When you’re pitching for new business as an MSP, like it or not you are an outsider and you have to overcome this. Network assessments can be a great tool to win over your prospect and demonstrate what you can do.
Engaging with a new prospect is challenging. As a solutions provider, you are an outsider coming in to try and establish a foothold. Your services may be different from how they are used to working, particularly if you have embraced the idea of delivering managed services rather than a “break-fix” style of engagement.
As part of the sales process, you need to establish trust, show the value of your service approach, and educate the business owner on the difference in your capabilities.
A logical place to start is by performing a network assessment. In general, a business owner or CEO will have very little idea of what’s on the company network, whether it’s working to its full ability, running cost-effectively or is a drain on company resources and finances.
Weak passwords, apps downloaded without authorization, un-inventoried servers attached to the network—all of these things and more can have an effect on the day-to-day running of the IT infrastructure and impact business processes.
The ability to carry out a systems health check gives you the competitive edge as it allows you to create a fully branded report that quickly identifies weak points in the network that will cause a problem in the future (or already has).
This helps you to devise a plan that can be used to improve the management of the network through managed services. It allows the company to mitigate risk when it comes to security and it lets you provide a tailored service covering everything the customer needs.
The approach is simple. Use technology tools to conduct an inventory and assessment of the environment, looking for the key pain points. No network is perfect, and using the information provided by this assessment will enable you to generate a set of recommendations on how to address the issues that were discovered. Technology, like a remote monitoring and management solution, can be used to conduct these assessments, so that they can be done in a completely automated manner. Install the software (potentially on a laptop left in the environment to scan), let it run for a period of time, and then collect the information.
Review this information with the prospect. Show how the use of technology to monitor the environment will highlight and identify issues before they become significant problems. Demonstrate how the use of technology will deliver accurate inventory and status information, allowing the asset information to be used for financial and planning purposes. Illustrate how the detailed information can be used to make upgrade plans, schedule security updates, and proactively manage the environment.
These detailed reports are often new to many SMBs, having never used technology in this way to automate the way their network runs. Additionally, these assessments turn up opportunities every single time. Every network has issues, ranging from security loopholes and backup failures, to unchecked event logs and rogue processes. Offering insight into these issues and your capabilities to resolve them will help show the business owner what is possible with a superior solutions provider.
In doing this process we use three critical strategies to engage with our prospect:
1/ Education
Customers need to be educated on the value of the services available to them by embracing cloud technologies, and to be shown the difference in the capabilities. Cloud-based email, for example, is delivered from multiple data centers with redundant connectivity and always-on failover, which is simply cost prohibitive to have within an SMB. By educating customers on what is possible with these new technologies, they will open their eyes to the differences.
2/ Trust
As service providers, it is important to show customers expertise via an organized methodology. The use of a network assessment is a strong way to build trust, where a service provider investigates the customer’s existing infrastructure and uses technical know-how to expose potential risk within the environment. A structured methodology will always expose risk that can be mitigated or eliminated via proper investment, and this exercise gives customers a chance to experience the technical expertise of the solutions provider, and thus build trust.
3/ Value
The service provider will show how the use of technology, particularly in the assessment process, is a level above what is typical for most SMBs, and thus the value of the services delivered. By showing a differentiation of service, the service provider establishes the value of their expertise, and additionally shows the value of their service offerings.
By focusing on education, trust, and value in each engagement, from a basis of sound assessment methodology, service providers differentiate themselves from internal IT and from antiquated ideas of infrastructure management. Technology has advanced considerably, and there are opportunities for all by embracing those changes. The network assessment is a key strategy for engaging with prospects and generating business.
In fact, these network assessments often generate two kinds of additional work. First, they offer project opportunities, solving the identified issues in a systematic way. Older hardware upgrades, software replacements, backup technology replacements, outdated software, and the like, are all typical follow-up work. Second, maintenance arrangements delivered as managed services to ensure the customer does not have to deal with recurring problems often result from the network assessment.
By proving how technology can be used proactively, the solutions provider shows the difference in the approach, changing the perception of the way IT services should be delivered. These both open the door for opportunities, and ensure the solutions provider engages the customer with a sense of confidence that there are no hidden issues lurking beyond. Establishing trust, value, and education early is a sound strategy, accomplished via the network assessment.
