If you are to listen to most of the MSP owners, they could be better at selling their services. They go to endless local business events, buy ads in local newspapers, put their ads on local bulletin boards, participate in online forums, buy digital ads, use social media, optimize their websites, and… nothing happens. They rarely get new leads and rarely sign up new customers. At the same time, sales and marketing activities take significant time and effort and distract from the cool stuff — deploying and managing technology. At the same time, some MSPs are good at selling. They are technical yet speak the customers’ language and can adjust their pitch on the go and sign up customers.
Therefore, there is a profitable model for the MSPs struggling with customer acquisition to discover — partnering with those good at sales. The model works for any MSP; however, it becomes more profitable if the MSP can offer some unique expertise — security and incident mitigation or expertise in specialized software.
However, the “reseller” part of the business is even more interesting, as any MSP with solid relationships with its customer base can become a reseller of other MSPs’ services. As long as they can offer new services for the customers and bill them more than the MSP they resell, there is an opportunity to earn additional margin from the services others provide.
The most popular services added on top of the basic infrastructure management and helpdesk are:
- Security. Ranging from deploying and managing EDR solutions to incident mitigation and investigations.
- Cloud services. Offloading infrastructure to the cloud, managing specialized cloud services, and hosting line-of-business applications.
- Disaster Recovery. A great addition to primary backup usually includes regular failover testing.
- Compliance. Analysis of compliance requirements, implementation of regulations, and certifications.
- Training. Generic IT training, specialized security training.
Finding a trusted partner to provide the services can be a challenging task, as many MSP owners are protective of their customer base and need to make an effort to agree to provide access to their customers to other MSPs.
Yet, if the reseller model is implemented correctly, it not only allows them to generate additional profit from somebody else’s services but also increases customer satisfaction and decreases the chances of a customer moving to another MSP. The more services customers consume through their MSP, the lower the chances they will be looking for another partner, understanding the high cost and inconvenience of the transition.