Want to Master the SMB Market? Listen, Learn and Help Them Win

Michael Conn

By Michael L. Conn, Senior Cloud Computing Strategist, Nerdio

In my role at Nerdio – a company that itself began as a managed service provider – I’ve helped many MSPs succeed in one of today’s hottest market segments: small and midsize businesses. SMBs are hungrier than ever for technologies previously available only to the enterprise crowd, and they have a huge range of digital services to choose from. Ideally, you’ll be the one to deliver.

How do you cut through the noise and close more of those SMB sales?

The answer is simple: Speak directly to their real needs. Small but growing businesses face a unique set of challenges, from less working capital to scarce IT expertise. They are in dire need of a smarter, more strategic approach to resource utilization, not to mention a way to lower costs, complexity and risk. This is where their challenges become your big opportunity — if you can show how to outsource their IT needs using a variety of as-a-service options while reducing upfront costs, maximizing the value of existing technology investments and delivering better performance. When there is an internal IT team, they are of more use to the business helping to innovate and improve the customer experience than keeping the lights on. In other words, take their IT headaches off their plates so that they can get back to improving their businesses.

A comprehensive approach will help you stand out from the crowd, accelerate new business acquisition and drive bigger successes. I’ve walked MSPs through the following tactics to help them shorten their sales cycles from the typical 18 months to just six months or even less. If this sounds like something you’re interested in doing yourselves, here are a few helpful talking points to get you started in selling better IT to SMB customers.

SMBs traditionally have taken a piecemeal approach to IT, largely because they didn’t have any other option. Most are used to juggling a myriad of components from multiple different vendors, and it’s a painful and tedious (and sometimes impossible) process to make the entire IT environment work cohesively.

With a full IT-as-a-service bundle, you can simplify while enhancing operational efficiency and resource utilization in a profound way. Tell your customers to say goodbye to managing a bunch of separate components and to stop worrying about hiring IT pros, or misusing the ones they have. No admin wants to spend all day patching servers and resetting passwords. Outsourcing both the maintenance and optimization of IT is a win. But remember, as service provider, you need to have…

… a bundle of components that you can deliver neatly packaged and tightly integrated. The last thing you want is to replicate inefficiency.

In a dog-eat-dog world, your SMB customers need to ensure that their technology investments are enhancing the business, first and foremost. It’s essential for their technology to keep pace, drive a real competitive edge over rivals and align tightly with their business objectives. The “as a service” model where a customer can pay per-user, per-month scales well and makes costs more predictable and transparent, so customers feel more in control of their IT expenses and worry less about overpaying for something they’re not using. The scalability and flexibility of the cloud also means that you can rapidly tailor and adapt services to their needs without investing much time or staff resources.

In addition, there are smart tools that go a step further in enhancing bang-for-buck, whether they prefer to use the private cloud or the public cloud. For example, there are automatic scaling services that dynamically adjust resources based on actual public cloud-consumption trends. This means that if your customer’s employees need more compute power on Monday mornings between 9 and 10 a.m. but half as much on the weekends, the IT environment can intelligently adjust so that your customer pays only for what is actually being used. Try that with internal IT.

The user experience is of chief importance to your customers, so it’s worth noting that buying IT from a managed service provider delivers uniformity, simplicity and standardization. This, in turn, translates to higher productivity and usually better security.

It’s worth noting that the benefits of IT as a service go beyond the customer. As a service provider, automation and standardization allow you to shorten the new-client provisioning cycle, use lower-cost resources to service your clients and reduce help-desk resolution times. With higher customer satisfaction, you can not only capture all of your client’s business (instead of just part), but increase your stickiness and gain long-term customers.

Competition in our industry is on the rise. It’s really important that you be intimately in tune with the needs of your customers. Speak directly to their pain points. It’s about them, not you.

Michael L. Conn is senior cloud computing strategist with Nerdio. With more than 25 years of business experience working with tech companies, Michael specializes in helping Nerdio partners understand and develop new growth tactics and business drivers through existing and emerging technologies.