While attending a recent industry partner summit I had the opportunity to speak with a small IT service provider who was making the rounds from one RMM vendor’s booth to the next. He had all of the other products marketing collateral under one arm and was in the process of peppering a co-worker of mine on PacketTrap MSP.
While attending a recent industry partner summit I had the opportunity to speak with a small IT service provider who was making the rounds from one RMM vendor’s booth to the next. He had all of the other products marketing collateral under one arm and was in the process of peppering a co-worker of mine on PacketTrap MSP.
He came prepared and knew what he was looking for. So, after AK (Our director of sales) gave him a thorough product demo and answered all of his product based questions it was now my turn to ask our ‘little RMM sleuth’ a few questions of my own. I started out with the usual ‘how many clients do you support?’ and ‘what’s your go to market plan, new client acquisition or conversion?’ and that’s where I saw the gaps in his research.
He quickly started telling me about all the different ways he was going to build his business. He was going to start by selling a ‘quick-monitoring only’ service offering to all of his clients (14) and then circle back in a few months and flip’em into a ‘fixed fee’ program. He explained that he was going to ‘resell’ the features and functionality of whatever RMM tool he ended up buying and that’s why he was here.
I then thought about taking a radically different approach and started off by explaining to him that I’ve spent the last 5 or so years in the post sales environment helping folks just like him build, price and sell their managed services. And that all of us ‘RMM vendors’ sell folks like him ‘tools’ that then get bundled into services and sold to small businesses. “We sell you the hammer… you then have to sell construction services.”
I asked him when was the last time one of his SMB clients asked about remote monitoring & management OR about custom scripting or SNMP traps. These are reasons why IT support companies like him buy PacketTrap MSP, not small business owners. They buy managed services based on saving money and greater up-time based on a reduction in downtime.
He then asked me how do other MSP’s do it and what’s involved in going from break-fix to fixed fee? I told him he needed a plan. A solid plan that factors in the different components required when changing a business model other than a vendor wanting to push more product on him.
We’re now in our third week of putting his plan together and I’m pretty confident that our little RMM sleuth is on the right track and one day soon will be selling fixed fee services to his clients.
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