Filed under: Ingram Micro, marketing | Tags: marketing, Seismic, Value Proposition
When you think of what it is your company does, who do you think could explain it well? Here’s a newsflash: Probably not your employees.
I’ve been saying this for years – and sometimes sound like a broken record – but our challenges with marketing and selling our value in the IT channel really start with being able to explain a simple value proposition to our customers.
Do this simple experiment. Setup a video camera on a tripod in a conference room at your office. Without warning, invite each of your employees into the room, one at a time, and ask them to give you the 15 second elevator pitch about what it is your company does. Once you have captured each employee’s pitch, compare them.
What you will find will trouble you.
Now, it’s not that your employees are intentionally misrepresenting your company nor are they poor elevator pitchmen. It is simply the wide variation of responses you receive that will define the problem your customers are having, or your prospects will have, when trying to understand what you do for them.
If your employees, who work inside your company every day, have such a disparate view of your company, what are they telling your customers? Imagine the disparate messages your customers are receiving?
It falls to management to define your company’s value proposition and ensure each of your employees is able to understand and communicate it properly. The simple exercise of defining your value proposition and solidifying the standard company elevator pitch will help both your customers, as well as your employees, understand what value you bring to them. Ultimately, it may help you win new customers and shorten your sales cycles.
Nevertheless, you don’t have to tackle this alone. Ingram Micro has helped hundreds of solution providers tackle this very issue – with outstanding success.
Filed under: Ingram Micro, IT Distribution, IT Services, Managed Services, marketing, Uncategorized
The managed services market is growing rapidly and has strong, long-term potential for many who are pursuing it. It is changing the way IT services are consumed and delivered. It is helping many of us diversify and strengthen our value propositions and balance sheets. We are all bullish about the future and the opportunity in front of us.
There is one significant hurdle, however, that nobody seems to want to acknowledge – the proverbial elephant in the room. For those of us who target the reseller, solution provider, or managed service provider market as our customer base, this issue is top of mind. Selling managed services is hard, but not because of the technology involved.
Not enough end users are consuming their IT services in a “managed service” form factor yet. There is a very real, and very problematic growth bottleneck at the point of sale with end users of these services. We, as an industry, are simply not getting the penetration into the end user base that is required to grow and scale this market quickly. And for many of us, that growth is not happening fast enough.
In fact, the technology sale is not the problem. The bigger issue here is the selling itself – how do we take our offerings to the next end user? And the next? And the next? If you ask several solution providers how many customers they have and then ask them how many managed services customer they have, you will find that the managed services penetration into their overall customer base is low. Why?
We, as an industry and a channel are still not investing enough in the sales and marketing capabilities of our respective organizations. Everyone is to blame – vendors, distributors, solution providers. Nobody invests enough in developing their sales and marketing capabilities.
When I hear a VAR ask a vendor how much margin is available for him to sell a managed service, I know we are not evolving. The margin in any managed service is how much you can get, not a number determined by a vendor or application provider. Yet we continue to ask those around us, or blame each other, for margins we can or cannot get out of any particular offering. The reason that this concept is so hard for us to grasp is that we simply don’t understand how to sell value and differentiate ourselves from one another. And until we recognize that and take steps to resolve it, we will always struggle to provide the value proposition that customers demand from us.
If you find yourself fortunate enough to have some dollars to re-invest in your business, where are you going to focus those dollars?
Filed under: Ingram Micro, IT Distribution, IT Services, Managed Services, marketing | Tags: marketing, sales, Seismic, Value Proposition
There is widespread agreement that managed services is an IT service delivery model that is here to stay. As with any other relatively new market, the SMB managed service space is highly fragmented with hundreds of existing application and service vendors and just as many new entrants to the industry competing for solution providers’ mind-and- market share.
A decade ago during the boom and bust of the dot com era, a similar landscape presented itself to IT solution providers. Many businesses made emotional or hurried decisions when it came to vendor and partner selection. Some businesses were swept away by fancy marketing, messaging, and branding campaigns by new entrants and fly-by-night dot-com companies. The results of many of those decisions are well documented.
