Using CloudRadial to Deliver audIT reports saves you time and changes the way clients experience the information.
A few months ago, I lived in what I thought was a nice, sound house that I was completely satisfied with. I did a big renovation about a year ago and thought I had patched up and remediated everything that was important. I foolishly thought I’d be able to take a few years break from home improvement. Then I made the mistake of having a friend who is a contractor over for a party in that brief lull in the pandemic before delta took off, and he reminded me about something important I learned in my MSP days. Without much, effort he had turned me from a completely satisfied homeowner, so proud of his recent renovation into someone who loses sleep over rust on a thing.
I trust my friend, but if my friend had said, “trust me, your house is a mess,” I would have had trouble hearing him over my indignation. I mean, I love this house. I’ve put a lot into it. I might have even taken umbrage. I didn’t have to trust him; however, he was able to rattle a thing here, jab his finger into a thing there, and was able to tell me everything I needed to know to be compelled to act (i.e., pay him a bunch of money) without even telling me his opinion on the matter or having to convince me of anything.
This same art of selling without selling is truly relevant to MSPs and vital to selling its services and continuing to expand their responsibilities within their clients’ business. Most MSPs gain most of their business through referrals. One of your clients talks you up to their friend and sells them your services before your first sales call with them. But what about those other leads that you gain through marketing or direct sales who have never heard of you? For the prospect, it’s like the difference between being set up on a date by a mutual friend or responding to somebody’s dating profile. There’s a big difference in trust that you won’t end up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing at the end of the night.
So how do you reassure the prospects who’ve never heard of you and how do you keep them reassured they should continue working with you? Evidence. You don’t need to worry about trust if you have easy- to-understand evidence. But what do you do when the evidence is clear as day to you but is gibberish to the client? Transparency is important but getting the client to care and act on the data is what we’re most interested in. This is where audIT brings a ton of value to the table. They help MSPs easily translate what they know into something the client can get their head around.
audIT is not only an excellent sales presentation tool but can be extremely useful over the life of the client as a business review presentation. It replaces trust with easy-to-understand evidence that you’re continuing to improve their business and surfaces concerns that inform ongoing sales efforts. This is what CloudRadial is all about! With CloudRadial’s Report Archive, you can make the audIT report available to your clients at any time on an ongoing basis. With a report archiving strategy, you can eliminate the trust approach completely – because, after all, you don’t want your client relationship tied to the trust of one or two people. The more visibility you can offer, the more your MSP is tied to the company (rather than one or two people).
In short, audIT finds the trouble spots in a business. CloudRadial lets you continually build a plan to address these issues. When the two are combined, the result is that everyone on your client's management team will understand what you do because the evidence is available to them in their portal anytime they need it. Not just the most recent report but all the reports so the client can easily see for themselves not only what you’ve done for them, but what’s still left to do. They don’t have to trust you; they just need to act on the obvious evidence before them.
