The Biggest Reasons Your Clients Don't Buy More

For MSPs (Managed Service Providers), new revenues come from two sources – new clients and existing clients. Most industry leaders emphasize the former and spend little time on the latter – except to talk about the quarterly business review (or QBR). On paper, this meeting is to discuss the opportunities of both parties. However, it usually turns into a sales lecture which drains both parties of all energy. 

Luckily, it’s not all about the QBR. 

In fact, the QBR is not what’s holding back most new client sales. Instead, it’s a mix of several different factors that build up and result in a complex roadblock that prevents client purchasing.  

You can break these roadblocks down into seven distinct factors: 

1. Clients don’t know what you have. 
2. Clients don’t want what you sell. 
3. You are too busy to sell to them. 
4. You have no account manager working on clients full-time. 
5. Simple things take too long to quote. 
6. You don’t define the “other” things that you sell. 
7. Your clients don’t appreciate sales calls. 

It’s a huge undertaking to tackle these roadblocks individually. It’s better to understand a lasting strategy that can fix these issues at their core. 

You can summarize these issues in two big buckets: 

1. Productization 
2. Automation 

Productization 

Productization is the process of defining what you do in terms that a client would want to buy. In its most simple form, it’s creating a named product. Behind that name are benefits and features that resonate with a client.  

Here is an example of how to take a simple “managed services” offering and make it more appealing: 

Acme Managed Services 

Benefits: 

• Stay focused on your business. 
• Lower IT spending than in-house staff. 
• Reduced business risk from cyber threats. 
• Business insights on IT usage. 

Features: 

• 24x7 support. 
• Professional and skilled team. 
• Online technology training. 
• Feature-rich portal. 

A productized approach seldom mentions the underlying technologies used and avoids any terms that a prospect wouldn’t understand.  

Products are aimed at executives that will use different wording than those aimed at in-house IT departments. Because, in short, if clients don’t understand it, they won’t want it. 

By envisioning a productized approach to your service offerings, you remove the roadblock of having to study IT to understand your offering. As a bonus, it makes it so that you can discuss this with any person in the organization – from the nontechnical CEO to the technical CTO.  

A client portal like CloudRadial helps to turn your productization strategy into something that you can present 24/7 in a way that is easily updatable and that presents well. 

Automation 

Automation focused on client-selling is no different than automation focused on service delivery.  

The goals of automation are: 

1. To leverage one-time setup into a recurring and desired outcome. 
2. To reduce future time expenditures through one-time time investments. 
3. To implement processes to leverage the skills and best practices of your team. 

For client sales, this means: 

1. To showcase your products in a service catalog so clients can shop for new services. 
2. To present information in ways that a client can understand. 
3. To not sell; instead, to guide. Point out information and let clients come to their own conclusions. 

This is where something like a client portal can be essential. A client portal allows you to build out as much client-facing automation as possible because it lets you put your offerings in front of them passively. 

At worst, they have an avenue where they can see everything you can do. 

At best, you have a platform to offer the services AND you have an area where you can run a QBR with actual client data to facilitate discussions and tangible examples.  

How CloudRadial Can Help 

CloudRadial provides the client-facing platform to address both productization and automation. It brings together everything you need to present what you do, can do and will do for clients through features like: 

1. The service catalog (to put your offerings in the portal) 
2. Report folders with individual emails (to forward reports into) 
3. Account planner (to showcase a roadmap of your core services and more)  
4. A sales matrix (to help you understand which clients get your messaging) 
5. Plus, many, many more features 

Get started with a trial of CloudRadial and see how we can help make selling to clients easier by removing the roadblocks that are holding you back.