The same caution and logic must be applied in todays highly fragmented, early stage managed services market. Many MSP’s, application providers, and service providers may not be what they appear or what their websites, blogs, and press releases claim. Because most of these early stage companies are privately held, it is hard to get detailed information about them to help you make buying decisions and partnership selections. Future success, stability, longevity, and financial solvency for these small players and new entrants may be challenging or downright bleak – and their management teams know it.
Here are four things those management teams may not want you to know about their operations:
4. I Run My Company with 3 People Out of a Van Down by The River
Small is no indictment of quality or financial stability. However, it pays to be diligent when making MSP provider or partnership selections. Does the potential provider or partner have a sustainable business model? Can they demonstrate financial solvency? Are they capitalized appropriately to grow as you grow? Can they support your needs long-term? Look under the hood and ask questions about how their business is built. If they refuse to answer your questions or provide vague answers, steer clear. They aren’t being specific because they know you won’t like the answers.
3. The Only Metric I Care About is My Revenue Multiple
There is certainly no crime in building a business to one day reap the rewards when you sell or merge that business. However, when the revenue multiple is more important than product quality, good support, or solid operating methodologies, that can cause problems for clients and partners. Again, ask some tough questions. How is the company financed? Who holds ownership positions – employees and owners or VC’s and private equity people? The answers will give you some indication of the time horizon that business is operating under. Beware of short-term thinkers and the churn-and-burn operators. Your best interests are secondary to theirs.
2. I’m A Solution Provider Just Like You (aka I Sell to End Users Too)
As a distributor, I get asked about selling to end-users every day by solution providers who are concerned that Ingram Micro will take their end-users direct. Yet those same solution providers have no qualms about doing business with MSP organizations that openly sell to end-customers. Those MSP organizations may even use the fact that they have end-user sales experience as a selling point in their messaging to attract solution providers as customers. If your partners and suppliers sell to end-users, they pose a potential competitive problem for you. Proceed with caution.
1. I Offer You Little Long-Term Value as a Partner
Do your homework. Look for substance beyond the bootcamp, blog, or white paper. Separate the spin from the reality. What does the potential partner offer you in terms of competitive advantage, long-term defendable value, or scale? How do they make your company better? How do they make you look bigger? How do they augment your capabilities? What can they help you achieve that you cannot achieve on your own or with anyone else? What is unique, lasting, or significant about their value proposition to you?
These are uncharted waters. Don’t navigate them alone. Call us to talk shop and help you make the difficult decisions critical to your success. www.ingrammicro.com/seismic
Filed under: Ingram Micro, IT Distribution, IT Services, Managed Services, marketing | Tags: marketing, Seismic, Value Proposition
Also published on MSPmentor.net on February 18, 2009 as monthly guest column contribution.
Generally speaking, IT managed service providers are technologists, both in training and previous professional pursuits. The managed services market is also highly fragmented, with a long list of small technology and software companies all battling for the attention and business of end users and IT service providers. The value focus in all of the selling and marketing efforts has resulted in a disturbing trend carried over from the hardware selling models: A focus on tools, technology, and features/functions.
Avoid this trap at all costs.
Here’s a newsflash: Only technology providers get excited about technology. The rest of the world just wants their IT problems handled so they can conduct whatever business they are in.
It is critical for successful managed service providers to stay above this fray and avoid the “speeds and feeds” trap that is so prevalent in IT marketing and solution selling. Tools are exactly that – pieces and parts of the overall finished service. Tools and technologies are not the services you are selling, nor are they the value you provide to your clients.
Your unique expertise and ability to deliver complex solutions to your clients, when added to the tools and technologies, is the service you deliver, and it is that expertise and unique value proposition you need to focus on when marketing and selling your capabilities.
Without question, the tools and applications you choose need to work and fit your business. Solid tools and strong technology is the foundation for any competent and quality service you deliver. However, too many MSP’s are focusing on and marketing the parts of their overall solution. For example, the reason an end client should choose you to provide IT systems management and support has nothing to do with the tools you use to deliver that capability. The assumption by the end user is that you can provide such a service – what do they care which PSA you have selected to run your business on? Yet many MSP’s still weave vendor literature and brands into their managed services marketing and selling materials and ignore the larger question: Why you over anybody else?
