3 Ways to Win New Managed Service Contracts Faster
If your managed services business feels like a challenge in today’s market, it’s not just in your head. Selling managed services is more challenging now than it was last year. What’s behind it? Several things, starting with the fact that, according to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is flat and not expected to improve through 2020.
To stay competitive, MSPs need to find ways to stand out, pursue new opportunities faster, and clearly demonstrate their value.
New MSPs open every year, and with IT spending not expected to rise over the next several years, you’ll have to fight harder to not only win new business, but also retain your existing clients.
What can you do? Start with three ways you can win new business in this challenging environment.
1. Put Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes
Your first step is to understand where your prospective customers are coming from. Making sense of their motivation can help you tailor your messaging to meet their needs.
Chances are good that your prospective clients either received unsatisfactory service from one of your competitors, or they’ve just realized that they need external help to manage their technology. Either way, you need to establish yourself as a trustworthy and skilled service provider before showing them a price tag. Fortunately, that shouldn’t be difficult.
Win them over by listening to their IT problems, taking an interest in their business, and clearly demonstrating how you can provide the answers to their biggest concerns.
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2. Let an IT Assessment Do the Work for You
Manually assessing IT networks is time consuming; it eats into a MSP's profit margin. To combat this, MSPs have started using automation to streamline their IT assessment process.
Unfortunately, most RMMs aren't built for this kind of work. Instead, they spit out a bunch of raw data you have to aggregate and dress up with charts and graphs—which takes your team away from billable tasks.
To gain the full benefit an IT assessment can deliver, top MSPs are adopting fully automated IT assessment tools to do the heavy lifting for them. A best-in-class, automated IT assessment tool can deliver a client-ready network assessment report in less than 1 hour.
3. Put a Dollar Value to Your Assessment
During the client onboarding process, you'll want to consider an IT assessment. In most cases, it should happen before you deliver your first sales proposal. An IT assessment is a valuable service that lets your clients know where the health of their network stands.
Top MSPs charge up to $5,000 for an IT assessment, while others give it away as a free service to get their foot in the door. Both approaches work, but if you give your assessment away for free, be sure to attribute a dollar value to the service to make it clear how much value you’re delivering.
To discover even more ways to capture new business in a depressed market, download the 7 Secrets to Winning New Clients eBook from RapidFire Tools. In it, you'll learn how to show your worth, protect your data, and craft a winning sales proposal to successfully sign new clients.
This post was contributed by Tara Newman of RapidFire Tools.