Start the Year off Strong—How to Translate New Products and Features into $$$$ for Your MSP

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season celebrating with family and friends!

My first blog of the year is going to be centered on a new feature that N‑able has recently launched focused on Apple Device Management.

You might be wondering: Why is the Head Sales and Marketing Nerd writing a blog post about Apple Device Management?

It’s because this newest feature—if adopted—can translate into increased sales and revenue opportunities for your MSP. And as your Head Sales and Marketing Nerd, my primary focus is helping MSPs grow and make more money.

The benefits of adopting Apple Device Management

So what are some of the key benefits that your MSP can experience by adopting Apple Device Management?  

1. It can provide broader and enhanced insight into your customer’s environment that you didn’t have previously, which leads to improved risk mitigation techniques

As our Head Security Nerd, Lewis Pope, always says: “You can’t secure and protect what you don’t know about.” So if you’re not monitoring, managing, and patching EVERY device within your customer’s environment, you will have vulnerabilities in some areas that can open the door to potentially letting the bad guys in.

2. It can provide an immediate increase in your monthly MRR and an appreciable increase in overall MRR across the majority of your customers

Incremental increases in every customer’s monthly bill translates into immediate overall revenue growth for your MSP. So if you have been struggling with lead gen and it’s been impacting your year-over-year growth rate, bringing Apple devices under your management can be a fairly quick and easy way to help you reach your revenue and growth targets.

3. It can provide an immediate increase in average deal size when quoting new managed services prospects

With more devices that you can now monitor and manage, you can create higher quotes that you can give to new prospects.  

4. It can provide broader insight into a customer’s environment and help you uncover additional services that you can potentially bolt on later on

Again, if you are not monitoring and managing a certain subset of devices, you are missing out on key data that can be leveraged for future sales opportunities. Data is king when it comes to creating sales opportunities for your MSP, so the more data you have reference to, the better the chances that you might be able to identify new services that you can sell into your customers down the line.

5. It can potentially help you move into new markets that you haven’t been able to service before

If you have been shying away from certain industries because they were known to be Apple-heavy from an end-user device perspective, then there is new vertical potential here for you to explore.

6. From an operational perspective, leveraging our new Apple Device Management set of features can help automate much of the work that you might be doing manually today on Mac devices, saving you considerable time and expense from a labor perspective

And it brings both Apple and Windows device management under a single-pain-of-glass, especially if you are using a separate product today for your Apple Device Management. Managing all your devices under a single platform could potentially save money, as you would no longer have to pay for two separate monitoring platforms. And you can reduce the complexity that comes from managing a multi-device environment, as everything can now be accomplished out of a single platform.  

Addressing the Objections

But being a seasoned sales professional, I can just HEAR the objections that you might be formulating in your mind. And I would love the opportunity to help address them.

Objection 1: “We don’t manage Macs. We are just a Windows shop.”

OK, so you are just going to let other MSPs win market share from you then? The Apple device market is growing, and it is growing faster than the PC market. Back in April 2013, just 12.86% of desktops used in the US were Macs, while Windows accounted for 85.6%. Since then, Apple has substantially increased its US PC market share, and now represents 31.34% of the US PC market.  That is substantial growth that cannot be ignored.

Objection 2: “Our customers don’t have enough Apple devices in their environment to make it worth worrying about.”

Sure. You may have a customer that has three or four devices here, another customer that might have two or three devices there… Yes, if you look at each individual customer, then that may be true. But I’m sure if you look across your entire customer base you have more Apple devices than you realize. And that is all uncaptured revenue for your MSP. Even inches, when there is enough of them, turn into miles. And this is an easy way to increase your customers’ monthly spend with you, with very little effort, and increase your average deal size moving forward; DEVICES = MONEY.

Objection 3: “Our customers won’t pay for this.” Or, my favorite objection, “We will have to go talk to our customers first to see if this is something they will buy.”

No you don’t. Leverage the ‘Tell, Not Sell’ Sales Philosophy. This is where your quarterly Executive Business Reviews can help. At your next EBR, tell your customers that you have made improvements and investments to your services that will help to mitigate their cyber-risk and improve their security posture. In the past, there were devices in their environment that you were unable to properly manage, but because of the newest investments you have made in your security stack, you are fixing this as you now have new capabilities to do so. As a result, you will be automatically enrolling these new devices into their existing program structure and their monthly price is going to be adjusted to accommodate and reflect this new set of devices that will now be under your management.  

Do NOT give them a choice as to whether you will manage these devices or not. Tell them that, moving forward, you are going to be managing them now that you have this newest capability. This is the ‘tell, not sell’ philosophy. You don’t need to ask permission first, as this is a security deficiency that you need to address—and this latest investment is going to help you do that.

Then for every new prospect that you engage with, you can just automatically roll these devices and this service into their monthly quote—don’t give them an option to strip these devices out. Because again, what you don’t know about, you can’t protect. And what you can’t protect, heightens the risk for them and for you as their MSP.  

I know as technical people, sometimes it’s great to geek-out when our favorite vendors release new features or products. However, as MSPs, you need to always be thinking, “How can this cool new feature help my MSP make more money?” Translating a technical feature-set into new sales opportunities that you can promote to your customers can help move the needle for your MSP in terms of new recurring revenue growth. Thinking about how you can position the business benefits of these new technical features in a way that a non-technical business owner can understand is a real skill. But when this can be done well, it’s what sets a successful and growing MSP apart from one that will continue to struggle. 

Stefanie Hammond is Head Sales and Marketing Nerd at N‑able. You can follow her on LinkedIn and on Twitter at @sales_mktg_nerd.