Don’t believe me? Who made the transmission in your car? Are you sure? Do you care? You want your car engine to perform, but you don’t really care who made the various parts, so long as the auto manufacturer stands behind the product, right? You are buying BMW, or Toyota, or Honda, or Nissan. You are buying the value proposition and brand promise that those various auto makers deliver. You are not evaluating the combined parts and components that go into those cars which are delivered or made by third parties.
End client prospects for IT services are evaluating their decisions in the same manner. They are looking to your brand, your value proposition, when making their decision. If your value proposition is on target, and you are able to differentiate your capabilities around delivering a high quality service at a fair price, the tools you use are your choice and are irrelevant to your end clients. So long as you ensure those tools work for you, they will work for your end clients.
Of course, Seismic offers the widest selection of tools and capabilities in the market. But if it’s your value proposition or brand promise you want to tune up, Ingram Micro can help provide market-leading expertise with that also.
Filed under: Ingram Micro, IT Distribution, IT Services, Managed Services, marketing, Uncategorized | Tags: Economic, marketing, Seismic
Also published and originally appeared on MSPMentor.net in Feb 2009 as participating sponsor guest article.
I saw an old proverb once that said of economic opportunity or commerce, “Be scared when others are greedy and be greedy when others are scared.” Fitting advice for any MSP these days.
The current economic crisis is a monster – no doubt about that. If you are under the age of 80, this is shaping up to be the worst market downturn of your life. Cautious and prudent fiscal, managerial, and operational policy in our personal and business dealings is critical. But what many companies and managers, in the midst of a crisis like this, may not recognize is this: Downturns are significant opportunities that don’t come along very often.
I am not suggesting that the current economic situation is anything other than an unmitigated disaster – it is. Blame whoever or whatever you want for the mess we are in – government, mortgage brokers, Wall Street, hedge fund managers – everyone had a hand in it. We didn’t ask the hard questions when times were good. Home values were up, stock funds were delivering strong returns, money was cheap, and debt skyrocketed. We turned a blind eye to the fundamental economics that govern markets. Only after those very fundamentals reminded us just how far we had drifted did we stop and look around and ask each other, “how did this happen?”
Now we’re in a mess and the question everyone needs to ask themselves is: What am I going to do about it? How am I going to grow my company? Win new clients? Retain current clients? Make money? Grow revenue and profits? Invest in innovation?
HP’s was born during the Great Depression. Amazon, ridiculed and left for dead in the wreckage of the dot com bust, rose from the carnage to become the innovative, industry behemoth it is today. IBM, during the downturn of ’79-80, bet big on a thing called the PC. Microsoft, a small software company that successfully weathered the downturn in ’90-91 emerged to become a household name around the world.
What did these companies have in common through tough economic times? Innovation. Vision. Risk-taking. Market awareness. Confidence. Belief in self.
It is critical to the current and future success of our collective businesses and companies to continue to innovate during challenging times. No IT channel companies are better positioned for innovation than MSP’s. MSP’s have been on the bleeding edge for years. Now is the time to capitalize on those innovations and attack your competitors who have not made such investments relentlessly.
Be prudent and manage carefully, but do not abandon the innovation and aggressiveness that is required, not only to persevere through the downturn, but to emerge from it stronger, faster, and further ahead of your competition. Don’t succumb to the temptation to hunker down and wait it out – let your competitors make that fatal mistake. Focus on your value proposition to your clients – reduced costs, high quality, predictable budgeting. The downturn plays to your value as an MSP – companies need what you have to offer.
In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell illustrates that successful people and companies, through years of preparation and dedication, capitalize on that preparation when they find themselves in the right place at the right time. We, as MSP’s, have spent the past few years investing, building, and learning. Suddenly we are confronted by a significant challenge, but one that we are well prepared for with a killer value proposition to leverage.
We are in the right place at the right time.
