Managed Services Sales: 25 Killer Qualifying Questions

By Nimsoft Guest Blog 2

managed services automation questions

My starter list includes:

1.     What have you outsourced before?

2.     Tell me about your experience – good and bad – with MSPs.

3.     If you could change one thing in your current MSP relationship, what would it be?

4.     Give me the ‘top five” apps you run your business on.

5.     What is the killer “make money or save money” app inside your company?

6.     Who is your most important IT vendor?

7.     If you could get out of supporting one application, what would it be?

8.     What’s in your service catalog?

9.     How do you find out when systems go down?

10.   Has the CEO ever called you about an outage before you knew about it?

11.   Tell me about your last DR test.

12.   How do you monitor your stuff?

13.   Can I see some of your performance dashboards?

14.   How often do you apply security patches and updates?

15.   Tell me about the company leadership team? Who supports IT?  Who gripes about IT?

16.   When do budget?  How do you budget?  Who approves the budget?

17.   Did virtualization “pay off” for you?

18.   Are you getting pressure to do something “in the cloud”?

19.   Do the lines of business go around IT by purchasing cloud apps?

20.   In your opinion, what is the single most important project IT is working on?

21.   In the CEO’s opinion, what is the single most important project IT is working on?

22.   Does your help desk run 24X7X365?

23.   How many times have you been called after hours in the last 30 days?

24.   Are you hiring or firing right now?

25.   How can we help?

CliffsNotes Version:  If I have time for one and only one line of questioning, I will always qualify the opportunity with #1 ‘What have you outsourced before?’ The best prospects have outsourcing experience.  They have seen the good, bad and ugly of MSPs.  They know what they want and don’t want.  I have yakked about it before, let the analysts evangelize trends.  I want to sell managed services to active buyers.

Phil LaForge is VP and GM, service providers at Nimsoft. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all of Nimsoft’s guest blogs here.