How to Talk Your Clients Out of Going Direct

Microsoft and Dropbox have followed a similar strategy when it comes to engaging small- and medium-sized businesses: Both companies offer basic, inexpensive cloud services directly to SMBs. This reality has put MSPs in an awkward position because, even while they want to maintain excellent relationships with these tech giants, they lose business when clients go direct with Microsoft, Dropbox and other large vendors.

Here are four ways MSPs can maintain adoption of managed services and discourage their clients from depending on a direct relationship with vendors like Microsoft and Dropbox:

1. Emphasize the quality of your support

With so many technology vendors, it is difficult for any one company to stand out purely based on the features it offers. That’s why the No. 1 thing clients care about most isn’t the feature set of any given offering, but the ongoing support that they will receive.

Many large online services such as Dropbox tout their ease of use, but they cannot compete with the support of a managed service provider. Emphasize to your clients your ability to be on-call 24/7 and to even show up at their doorstep if they need in-person support. Until the big players in the market can provide this level of support, they can’t hold a candle to you.

2. Bundle multiple managed services

As an MSP, one of your primary advantages lies in the “one-stop-shop” nature of your business. Your clients don’t want to deal with multiple vendors for their phone system, their backup, their network, their firewall and their file sync needs–they want to work with one company that manages their IT needs.

Take advantage of your clients’ desire to work with a single vendor for all their managed service needs. If you aren’t doing so already, leverage the breadth of your services by bundling them together. For example, combine your file sync solution with your backup and BDR offerings as a complete package, so you can provide your clients the assurance that all of their data is accessible and protected under one roof.

3. Create a custom deployment for your clients

As an MSP, you know your clients better than anyone else. You understand their technical needs, their security and compliance requirements, and their technology concerns, and you are able to foresee business needs and expectations. Show your clients how well you know them by custom-deploying a suite of services that specifically meet their needs. For example, if one of your clients manages many medical records, you can educate the client on HIPAA-directed patient privacy rights and develop a bundle of HIPAA-compliant solutions.

Especially when services are branded with your clients’ names and logos, custom deployments can move the conversation beyond price and features. Custom deployments build inherent value that is hard for direct vendors to compete with.

4. Provide your customers with the right information

Sometimes, less really is more. Your clients have enough information to deal with already; the last thing they want to do is waste hours scouring the web to understand how data protection services work and which service is best for them. By providing your clients with tailored, personalized information that’s relevant to their needs, you can gain an advantage over larger companies that don’t have the time or resources to truly get to know your clients.

Give your clients the right blog posts, emails, brochures and more so they have the information they need to understand your service offerings. You know your clients best–so show it.

eFolder partners enjoy high margins and happy clients because they know the best ways to dissuade their clients from going directly with vendors. eFolder provides our partners with a variety of white label data protection services and easy-to-use brandable marketing materials, so it is easy for partners to emphasize their advantages to their clients. Download the Anchor Client Awareness Playbook to learn how easy we make it for partners to market their service offerings to their clients, and visit us at www.efolder.net to learn more.

Neeraj Periwal is Marketing Coordinator, eFolder. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s Cloud-based File Syncing and Sharing Infocenter.