Our Checklist for Creating a Co-managed IT Go-to-Market Plan

In the previous blog posts in this series we’ve talked about a number of different ways that co-managed IT services can help MSPs develop their businesses, including:

• The Strategic Benefits of Co-managed
• Why the Current Economic Conditions are Ideal for Co-Managed IT
• How Co-managed Can Elevate Your Cybersecurity Offerings
• How Co-managed Can Help Bridge the IT Talent Gap
• How Co-managed Can Be Your Secret Sauce for Client Retention

The next step is to talk about how you take your new Co-Managed services offering to market.

Creating a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy

A GTM strategy is a step-by-step plan for launching a new product or service. It can also be used to expand into a new market with an existing product or service. Your GTM strategy is typically tailored for a specific launch and focused on a certain time-based activity or campaign.

Here a checklist of seven steps you need to consider when crafting your co-managed GTM strategy:

1. Define Your Ideal Client Profile

• Who is your target audience?
• What does your ideal client profile look like for this market?
• What vertical markets, geographical locations, roles of personnel, new logos, or existing customers do you want to target?
• What type of IT organizational structure will your services best support (top-heavy departments, bottom-heavy departments, thin or 1-person departments)?
• Where will you source company names to help build our prospect lists for marketing and tele-sales purposes?

2. Identify the Problem

• What problem(s) will your co-managed services help solve for internal IT departments?
• What are the purchasing triggers and pain points of your target audience? This will help you create your key messaging and value prop statements for your co-managed IT services.
• Consider the issues plaguing internal IT departments today that you will want to consider addressing in your marketing and sales material. Some of the main ones that you can highlight are:
  • IT Companies are experiencing staffing challenges and struggling to find qualified staff.
  • Existing staff are busy and forced to do more with less, which is leading to burn out, exhaustion and turnover due to overworked staff.
  • Networks are becoming increasingly more and more complex and cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated making it difficult to keep up.
  • The ever-changing technological and threat landscapes are causing internal IT to lag behind.
  • Internal IT live on an island, with limited exposure compared to MSP staff.

3. Research the Competition

Questions to ask yourself:

• What other MSPs in your market offer co-managed services?
• What type of co-managed service programs are they promoting?
• How do their offerings compare to your offerings?
• What vertical markets, role types, geographic regions are your competitors targeting?
• How is your competition doing at promoting their co-managed services?
• What kind of marketing and promotion activities are being advertised? 

4. Create Key Messaging & Define Value Prop

For each problem identified above outline in Step 2, complete the following:

Pain Point:_________________________________________________________­­­­­­__

Benefit/Value Provided: _____________________________________________

Key Message: ______________________________________________________

5. Determine your Marketing Channels

Ask yourself:

1. What marketing channels will I use to help make my co-managed services stand out from my competition and get the attention of my audience?
2. How will I convert attention to lead generation or sales?
3. Once you get your prospect’s attention, how are you going to move them to the next step in the process?
4. Consider leveraging MarketBuilder to create a “Co-managed Services Event-in-a-Box”

6. Set your GTM Goals and Objectives

Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) To Measure Campaign Success

• What are your goals for this campaign?
• What KPIs will you be tracking to gauge its success?

Example: If conducting an in-person seminar or webinar event, possible KPIs to track:

• Event Registration
• Event Attendance
• Marketing Effectiveness to Populate Event:
  • Email
  • Proactive Call Campaign
  • Social Media
  • Direct Mail Invitation
• Sales Qualified Leads to be Generated from Event
• Pipeline Generated
• # of New Customers Acquired
• Customer Acquisition Costs
• Event ROI
• Event Feedback Surveys Received
• Event Budget vs. Actual Spend

7. Create your Sales Plan

• Who will be involved in the sales process?
• What role will they have?
• What will their primary activities be?

And that’s it! You now have a basis for creating your GTM plan for your new co-managed services model. don’t hesitate to log into N‑able MarketBuilder and to gain access to all the ready-made content and campaign materials that have been developed to support your marketing and sales efforts.

Unlock the secrets to Co-managed success with our digital playbook! Discover the ultimate blueprint for creating, selling, and pricing co-managed services with our Co-Managed Digital Playbook. Here’s what one of our partners had to say about the playbook:

“Bravo on the Co-managed Digital Playbook. It is awesome. It’s an actual blueprint of how to create your Co-managed offering, with real useable insights including how to structure your pricing. This is something you never really see with vendor guides. Thanks for all of the content and hard work put into this.” Robby Garon, President Teknertia

To get hold of your copy, N‑able partners should contact Stefanie Hammond.

Non-partners can download the Playbook here.

Check out this video interview with Stefanie for more on Co-Managed