I had a meeting scheduled with one of our MSP based out of San Jose, CA. As a part of our company’s process, we do visit our MSPs regularly and understand where our product stands within the whole Managed Services portfolio. I was expecting a normal meeting with that MSP requesting a set of features we have to build within our product. But the discussion turned otherwise. The MSP started to share his story on how his company signed up more businesses for backup and recovery just by showing them what customers need. That might sound like a simple statement, but wait for what follows after.
Winding back the clock to 2009, our MSP started to offer Managed Backup Services to their 25 small business customers to begin with. Like every other service provider, they started advertising their services through email, direct mail, QPR meetings etc… But with little success. It was the time when all those Bozy’s and ‘Burp-O-Night’s of the market started emerging promising unlimited backups to businesses for pennies. It was also the time when many MSPs / VARs started to compete against those consumer grade backup services and ended up losing their profit margins on BDR and some even went out of business. What the businesses don’t know is these kind of consumer grade solutions / Tape Backups / Legacy backup solutions etc… Are of no use when they actually need it. By the time these businesses download their business critical data from cloud, three generations will pass and god forbid, data should not end up corrupted as it will be of no use waiting for that long :)
This scenario was in advantage of our MSP. Instead of promoting his StoreGrid based backup service to these businesses, he wanted to show Businesses on how weak their current backup strategy is. He was actually selling a ‘free disaster recovery audit’ for businesses, where he will work with an IT Manager and declare a mock disaster. Now the IT Manager is requested to recover their data from cloud / tapes etc… The results were amazing. None of the businesses were in a position to ‘satisfactorily’ recover their critical data. The IT Manager was running from pillar to post and tried contacting the support team of these cloud companies – you know how that story ends…
As a result of this exercise this MSP won 20 businesses out of 25 in less than a month for their Managed Backup Service. Time in again, most industry veterans reiterate the fact that it is always the MSP who is in the best position to offer Managed IT solutions for Small Businesses. Many fancy cloud solutions may come and go, but nothing can replace the local touch offered by these MSPs / sleepless nights monitoring your IT / missed baseball games with the family. That is one reason why MSP channel still thrives though facing threats from various cloud solutions again and again. On the other hand, MSPs should see cloud as an opportunity / industry trend and take the best of it and blend that offering to their existing business customers. Here again, you have to show the business on what you feel is the best practice so that they can start to adopt it. Simple and straight forward marketing works but not effective.
I am working with that MSP to share the ‘Free disaster recovery audit template’ that was used in his marketing campaign. Anyone interested, please email me at len AT vembu DOT com.
