If you’ve read my “About” page on the site you’ll know in a former life I ran an online retail store. That business grew extremely rapidly through leveraging online marketing techniques, primarily SEO & old school social media. I now do ongoing consulting for a handful of online retail stores helping them with building their businesses online.

How-to Marketing stuff for MSPs

After reading Mike Cooch’s latest blog post he does paint a pretty clear picture of how badly MSPs market and sell themselves. While there’s plenty of technology to help MSPs do business better there’s only a handful of people that MSPs can turn to for marketing and sales advice. If you don’t know the big ones, I’ve listed them below (please add any I’ve missed to the comments and I’ll update this post):

Gary Pica

Robin Robins

Kutenda

Stuart Selbst

I figure that I might as well pitch in and share the love so over the next few months I’m going to rollout some posts around online marketing and see how they’re received – I think the guys above have the strategy stuff pretty well covered so I’m going to share some tactics, more “What To Do” and “How To Do it” around online marketing. Some of it is common-sense mainstream online marketing stuff, some of it you’ll only know about if you’re heavily in the online marketing space, either way, looking at some of the MSP websites in the MSPMentor top 100 list, most MSPs have implemented neither.

Brightgauge.com – an up & coming tool to keep an eye on

I tweeted this out the other day, if you missed it then this is one to keep an eye on, particularly for newer MSPs who are still feeling their way around Kaseya’s reporting engine.

Check out www.brightgauge.com which is scheduled to launch in Jan 2011

Basically, its a dashboard and reporting tool that sits over the top of Kaseya & Connectwise…like they say in their website copy, this could be an invaluable sales tool!

Kaseya2 upgrade – time to upgrade now

I’ve had a lot of emails come through this month about Kaseya 2, is it any good? should I upgrade? what should I watch out for? – I figure that everyone has been working through their todo lists in the leadup to Thanksgiving and looking to get some of the bigger action items ticked off the list.

The quick answer is upgrade now!

My experience now is that K2 is as stable as its ever going to be and the scheduling engine and some of the improvements now make this a really worthwhile upgrade. Kaseya has done a good job ironing out the bugs and apart from general support stuff, I haven’t really seen any major issues for a few months now.

The new 6.1 version of the VSA is also due out soon and the improvements scheduled for the new .1 upgrade will leave MSPs who’ve haven’t upgraded at a disadvantage. I’m sure 6.1 is going to have some bugs so if you haven’t bitten the bullet and moved to K2 I say do it now, iron out the bugs over the holiday period when things should be fairly quiet and then look at the 6.1 upgrade towards end of Q1 next year.

If you have an K2 upgrade feedback, please share in the comments!

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If you’re running an MSP business or in any way involved with selling MSP services you should check the site out.
Some really good stuff there on the less technical facets of the MSP business model

Mike’s the CEO of both Everonit.com and Kutenda.com

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I’m really excited about the new iPad revealed last week. In fact, I’m really excited about Apple in general at the moment. A month ago I made the switch to a Macbook Pro fulltime because I’ve simply had enough of Windows. Win7 is simply too little too late. The elegancy and performance of Mac OS wins hands down every time. I love my new MBP…its just ridiculously fast compared to my old Windows notebook.

A growing trend towards Apple hardware in the SMB/SME space…

Talking with a few different clients over the past fews months, I’ve noticed a new trend occurring. CEO & Exec level staff at companies they support are heavily leaning towards iPhone and ditching their old Blackberry handsets. A lot of these guys have also ditched their Windows notebooks in favour of a Macbook (granted a lot are still running Windows on top of Parallels or VMware). Staff working for these MSPs seem to be moving towards Apple too opting to use their own personal MBPs at work too.

So here’s the thing, 2-3 years ago, many MSPs wouldn’t have even thought of supporting Apple machines or equipment. 18 months ago – many were forced into a position where they had to. Sure, the majority of machines on networks they managed were Windows boxes with a couple of Macs so not a big deal. Today, if the CEO of a SME business you support is ditching his beloved Blackberry and Windows notebook for an iPhone and Macbook Pro, you can be certain than 18 months down the track, he’ll be much more inclined to look at rolling out more Apple machines in that business.

MSPMentor could only find 1 Mac MSP firm?

So here’s the opportunity that I don’t think anyone in the MSP sector is really leveraging except maybe for these guys: MSPMentor.net found an Apple friendly MSP firm
Build some internal capability to support Mac machines and start promoting yourself as a capable Apple & Mac support provider.

At a time when the MSP market is becoming heavily commoditized, you need something to help you stand out from the rest and here is something that’s really simple. A lot of MSPs shun Macs because they don’t need much (any?) maintenance, rarely need patches and simply just work. The reality is, users need support regardless of what machine they’re running. The fact that Macs need significantly less maintenance than a Windows box is even more reason why you should be pushing into this vertical market.

Would love to hear your take on supporting Macs….post in the comments.

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If you’re looking to improve your marketing and sales efforts you should check them both out at the links below or in the Kaseya Resources section in the sidebar.

From Gary’s site:
FormulaWon gives you the tools you need to take your business to the next level. It covers leadership; packaging, pricing and delivery; sales; and performance tracking because those are the 4 key factors that make the difference between the MSPs that make it and those that don’t.
Gary Pica – TruMethods.com

From Robin Robins site:
“My Technology Marketing Toolkit Takes the Mystery and Hard Work Out of Marketing Your Business, Attracting New Clients, and Selling Profitable Managed Services Contracts”
Robin Robins – TechnologyMarketingToolkit.com

Any other good MSP business or marketing resources out there? Drop me a line in the comments and let me know!

EDIT: as commented by Brendan Cosgrove, Stuart Selbst also does some great work coaching MSPs towards profitability and success!

http://www.stuartselbst.com/

Excerpt from his site:

Stuart now owns Stuart Selbst Consulting, a consulting firm which offers an executive coaching along with other business development programs that align sales and marketing together with business processes along with the practice of goal setting to achieve individual and team success.

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