As an MSP, how you package and price the service offering is critical to your success. Your packaging and pricing should define your company way and demonstrate to clients how you are different than any of your competitors.
Take a step back for a moment and ask yourself this question: What is it that you actually deliver to your clients? I’ll give you a hint; the answer is not your great tools, top-of-the-line technology, awesome employees, and quick response time.
While all of these are undoubtedly important, they are not what will set you apart as a unique service provider. Every MSP can say they delivery those things as well. Put simply, what will make you unique is the vision that you have for your clients’ IT and the process by which you deliver the best possible results.
Your Chocolate Cake
What is it that makes your company unique? At TruMethods, the concept of packaging your offering is explained in terms that everyone can understand: chocolate cake. Most MSPs sell ingredients—patch, spy, spam, virus protection, backup, help desk. World-class MSPs sell chocolate cake—your unique product that includes everything a prospect needs to run a better business.
Prospects don’t care about what kind of butter you use. They care about the finished product, your unique process that will make them more efficient, more profitable, and decrease their noise. They want your chocolate cake.
The Recipe
The ingredients to your chocolate cake should include your people, resources, best practices, technology consulting, documentation, and standardization.
The recipe for your chocolate cake is your process. The process for delivering world-class results involves developing technical standards and continually aligning your clients’ technology. This process impacts every area of the business. As a result, you will drive down noise, increase your value to the customer, and build a belief system. This impacts both sales and profitability. If you are not selling as much MRR as you would like to or if you are not able to command the right price, look no further than your lack of a truly proactive alignment process in your organization.
The companies that have the highest level of discipline around this process are the same companies that are selling the most amount of managed services at the highest prices.
Learn to make your own chocolate cake
To learn more about how to make this approach work for you, join me at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Feb. 3, for “MSP Packaging and Pricing Strategies to Increase Your Revenue.”
During this webinar you will learn:
- Pricing managed services and cloud: Learn guidelines that will take the mystery out of pricing your support offering
- Packaging your offering: Your support offering impacts sales, service delivery, and profit margins
- The three most common mistakes IT providers make
- Answers to your most burning questions: What should I include? How many offerings should I have? How should I present the offering?
Photo Credit: liz west via Flickr. Used under CC 2.0 License.
