Authored by Phil LaForge, VP Service Providers, Nimsoft
Here are five common, but critical Go-to-Market errors made by early stage MSPs leaders that absolutely crater any chance of long term success…
Foster a belief that the move from VAR to MSP is just a tweak to the edge of the business and not completely transformational. Vastly underestimate the table stakes, capital, organizational upset, customer nurturing required to execute the MSP business model. Don’t monitor anything. Just build products around a financial rehash of traditional break-fix bundles/buckets/boxes of pro services hours. That way you will never be forced to present the proactive, managed, high availability manifesto inside to your organization and outside facing the market. Assume that your traditional VAR engineers can deliver managed services excellence. Ignore the huge differences in the psychology of your current staff made up of middle of the night break-fix “heroes” and project “artists” vs. the best MSP engineers who see the beauty in simple system designs attached to repeatable processes. Price MSP services too cheaply based on the traditional pro services “cost plus” model. Don’t get paid handsomely for the contractual risk you are accepting when customers demand performance guarantees and SLAs. You can view more of Phil's MSP growth strategies at this URL: http://www.nimsoft.com/mspzone/phils-strategy-sheets.php
