We’ve heard from many dealers and VARs that one of the biggest mistakes they made when first offering managed services was lack of focus on an ideal customer profile. The natural instinct is to sell your services to as many customers as possible, but doing so with managed services may lead to unprofitable accounts and uneven quality across your customer base.
For example, a small but needy client might consume a disproportionate amount of your resources. And the more diverse your customer base in terms of size, industry, and IT infrastructure, the less likely you will have the experience, skill, and resources to provide consistent service.
Most managed service providers eventually create a customer profile that represents who they can best serve and make a reasonable profit doing so. If you are considering managed services, these are the questions you need to ask about your customers and capabilities.
What types of businesses do I understand the best? How a company makes money dictates what it needs from an IT infrastructure. An online retailer, for example, will have very different needs from a professional services firm or a manufacturer. Let’s say professional services firms make up most of your existing customer base and you have a good idea of how their IT supports their business processes. Then you take on an online retailer as a managed services client. You’ve never had to deal with inventory control or compliance with credit card security standards. A mistake in either area could be disastrous for your client.
What’s the ideal size range of my target customer? You want to understand how your business scales in both directions. At which point is a customer too small to be profitable for you, or so big it stretches your resources too thin. It’s not just about sheer size. The larger a company, the more complex its IT infrastructure is likely to be.
How mobile are my customers? You can’t assume that a client will have only one computer for each employee, A 50-person company where most employees are mobile will have more complex needs than another 50-person company where its employees are at a desk all day. It’s a given that you will need to support mobile connectivity for at least some clients.
What platforms am I best able to support? Your managed services prospects might be using any number of software and hardware platforms to run their businesses. Some you will be able to support directly or migrate to a platform you support. Other platforms might be a challenge because your team has no experience with them. And you will run into a few home-grown or oddball systems that no one understands. You might not walk away from a client because of its internal platform, but you should understand the cost and complexity associated with them when presenting a price.
By answering these questions, you will be able to create a profile of your ideal managed services prospect that you can then communicate to your sales team. You might still accept customers outside that profile, but you will be making that decision with a better idea of the risks involved.