Filed under: Ingram Micro, Managed Services, People | Tags: marketing, sales, Seismic
In the last month I’ve met with three solution providers from different regions of the country (Southern California, Arizona, and Minnesota) who are all very bullish about building their managed services business. All three are very optimistic about their prospects of significantly growing the number of end-customers on managed services contracts. Coincidently all three solution providers quoted me the same metric that they were shooting for: to triple the number of end-users on managed services. Two partners wanted to accomplish this goal in twelve months while the other partner was shooting for eighteen months. These partners current have between 18 and 42 clients on managed services agreements.
In order to accomplish this goal the three partners had plans to invest in aggressive demand generation programs. While solution providers have traditionally been reluctant to spend dollars on marketing and lead-generation programs, a new breed of confident, aggressive, and marketing-savvy managed service providers is emerging. These MSPs are focused on customer acquisition and are investing dollars via traditional marketing techniques as well as via on-line, viral marketing avenues.
Theses partner believe in the MSP model, have properly ‘merchandized’ their managed services offering, have trained a portion of their sales team to effectively position managed service value proposition to customers, and have developed the efficient operations to profitably scale their managed services practice. They are confident that investment in marketing and lead-gen will yield a healthy return and allow them to quickly build their business.
The managed services land grab and gold rush is on. MSPs are starting to aggressively market their managed services in their local areas; others are acquiring solution providers in order to flip their customers bases to managed services, while others are opening remote offices to grow their customer bases. Now is the time for solution providers to invest in marketing and demand generation programs to grow the business.
MSPMentor calls it like they see it. For an effective path into the managed services space, its about the partners, not the tools. We couldn’t write any better ourselves.
http://www.mspmentor.net/2008/03/17/what-is-a-master-managed-service-provider/#more-412
Filed under: Ingram Micro, IT Distribution, IT Services, Managed Services
As in any solution strategy, hardware or service, solution providers need to choose their partners wisely. Being from Ingram Micro, my position on this issue goes without saying. As services models and service providers evolve, it is critical that solution providers take into account who their partners are and what the strategies – or agendas – of those partners – really are.
Direct or indirect? Do you partners claim to support both? If they do support both, and you run into selling or account conflicts, don’t pretend to be shocked and horrified. You’ve been around long enough to know better.
Is your partners’ success completely dependent on your success? If so, they are highly motivated to make you successful and satisfied. If not, well, who can blame them for looking out for themselves?
And lastly, do your partners work with you or against you? Meaning, do they support the channel model AND other, competitive models as well? Do they provide you a really killer price while driving down your value in the market by doing so? Will they sell against you given the chance?
The moral of the story – make sure you know what you’re getting into. Understand who your partners are and what they are trying to do – what their business model is. If their success is dependent on your success, those are generally the horses to hook your wagons to.
It amazes me how much press many business models get when they are actually bad for solution providers an bad for the channel. The old saying still holds water – you get what you pay for. Or even more to the point: Buyer Beware.
One of the great benefits of a well-executed managed service strategy is the improvement of customer satisfaction levels with your suite of capabilities. Solution providers around the country are finding that a properly executed managed services offering can improve customer satisfaction levels right along side profits and revenues.
Every business owner or manager knows the inherent problems in poor customer service. Especially when that customer experience is the first one a potential partner has with your company. Often times you don’t get a second chance to make a good impression.
So what do you do when such an issue comes to your attention? The best defense is not defensive at all. Own up to your mistakes or shortcomings, pledge to try harder and resolve the concerns, and ask that the offended party give you another chance. Sometimes they will. Often they won’t. In either case its an expensive and humbling lesson.
Excuses and deflections will never fly. Honesty and perserverance might.
http://www.spinningsilkmultimedia.com/ingram-micro-unfriendly-to-small-business/
Justin
Filed under: Ingram Micro, IT Distribution, IT Services, Managed Services
Seismic has set the standard for distributor managed services platforms and is drawing recognition as one of the best known offerings in the space. Other distributors are following our lead – and its about time.
Justin Crotty
http://www.mspmentor.net/2008/02/14/distributors-continue-managed-services-moves/
"Seismic" Events in IT Services 