The MSP's Guide to Success in 2018

With a new year comes resolutions, new beginnings, and business growth. Well, ideally.

But remember: anything is possible when you stick to the plan - and tweak it accordingly the more you learn. For competitive service providers, your primary goals for this year might include:

1. Attract and gain new business

2. Retain and satisfy existing customers

You’re surely familiar with a few tricks of the trade when it comes to growth and retention - but since tech is evolving at lightning speed, we’ve compiled the latest and greatest tactics to increase profitability, year after year.

Proving Your Worth to Prospects

Let’s start with the basics. How do prospects become your customers? You win them over. How? It’s crucial that you are able to differentiate your business from what everyone else is doing. Once you nail down the unique benefits your company can offer and how to best communicate with your ideal audience, you’re well on your way to developing a solid strategy for attracting and converting new business.

Instead of spending time thinking about what you’re bringing to the table, let data speak for you. Implementing a data-driven marketing strategy means that real data will influence your plan of action. Ask yourself things like:

• How many clients do I need to acquire to remain profitable?
• How many leads do I need to generate in order to convert that number of clients?

Your solidified plan should be born from those goals you establish. And, make sure to constantly monitor and adjust your marketing in accordance with both your successes and failures.

What’s more, data can be used to prove your business worth to prospects who are right on the edge. How many issues did you help your clients resolve over the past year or quarter? How much downtime did you cut down on? These numbers can help you quantify the benefits of partnering with your services business.

When it’s time for sales to step up to the plate, keep this client-centric approach. This means you should focus on helping your clients solve their specific problems. A great method to bring your story to life is to leverage customer case studies. These help you bridge the gap between the value you’re selling and the challenges you can solve for the client. 

Getting More Out of Your Customer Relationships

If you’re in good shape on the prospecting end of the spectrum, that doesn’t give you a pass on the customer relationship side. Minimizing churn is vital to your business future, so aim to make clients happier in 2018. Where do you start? Think about whether you’re currently aware of your clients’ level of satisfaction with your IT services. Do your services help alleviate their major concerns or IT pain points? Knowing this information will help you start making client satisfaction a driver of your business.

You can foster your client relationship from the get-go during onboarding by communicating regularly and meaningfully. Offering monthly or quarterly business reviews is a great tactic. Discussing what’s going well and how to overcome road-blockers shows that you’re invested in their success. Once your clients know exactly what they can expect from you, you’ll be set for those relationships to prosper.

How else can you maximize interactions with clients? Leverage reporting! With the appropriate intel on each customer, you can offer more personable services. And, with the right integrated system, you’ll be able to track tickets and better collaborate with your clients to keep track of their business goals and ultimately help them grow.

Taking Your Business Up a Notch

So, after getting more juice out of prospecting and existing customer relationships, does the service provider’s job end there? Remember that there are always opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell your clients - especially when contracts are coming to an end and renewal is the topic of conversation. After sharing key metrics with customers and establishing that their needs are top-of-mind, the road to increasing recurring revenue is merely steps away.