Selling the solution – how to sell your Hosted Desktop Solution vs On-Premises or a classic MSP offering.
A Hosted Desktop solution can feel hard to sell vs an On-Premises/MSP offering.
- It’s more expensive
- It doesn’t reuse existing hardware (much)
- It’s new, so there is education involved
Luckily, it’s that last point that is your saviour here. If you are competing with a classic MSP (or two) their offerings will look similar, and the story they tell will be similar.
- We take care of your IT headaches
- We let you focus on your business, not IT
- We let your team do more with less
These are all good, but generic, and this is where you get to change the game. Sell on the outcome of your offerings that are specifically different.
Work from home/anywhere
This one is a no brainer during COVID, but it still bears repeating.
When talking with your prospect:
By moving to us all of your users will have the ability to use all of their IT systems from home, either on a work supplied device or a personal device, included.
You can have the confidence that your team can keep your business running, even if they need to isolate or take care of family members.
All of your business applications will be available, not just email and shared files.
Take the stress and worry out, and give yourself the flexibility to manage your team as you see fit, in the office, at home, or anywhere they have an internet connection.
Additional Talking Points
This is our standard offering, and we have x years and x users already doing this.
It’s important to call it out as your standard. For most other companies it’s an upsell, and unique. If the potential customer has a random RDS server already (that they probably hate), well that’s the difference between what we do as our bread and butter vs what our competitors offer.
Limited CAPEX with a nice smooth OPEX
Money talks.
You will find the greatest chance for an MSP to lose a customer is when hardware refresh time comes around. While the relationship may have been good, this is the big spend, and many businesses will go out for quotes. You are one of those – whether you know it or not.
Prospect Conversation:
With our offerings, you won’t have to go through a backend server purchase again. This saves you the time and hassle of going through this process every 3 years or so.
It’s not just the hardware cost, it’s the professional services cost, and you and your team coming up to speed with all the new technology terms your MSP is throwing around. If you had a smooth operating cost, what could you be doing with the CAPEX instead? New plant for more efficient production? A new website talking about your new offerings? A new more fuel–efficient vehicle?
Imagine what you could have done with the time if you weren’t having to focus on this? Could you have won a new customer? Automated something that costs your people time? Created a new marketing campaign?
Our model means that these lumpy projects that take up CAPEX and brain space disappear. As part of the per user per month service, this is all taken care of.
Additional talking points:
This is not a lease and is permanent – it’s a service
We scale with the number of employees, if you shrink, so does your costs, unlike large CAPEX and project services. If you grow, just add an additional user at $x per month. Other than a laptop/desktop you have no other costs.
Secure by default
Ransomware is becoming a bigger and bigger deal. And it’s getting harder and harder to deal with. It is very likely there is a local case you can refer to.
The story is not that you are immune, it’s that lots of little things make your service less risky than a classic On-Premises MSP.
Tell the story about how Ransomware typically gets in, one user opening a website or an attachment to an email, and it spreads over the network. Your people are all good people, but they are not security trained by default. (Is this a service you can offer as well)?
Prospect Conversation
We do a lot to mitigate the chances of this being a problem, and if it does happen, to make sure we can recover your business as quickly as possible.
1: Compare and contrast your backup strategy vs the currently implemented one or proposed.
2: Compare and contrast the multiple filtering/antivirus/antimalware you have vs what’s implemented now or proposed.
3: Compare and contrast the minimum steps to get back to a level of productivity from you vs the competition.
Because we host many customers we are able to invest in greater redundancy and mitigation than you can by yourself, and any MSP running you on-premises is likely to.
Self Service
And for the cherry on top.
Logging tickets is the bane of every customer‘s life. IT does not matter if you respond in 30 seconds or 3 days, that fact it needed to happen is frustrating.
If you are running fully hosted DaaS you should have a self–service portal in place. Shameless plug – that’s what we do (www.getatria.com/meet-atria).
Prospect conversation
Did you know that up to 30% of help desk tickets are for password resets? That another 25 – 30% are for a user to get access to an application they need? Both of these tickets stop people from being productive.
Your team can now take care of these themselves, saving that call. Through our portal, users can reset their own passwords and request access to apps for you or your delegates to approve. It all happens instantly, making sure your team is productive.
Our helpdesk is for when things go wrong, not for the day to day. This keeps you and your users productive and makes sure you have the freedom to add people and give them what they need when you need to.
Additional talking points:
Lots of MSP’s might give your users a password self–reset tool. We also let you and your nominated team reset user‘s passwords. There are always people these tools don’t work for so we give you options.
Another MSP might see if your team wants admin access to your servers or to office 365. That’s a risk. The more people that have admin access, the more chance there is of something going wrong. With our portal you can make the changes you need, without giving people admin access.
This is an opportunity to ask about how many of a competing MSP’s staff have admin access to the AD and Office 365 tenant. If you are using a portal like Atria, most of your frontline won’t need admin access, so you will be on the front foot here.
In Summary
Fully hosted is not right for every customer and can feel like a difficult sell at times. But when it is right, with the right talking points it’s an easy win for you and your customers. It’s important to call out why and why it’s important to the customer.
Play to your strengths, and play them in a way the customer understands, not why it’s important to you.
Check out our other articles on cost models, and customer profiles.
1. Multi-tenancy costs and structure
2. Managing customers in a Multi-tenant Environment
3. Demystifying the Art of Active Directory Multitenancy
Want to talk about how Atria can help you become the best MSP you can be?
