predictable set of outcomes, you can confidently hire and train salesperson to be successful

The Sales Funnel

The flow of potential sales opportunities as they move from an initial prospect to signed client is often referred to as a sales funnel. The funnel is divided into a series of stages.  For a prospect to move from one stage to another, the sales person, or the prospect, needs to have completed a defined set of actions or met a defined threshold.  At each stage, you can set the likelihood of this deal closing having achieved those actions and thresholds.  As you go down the sales funnel, the likelihood of any deal in a particular stage becoming a win should increase.

A typical sales funnel has the following stages:

1. Prospects – at the top of the funnel are leads from your web-based or outbound demand generation activity.  They either show up in your funnel through online registrations or because your sales folks have identified them as likely prospects.
2. Qualified prospects – at this stage, your sales folk need to reach out to the prospects and start the process of qualifying how good the potential for business is at this company.  If the prospect came into the funnel through an action on their part, some qualifying questions might have been answered as part of their filling out a form.  If the sales person is doing total outbound calling or emailing, it might take more effort to get the prospect to engage in a conversation.

You get to decide the qualifying criteria.  It could be quantifiable such as number of devices or employees, having an identified budget for the service or project, or having the willingness to take a meeting.  It might be something a bit more qualitative, such as their interest in moving business applications to the cloud.  The qualifying questions can vary depending on what service or projects you are trying to sell. Obviously, over time, you might realize some qualifying data isn’t useful in sorting good from poor leads, or vice versa, and you can adjust the criteria accordingly.

Remember, qualifying a prospect out is just as useful as qualifying a prospect in. The less time your sales team spends on leads that are going nowhere fast is more time they can spend on prospects that are might actually sign on the dotted line.  In addition, remember that the qualifying stage may need to be broken down into several sub-stages. The point is to identify those criteria that move the process forward and indicate that this opportunity has a higher possibility of closing successfully than it did before.

1. Proposal/presentation. At this stage, you should know almost as much as the prospect about their business as it pertains to the service/project you are selling.  You understand the pains they are experiencing with their status quo situation; you have discussed any other competitive options they are considering (including staying with the status quo); you have a handle on the company players and their own personal/business objectives.  You have asked questions and really listened to their answers.  You are now in the position to go in, layout the roadmap for how you can help, and ask for the business
2. Handling Objections. Here is where the rubber meets the road.  The conversation has now pivoted from benefits and business gains to cold hard cash.  This is when prospects poke holes in your proposal; start to get cold feet about making any changes to their processes; and/or position for negotiation.  However, if you have properly handled the qualifying process and established trust with your prospect, you are better able to address these objections.
3. Closing. Some sales people are so focused on ‘selling’ that they may either 1) forget to ask for the business and close the deal or 2) not hear the ‘yes.’ No matter where in the sales funnel you are, always be alert to opportunities that could help you close the deal faster than you may have initially thought.
4. Customer Follow-up and Loyalty Programs.  The sales process doesn’t really end with a closed deal, of course.  You need to ensure that you have the proper processes for appropriately managing client renewals, as well as opportunities for upselling and cross selling your services and offerings.

Sales Pipeline

Sales pipeline is sometimes used interchangeably with sales funnel.  In many ways, they refer to the same process and have the same end in mind – visibility into prospects that you are currently talking to (including potential new business from existing clients) and an estimate of how likely they will lead to real bookable revenue.

A pipeline workflow (versus a funnel workflow) is more likely to:

• Make the sales person provide an estimate close date for each opportunity they are working on
• Prorate the total potential revenues in each stage by their likelihood of closing, and then total these prorated amounts for a pipeline total.
• Note that this total has to be for a period of time based on the estimated close date
• Include renewals as well as new business and upsell/cross sell business
• Track the days each prospect individually stays in each stage versus the average prospect in that stage

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that comprises the processes, strategies and technologies used to manage and analyze your interactions throughout a customer lifecycle.

Sales Enablement Tools

As your sales process evolves, you will find that there are some tools that help accelerate a prospect through your sales funnel.  Typically, sales tools include services collateral to either hand out in person or attach as pdfs to emails, client case studies, sales and prospecting phone scripts, web content, sample emails, ROI and payback calculators, and templates for proposals and statements of work.

Make sure you can explain the value of your offering very clearly. Have clear leaflets and web pages that outline each of your offerings.  If you have tiered service levels (which is recommended), make sure you have a simple price list ready to include with brochures or hand out (make sure these are printed on a separate sheet, as prices do change).

Again, your exact set of sales enablement tools will be unique to your own situation: your ideal customer, your competitive positioning, the services and projects you are offering, etc.

