Developing a cohesive marketing and sales strategy is important to attract new customers and up-sell existing ones. With almost a decade of experience working with MSPs across North America, we have identified four primary offerings that need to be in the portfolio of a managed service provider.

Whether walking into an initial client meeting or a meeting to close the deal, it is critical to listen to and understand your client’s pain points. Offering all of the solutions below as part of your portfolio will help you alleviate these pain points.

1. Managed IT -- Managed IT entails 24x7 monitoring, support, and problem resolution for businesses. Many businesses today do not have the staff or expertise to manage their own IT. This provides an opportunity for MSPs to become a trusted guide for IT services and to develop a long-term relationship.
2. Backup -- Backup and data recovery (BDR) is a key component of an overall business continuity plan. Whether the business has premise-based servers, cloud-based applications, or most likely a hybrid of the two, it is critical to have a comprehensive plan in place in the event of a failure.
3. Security -- Security is a paramount concern in today’s business environment. Everyday in the news you hear about hacking, network breaches, ransomware and other security challenges. Businesses need MSPs to provide guidance and a clear strategy so they can avoid these issues. More than just setting up a secure network and creating strong passwords, a security strategy involves educating businesses on how to avoid breaches through employee training.
4. VoIP -- VoIP market share is growing as more businesses make the transition from legacy PBXs to cloud-based voice technologies. Today’s VoIP is feature rich and is a key part of the network infrastructure of a business. As other IT solutions move to the cloud, VoIP is a natural fit for this migration.

Why these four solutions? Because they are all part of a total IT portfolio required by today’s businesses. As a mature managed service provider, you want to bring total solutions to your customers. Selling a complete portfolio provides “stickiness” with your customer. Stickiness locks the customer with you and entices them to stay for the long haul. Of course, you need to provide outstanding service and support to maintain the relationship. Taking care of your customers and selling a complete portfolio also raises the barrier of entry for the competition. By offering only two or three of the items above, you leave your customer relationship exposed to the competition. A few examples of competition:

• Telcos are looking for new revenue sources beyond business voice and are becoming MSPs.
• Copier companies are looking for new opportunities beyond their traditional portfolio.

Bottom line: if you are not selling all four of the solutions listed above, your competitor is likely to sell the ones you don’t. After they get in the door, they might replace you with their competitive offerings. Don’t get left behind. Lock up your customers with a full offering -- Managed IT, Backup, Security, and VoIP!

Cytracom delivers premier VoIP services to businesses in North America. Our channel-only approach provides our partners with the most seamless and simple VoIP solution to sell, deploy and support. We were recently chosen as one of the Best Channel Vendors for 2017.