Value Conversation Part 5: Creating Stack and Value Alignment
BY IT GLUE | May 21, 2019
Demonstrating value for your clients requires you to deliver value. If the previous articles in our Value Conversation series make it seem any other way, trust me, that’s not the case. If you convince clients that you offer genuine value, you must deliver genuine value, or risk losing those clients just as quickly as you acquired them. As with anything worth doing, it’s more work than you think.
Standardized stack
When you work with the same stack across all clients, you’ll be more efficient. Training your employees on one firewall is, unsurprisingly, a lot easier than training them on five firewalls. Moving your clients to a standardized stack creates value for your clients, too. First, if you’ve chosen the tech well, you’ll be offering them better stuff than what they had before. Second, if you can service their accounts more quickly and effectively because you’re servicing all your clients with the same stack, that is also value you can convey. When you are able to set better service level standards than your competitors, and hit them routinely, the value conversation gets a lot easier.
Stack and value alignment
Ultimately, anything that makes your life easier gives you an opportunity to add value. For example, if you are an enthusiastic adopter of integrations, and automate as much documentation as you possibly can, you’ll not only improve your service standards, but you’ll be able to take that time you save and apply it elsewhere. Like acquiring more knowledge and entering new verticals. Or better yet, finding new services to sell to your existing clients. If you’re already serving health care clients, for example, you might want to add a HIPAA compliance service. The more time you free up from routine tasks, the easier it will be to add new business lines without adding additional resources. That’s more value for your clients, as it allows them to work with fewer vendors, and more value for you, as you increase your revenue per client.
The other aspect to aligning stack and value is using a technology stack that offers the greatest degree of integration and cohesiveness. The major channel vendors are all moving in this direction, so it pays to look around at the sum total of competitive offerings from a company as there are sometimes some powerful synergies to be found. If you’re using IT Glue, you’ll find we have rich integrations with not just BMS but also with ConnectWise Manage and with Autotask. But dig deep, watch the demos, and see for yourself which combination of tools delivers the highest degree of automation, integration, and value.
Value conversation
An overriding theme in this series is that you have a lot of different things to talk to your small business customers about. Price is not one of them. You’ll have to talk price eventually, of course, but always make sure that you’ve had a chance to showcase the value you bring, because quite frankly your customers might not have any idea what it is that you do. If all they are thinking about is money, that’s understandable, but it’s also incorrect. Each MSP is different, so there’s different value that each will deliver. Even if 90% of your business is completely undifferentiated from the MSP down the road, you still have 10% to talk about, and you still can shift the conversation away from price to the actual value that you are bringing.
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