Track, Track, Report, Analyze, and Repeat

You can’t hope to create a predictable, repeatable process without actively managing that process.  Again, like any other aspect of your business, you need to institute ways to track the progress of your overall sales pipeline as well as each individual sales opportunity.

Sales pipeline meetings – where you and/or your sales team review the overall pipeline to make sure it’s healthy and on track to meet your new revenue projections – should be scheduled at least monthly.  Meetings to go into individual sales opportunities should be held more frequently, especially for new sales people or when your sales team is selling a new service.  In these meetings, identify what the roadblocks are for moving the deals forward and brainstorm on ways to remove these roadblocks. Remember, sometimes the best move is to walk away from a bad prospect.  Don’t let the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ (i.e., thinking that you should spend more precious time on a bad bet based on the precious time you’ve already invested in said bet) make you and your sales team spin their wheels with a prospect who is not a good fit for your business, or is a perennial ‘tire kicker.’ Another benefit of close tracking is that you can build in expectations of when a particular deal is expected to close (or should close) based on how long it’s been sitting at different stages of the funnel.

While every opportunity will have its own unique characteristics, averages will emerge over time that will be helpful for planning and evaluating sales efforts.  For example, you might find that your average deal takes 90 days from initial lead to signed SOW.  In addition, you will discover what percentage of new prospects, on average, advance to the Qualifying stage; what percentage of these prospects advance to Presentation/proposal stage; what percentage at this stage typically advance to the Objection handling stage; and, finally, what percentage on average is a successful Closed opportunity.

In addition, write a quick summary after a deal closes to document the main drivers for your success.  Consistent review of these summaries can help identify new trends that can help your sales efforts become more efficient. Equally important is to honestly assess why you lost opportunities so that you can use this insight to improve your sales process.  Perhaps you are losing to competitors for a reason you can address, potentially increasing your chances of future success.  Perhaps you are losing to ‘no decision’ and should understand if 1) you are not accurately qualifying out prospects who are not good prospects or 2) not describing the benefits of your services in a compelling enough manner.

CRM Technology

CRM software systems help your sales team become more productive and efficient.  A CRM solution should enable you to easily enter new opportunities (both for prospective and existing clients), the company details and contact information for the employees of that company, as well as track all activities pertaining to that opportunity.  You can define the stages of your sales funnel (or pipeline) and assign the probability of a successful close at each stage.

Reports on overall pipeline, by sales team member or division, by service offering, and more, can now be easily shared and reviewed – and will always reflect the latest information.

As importantly, your CRM system allows for a simple, clean handoff of all pertinent details to the rest of your organization once the deal is closed.  This handoff allows for a seamless transition from the client’s point of view as they move to the part of your organization that will deliver the goods and services.  Project management, service desk and ticketing, and billing and finance should automatically get all the information they need to do their jobs in relation to this new engagement.

Hiring, Training and Managing Sales Pros

Sales may be the most important role for the business. You need to make sure that you hire the right people with the right skills and build the right organization for them to succeed.

Planning For Your First Sales Hire

If you are only going to have one person for this position initially, then they will, of course, spend more time on sales than management. This should fit the business anyway, as the first few people involved in the business should be reasonably self-sufficient and shouldn’t need ‘managing.’

Salespeople usually get a base salary (or possible a retainer), which is what they get paid every month even with no sales. They need this to survive, as it can take between 3-6 months to build a sufficient pipeline that is producing revenue.

If this is going to be the first sales person that you take on, you will need to be very careful in your selection. A sales person can be a large financial burden, especially as they are learning your business.

As a rule of thumb, you should plan on paying the cost of a salesperson for up to 6 months without them bringing in any new sales. Hopefully, this won’t be the case, but you should plan for this scenario. If you can find a sales person who can bring a few customers with them, that can be a huge benefit.

Most sales people are motivated by commission.  By making sure they get a good share of their total compensation via the commission on each sale, you will ensure they are always hungry for the next sale. Commission rates need to be sufficient to be motivational, but not so much to impact your profitability for each new sale.

Sales people sometimes get paid based on an On Target Earnings (OTE) metrics. This means they need a sales target expressed in terms of revenues. They also need to know that the targets are both realistic and achievable.

Be prepared to negotiate the basic vs. commission split on wages. To lower your risk, you can offer a lower base salary, but give a higher percentage per sale. This allows you to bring on board a good sales person at a lower cost. Be very suspicious of a salesperson who isn’t interested in a good commission package. The main thing of importance should be the OTE, how much money they can make if they achieve their targets.

