Download this set of marketing assets to deliver the best value to customers and optimize their business's operating costs with cloud services. All templates are white-label, so you can brand them with your logo and add any company information you need.
If you’re an MSP who has decided to take a cloud-first approach to managed services, you know the value of cloud-based offerings.
But that doesn’t mean your prospective clients will recognize the value of the cloud-based managed services that you may choose to offer. For that reason, it’s critical to develop a sales strategy that clearly communicates why customers should choose the cloud-first managed services that you offer over traditional alternatives.
So you’ve decided to go cloud-first for your MSP business, meaning you’re leveraging the cloud wherever possible to power your managed service offerings.
Now, it’s time to build managed services that allow you to take full advantage of a cloud-based approach. Here are tips on how to do that.
The IT industry has shifted toward a cloud-centric model over the past decade. But many MSPs have not. To a degree, that makes sense. Many of the managed services that MSPs deliver aren’t obvious candidates for disruption by cloud computing. An MSP who sets up and manages workstations or local services may not seem to have much to gain from cloud computing, for example.
Cloud is becoming so cheap, reliable, and safe that more and more companies are moving workloads there. Anything from database management to IoT, from data storage and backup to email exchange servers, can nowadays be run in the cloud in a scalable and cost-efficient manner. In fact, you can build a company solely upon the infrastructure of one of the cloud giants: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. And, in fact, many companies do this.
The nationwide lockdown has many people going up the wall during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, you can reduce the boredom by keeping yourself occupied. How about getting a certification? It will not only be a better use of time, but it will also make you more marketable. Getting a certification can keep you focused on your career goals and validate your newly acquired skills.
Retaining employees is just as important -- and challenging -- as finding them in the first place. Although it may sound like a cliché, employees truly are the most valuable asset of any business. Not only do they have the skills and knowledge required to keep operations running, but they are also quite costly to replace. On average, every time an employee leaves, it will cost the business six to nine months' worth of that employee's salary to find a replacement.
When you’re hiring a new employee, it can be easy to treat the onboarding process as an afterthought. You spend so much time conducting the job search, running interviews, and selecting a candidate that you pay little heed to what has to happen after an applicant receives and accepts a job offer: onboarding.
The “hiring funnel” refers to the stages that a hire goes through between first becoming aware of your job opportunity and ultimately being hired. The concept is modeled on that of the sales funnel. Understanding the hiring funnel helps you determine whether you’ve created the right job ad and how applicants will behave during the hiring process.
If, like many MSP business owners and managers, you come from a technical background, you may not have much formal experience when it comes to hiring employees. This is especially true for smaller MSPs who have worked as one-person shops or with very small teams previously, and are now looking to scale up.
When it comes to those conducting the interviews, information on how to behave, which questions to ask and so on is more difficult to find. Business owners in the MSP space come from technical backgrounds, and have little formal experience in areas such as HR. As a result, they may struggle to conduct effective interviews. To help MSPs avoid these outcomes, this white paper offers guidance on how to conduct effective job interviews in the managed services industry.
Nowadays every managed IT provider has access to the best-in-class software and hardware solutions. Technology and knowledge have become cheaper and more accessible than ever, so, to stand out from the crowd, you need to compete in your excellence at providing services. This means that the value of your services to your customers is based on how professional your approach is, not only to the provision of the technical component of your MSP services but also to communication.
