Ask any company, large or small, about their biggest challenges and odds are they’ll mention unpredictable revenue as a key problem. Maybe that’s why so many businesses in so many sectors prefer a contract-based model that ensures a steady, consistent revenue stream month after month. Software vendors that sell subscription-based solutions are a familiar example in the IT space, but everything from phone contracts to vehicle leases follow this approach.
If you’re a reseller, you’ve probably seen a growing number of competitors make the switch to the MSP business model. It certainly makes sense—replacing the reseller’s typically scattered, irregular assortment of customer sales transactions with the MSP’s consistent, recurring revenue stream translates into greater profitability and long-term financial stability for your business.
What’s more, delivering recurring services to your clients helps you build long-term relationships with them. The regular contact you’ll maintain will ensure you gain more insight into their IT and business challenges, and that knowledge lets you build trust and familiarity. As a result, clients will be more receptive to your suggestions for additional services that could benefit their businesses—while simultaneously strengthening your bottom line.
Adopting the MSP business model also enables you to significantly increase your efficiency. While a reseller must often wrangle a mishmash of disparate solutions chosen by its clients, an MSP can standardize on a single set of solutions across its entire client base, making purchase, deployment and management of those solutions far simpler. This standardized approach helps you raise client uptime while reducing your support costs and makes it far easier to scale out your services when your client roster expands.
In theory, with so many benefits to be had, transitioning from reseller to MSP seems like the proverbial no-brainer…obviously worth doing, right?
In practice, however, switching to MSP operations presents a variety of issues that you must be prepared to address if your changeover is to be seamless and non-disruptive. First and foremost among these issues is the need to make a convincing case for the benefits of managed services to both your existing customers and any new sales prospects.
How Becoming an MSP Will Benefit Your Clients
The most obvious benefit to clients is eliminating their need to manage their own IT services. By relieving customers from the time-consuming and laborious tasks of buying, installing and maintaining their IT solutions, MSPs let them focus their time and talents on the core business operations that generate revenue. The net result is MSPs help their clients achieve significantly more system uptime, better end-user productivity and greater business profitability.
That said, when you transition to MSP operations you may encounter resistance from existing customers who balk at the idea of a fixed monthly fee for managed services, believing that handling their own IT support tasks is a more economical approach. In reality, a recent Gartner study presented during the annual Gartner Symposium / ITxpo 2018 conference showed that 46 percent of surveyed organizations considered IT services one of the top three most-effective approaches they employ to reduce costs.
Smoothing the Transition to MSP Operations
Not surprisingly, making the move from reseller to MSP does require some changes in how you conduct business. For example, it can be challenging to switch from managing multiple solutions to standardizing on single solutions. Because your customers typically own their software licenses, they may resist paying your MSP fees while their pre-paid licenses are still in effect; this resistance can delay moving some of your clients to MSP services.
A more immediate concern is the substantial investment a new MSP must make in buying licenses for its standardized solutions; these expenses—along with the costs of training your technicians to deploy, configure and manage those new solutions—can reduce your profits until revenues from client fees grow.
These are some of the reasons why choosing MSP-friendly solution providers is key; they understand the challenges that MSPs must address when balancing client needs with their own business objectives. And that’s why we created the VIPRE MSP Program, which helps you deliver industry-leading VIPRE endpoint and email protection while boosting your efficiency and profitability:
- Better Protection, Better Profitability: Use our secure, accurate threat detection, threat report summaries and single pane of glass multi-tenancy management to reduce client infections while saving administration time and lowering your operational costs.
- Demonstrated Value: Show your clients the value of your services by delivering automated threat management report summaries on a monthly, weekly or daily basis.
- Support for Business Growth: Take advantage of our free award-winning customer service and free malware remediation, along with marketing & sales enablement via our robust partner portal.
- RMM Integration: Seamlessly manage VIPRE Endpoint Cloud and Server with plug-ins with ConnectWise Automate®
Bottom Line: Becoming an MSP is Clearly Worth It
There’s a reason why so many resellers are becoming MSPs—as shown above, the advantages of MSP operation are wide-ranging, paying dividends to both you and your clients. What’s more, partnering with MSP-friendly solution providers like VIPRE makes those benefits even more compelling. See just what the VIPRE MSP Partner Program is all about.
Guest blog courtesy of VIPRE Security. Read more VIPRE Security blogs here.
