MSP Value Chain: The Customer Lifecycle

So far in our series on the MSP value chain, we’ve looked at how IT Glue adds value to specific operations – a ticket and a project. But there’s more to your business than just efficiently and effectively executing transactions. There’s also the whole matter of acquiring customers, onboarding them, and in some cases offboarding them. These may not be everyday processes, but they nevertheless can chew up a lot of your resources, thus having a significant impact on your bottom line. But how on earth does documentation software add value to these activities? Let’s take a look.

Add value to the sales process

You can’t run a business without the ability to acquire customers. But it’s a competitive landscape out there, and you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. One way that’s worked for some of our longtime partners is that they will actually sell prospects on the fact that they use IT Glue. The sales manager will sit down with the executives of their target prospects, and show them how the MSP will document the client environment.

Next, they explain to the prospect how this level of documentation will help them meet their service specs. The prospect probably isn’t technical – they’re hiring an MSP so they don’t have to worry about IT, after all. But talk to them about downtime, ticket response time, and showcase how any member of your team can solve almost any problem, because of how well you’ll document their environments. All executives understand the concept of minimizing downtime. If you’re promising better SLAs than your competitors and can prove that you hit them, that gives you the edge. 

Onboarding

Congratulations, you’ve made the sale. Now you have to document an entire environment. If you’ve ever spent a hundred man-hours manually logging an entire new company into Sharepoint, Confluence or some other system, the value IT Glue brings to onboarding should be a no-brainer. We’re integrated with leading PSA and RMM platforms, plus Datto, Warranty Master, and more. Plus, with our open API, you can build out other integrations to automate even more documentation. Some of our clients have seen time reductions of 80-90% on onboarding because of how much of the process can be automated with IT Glue.

Then there are things like diagrams, charts, and photographs of environments. All of that is pretty easy to get into IT Glue. 

Plus, we’ve got your back. If you need help with things like structuring flexible assets to meet the unique needs of your clients, we’ve got the IT Glue Library, the Knowledge Base, and our Partner Success team all at your disposal to help you set up the new environment exactly as you need it set up.

Offboarding

We like say that churn is evil, and that’s true, but churn will happen. Sometimes you want to let a high-maintenance, low-margin customer go but other times the situation just doesn’t work out. Now at that point, you’re not getting paid anymore, so how much work do you really want to do for an ex-client? If you can print off their documentation in a runbook, or a .csv export, and be done with it, that’s a major resource savings.

Total value chain

If it seems a little crazy that IT Glue adds value to every part of your business, relax, it’s not crazy. We designed IT Glue that way because we come from an MSP background and know what you need to be successful. One word that keeps coming up with our partners is “transformation.” The organization and professionalism that you can bring to your company with IT Glue is so much greater than without it. IT Glue really does transform your entire business.

But don’t take our word for it – check out our case studies to see how our partners have transformed their MSPs with IT Glue.

Read Case Studies