Channel, Networking

Automation is Key to Securing Monthly Recurring Revenue

Shawn Sailer, vice president, managed services strategy, Liongard
Author: Shawn Sailer, vice president of sales, Liongard

Break-fix work and one-off projects alone don’t scale businesses. While they definitely bring in new customers and increase revenue, these “one-and-done” invoices make it extremely difficult for an MSP to quickly grow their business. To truly scale, MSPs have to transition into long-term managed services relationships.

Managed services deliver monthly recurring revenue (MRR), giving you a consistent revenue stream from multiple clients. It enables your sales team to switch their focus from short-term revenue to long-term, high value customers that increase your profitability. MRR also lets you budget more effectively, plan for the future and lower your costs—all necessary to scale an MSP.

So, how do you make this change…especially in the middle of a pandemic, when profit margins have already dipped?

Automate, automate, automate.

With automation on your side, you can improve your operational efficiency, obtain deeper visibility across a wider number of systems, and deliver higher value through richer analysis and reporting. Ultimately, you can increase MRR. Liongard’s advanced automation gives you the power to standardize your processes, secure your customers’ systems and scale operations. We support MSPs through every customer touchpoint:

  • Sales assessment – Evaluate your prospects’ systems quickly with our inspectors and deliver value immediately by uncovering security gaps, unused licenses and expired certificates.
  • Onboarding – Leverage our automated discovery and documentation to standardize and speed up onboarding to just one hour per customer, on average.
  • Issue resolution – Gain deep visibility into your customers’ systems so your teams have the accurate, up-to-date information they need to resolve issues and meet SLAs from the get-go.
  • Monitoring – Use our automated alerts to ensure that the right team is informed of problems or issues, via an open ticket or email.

Scale for maturity, growth and MRR

Once you’ve got steady MRR coming in and Liongard’s automation on your side keeping things flowing without manual effort, growth opportunities abound:

  • Your sales team can focus on worthwhile activities that lead to long-term managed services work, instead of going for the low-hanging fruit: break-fix and project jobs.
  • Your account managers can help your customers plan and grow rather than just maintaining the status quo. Over time, this repositions you as a trusted advisor rather than a vendor, leading to longer-term, higher MRR relationships.
  • Your MSP is better positioned to move beyond being stuck in the hardware and software reselling space with dwindling margins, and onto higher levels of recurring service revenues with more profitable margins.

If you’re tired of taking on break-fix projects and other short-term work, sign up for a demo to see how Liongard can scale your business.


Author Shawn Sailer is vice president of sales at Liongard. Read more guest blogs from Liongard here.