Service Leadership CEO on why MSPs should be pushing 'full-meal', not a la carte, services
MSPs should be convincing 90 per cent of their customers to adopt identical technology and their 'full meal' rather than a la carte services, Paul Dippell tells CRN's newly launched sister title Channel Partner Insight in this exclusive interview
Best-in-class MSPs will have 90 per cent of their customers buying their "full-meal", fully managed services offering, according Paul Dippell, the CEO of Service Leadership.
Service Leadership has been benchmarking MSPs and solution providers for ten years and scrutinises 80 different metrics of financial and operational performance.
Talking exclusively to our newly launched sister title Channel Partner Insight, Dippell claimed that the hallmarks of an operationally mature MSP are the same the world all over, and are also sometimes counter-intuitive.
As an example, he said the highest-performing MSPs Service Leadership tracks have 90 per cent of their customers running the same technology stack. The same proportion of custmers will also take their "full-meal" managed services offering.
"The low performers will either have a million a la carte offerings - ‘I can monitor this, I can manage this, I can patch that' - and the customer selects which of those options they want. Only 20 per cent of the low performers' customers buy their fully managed offerings, where the MSP does everything. If you look at the mid-performing MSPs, about 35 per cent of their customers buy their fully managed offering, and the way they do that is by going from a la cart to a precious metals plan, and 35 per cent of customers are on Gold. Eliminating a la carte forces each sales transaction to at least buy the Bronze package and broaches the subject of the Gold package more frequently, and they can get 35 per cent of customers on the fullest, richest package, which is the biggest win for the customer and the MSP."
Dippell continued: "If you look at the top quartile guys, they only offer the Gold package, and they don't call it Gold, they call it standard, and they get around 95 per cent of their customers on that. That's 95 per cent of the sales cycle resulting in the biggest possible sales with the most possible value to the customer. The customer is happier, revenue growth is better, and more and more customers look identical, which is cheaper to run, so it's multiple benefits."
See Channel Partner Insight for the full article.
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