Podcast featuring Jennifer Bleam
In cybersecurity, you hear a lot about people, process, and technology. And so I’m playing with this model that MSPs can sink their teeth into: We have to market to create leads. Then we need to close those leads. So, we’ve got marketing; we’ve got sales;and we have service delivery. (And service delivery is dealing with the pesky clients: the ones that send in silly tickets and we have to smile and deal with them. But those clients are our bread and butter. They keep the lights on. So, we close the tickets and – if we’ve done service delivery correctly – we can upsell and cross-sell to those existing clients. (And of course, we have the administrative side of things to make this all work.)
Well, if you look at those four swim lanes that you have in your business, I encourage you to look at each from a people, a process, and a technology standpoint. Fix the most broken process in your business. Service delivery probably isn’t very broken because that’s the part that comes naturally to almost everyone. And you probably enjoy most of your clients most of the time. So that part is almost fun. Hopefully you’ve documented the service delivery processes. And the technology side is fun. And maybe you have your people in reasonably good shape. Maybe they’re not all A-players, but they’re decent. The processes are probably pretty good, technology may be bloated, but it’s doing its job. The admin is probably limping along well enough to keep the lights on.
But sales and marketing (which doesn’t feel fun and isn’t your natural skillset) get neglected. And so when you look at sales and marketing, your process is probably largely broken. If those are pieces of your business that you’re neglecting, then perhaps that is causing stagnant growth or slower growth than you’d prefer. If you put a little bit of attention there or bring in experts, that will improve. Find those experts. They’re out there.