The trick is finding the right relationship between base and commission as a percentage. An average sales person may expect this to be 50/50, but a good sales person should be thinking more about 40/60. That being 40 percent of their wages will come from base salary, and 60 percent will come from commission.

On a 50/50 plan with a salesperson, you would only expect to pay perhaps a 10 percent commission. But as the amount of money the salesperson is paid from commission is increased, the percentage will need to increase as well to reward them for their increased risk. You will need to negotiate, but perhaps 15 percent for 40/60 and 20 percent for 30/70 might be a good place to start. You may need to change the sales pay in the plan to reflect this.

Building Pipeline

Building sufficient pipeline is the key to sales. A pipeline is everything that a salesperson is working on, from initial contact through to negotiation. There is a gap of time, usually, between the initial contact with a customer and when they actually sign up.  As we discussed above, you need to have the right processes in place to track and measure the pipeline.

Before you hire, you need to plan how this pipeline will be created.  Will most of the pipeline come from direct prospecting efforts by the sales person?  Or do you have a demand generation engine bringing in new leads?  You have to make sure that whatever plan you have will keep new leads coming into the top of the funnel in order to ensure the right amount of targeted business closing each month.

Hunters and Farmers

Some sales people are known as hunters.  They are the ones who are best when searching for and closing new opportunities. This means they are capable of ensuring that the highest possible percentage of prospects that can be turned into paying customers will be.

This does not mean that all or even a large percentage of your salespeople need to be hunters. Depending on your client mix, you might also want sales people who are solid ‘farmers.’ Farmers are usually account managers. That is they have a number of existing customers given to them, whom they tend to and work with to identify ways to get more business out of these accounts.

Sales Training

Don’t be discouraged if you have higher turnover for your sales group than other internal groups.  Many salespeople are only effective selling one type of product or service for a few years. Sometimes you might hire someone who had success with a different type of selling, but they can’t find their footing in your particular business.

Take a lot of time to choose an effective salesperson that will work for your business and will relate well to the type of customers your business will attract. Have them spend a lot of time explaining their previous sales targets, and how they reached them.

Have them explain how they will help find customers, and what techniques they can use to bring customers on board. Use your instincts with salespeople, and don’t pick the ‘flashy’ salesperson, but the one that understands and suits your business.

This is when having a documented, predictable sales process will optimize your ability to bring new sales hires up to speed as quickly as possible.

Sales Management

A well-functioning sales team is critical to the success of your business.  People spend their whole careers learning the intricacies of selling.  If you can’t do this yourself, be smart – admit you can’t do it, and hire someone who can. Then spend all of your time learning from them, and understanding how sales fits into your business.

If you are going to have separate salespeople from your management, then you will also need to consider who will make a successful manager for your business. That may be you, or perhaps you would rather have someone else looking after the detail so you can concentrate on the overall business.

First and foremost a manger is there to look after the people. If you have the right staff they should know what to do. The manager is there to make sure they have everything they need to be successful, and to help them to all work together effectively as a team. A manager needs to be able to motivate, understand and reward all of your staff, while also reviewing their pipeline with them on a regular basis.  Since sales is stressful – with many ups and downs – a manager should be able to motivate their team to constantly be striving to do better and better.  In addition, a manager should also have a good foundation in business, an understanding of technology (both its benefits and challenges), and a creative, problem-solving approach.

Learn More

For more in-depth advice on MSP best practices, check out our three eBooks.

A Winning Hand: 21 Cards to Play for Total MSP Success – Part I

This includes:

• Lessons on Achieving Managed Services Growth
• The Dynamic and Influential Role of the MSP
• Formulating the Right High-Level Strategy
• MSP Business Planning for Business Growth
• Vertical Strategies and Top Vertical Markets
• Creating and Building a Strong MSP Brand
• MSP Marketing Strategies and Tactics
• Choosing the Right Technologies For Your MSP

A Winning Hand: 21 Cards to Play for Total MSP Success – Part 2

This includes:

• MSPs: Making Sure the Price is Right
• Building Effective Service Bundles
• 22 Critical Metrics and KPIs for MSPs
• Finding and Keeping the Best Employees Chapter 12 Contracts, SLAs and Master Services Agreements for MSPs
• Making Statements of Work, Work For You
• Mastering the Complexities of Successful Customer Onboarding

A Winning Hand: 21 Cards to Play for Total MSP Success – Part 3

This includes:

• Building and Tuning a High-powered Sales Engine
• Creating the Most Helpful Service Desk Possible
• What You Need to Know About Offering NOC Services
• What is a vCIO? It’s More Than What You Think It Is
• Security is an MSP’s Job One
• Customer Management
• How to Have the Conversation on Cross Sell New Services

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