In this episode of MSP Founders Den, we talk about the challenges and best approaches to map out the journey for your customers. We also share important lessons we have learned through our years to improve your speech and pitch the idea to potential customers.

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"We believe if you do not measure what you're doing, you won't know if you're growing or slowly dying."

Hello, this is Jhovanny Rodriguez co-founder of both an award-winning MSP as well as a VoIP services company that serves the channel, and today we're talking about “Mapping your Customer’s Journey”. That is a hot topic and it is very important to make sure that they know exactly where you are leading.

Some of the issues are that besides your regular service, your normal day-to-day, network monitoring, security, help desk, and field techs a lot of times the customer doesn't know what is your 90-day, 60-day; one-year or three-year plan. What else are we doing together? Are there any enhancements that go beyond the day-to-day?

Sometimes you might have a list of projects that you're having trouble getting approved or they're just kind of sitting there and every once in a while, you remind the customer of them but they don't seem to be moving. Finally, the customer sometimes, based on what I heard and some of the experiences that we had early on in our MSP Journey, simply does not know what you do.

They do not fully understand that the reason why they are not having issues or the reason why they are not getting hacked or getting hit with ransomware is because of some of the things that you are putting in place. In addition, sometimes it can become a “set it and forget it” but you are putting these things in place.

Moreover, you as an MSP have the staff, the resources, and the processes to look at all of that and keep up with it. Because what happens many times with full-time IT staff is that they just do not have the tools or the processes; they only have the resources, so that is one of the things that you need to bring up to the light.

Back in the day, we have all struggled with some of the same issues; the projects that were being approved by the customer, they did not have the full understanding so our full work and efforts were not understood.

Therefore, we are going to talk about a couple of lessons that we did to help remediate that issue.

 These are both while running an MSP and now as a voice provider through the channel. 

• Lesson #1 - Create a document with Business Goals and timeframes
  
  

  One of the things we implemented was having a document, which painted the picture in terms of what are we looking to accomplish between this executive review meeting and our next executive review meeting. This is where we discuss many things with our customers including their challenges.

  In addition, these meetings have become venting sessions. As I have mentioned in the past if you map out what are the goals that you have; in the short and long term, the customer can prepare budget-wise. And it does not have to be a very extensive and complicated document; it could be as simple as in the next 90 days I am looking to get this done. Or in the next 60 days or the next time with meet, we need to start talking about those servers that need to be replaced or start talking about those servers that are being retired because those services are moving up to the cloud.

  We need to be talking beyond backup; we need to be talking about business continuity and recovery whether it is that you need to have some redundancy or that migration to office 365 if they have not done that migration already and prepare that and what does that look like, what does that cost?

• Lesson #2 - Addressing the challenges 

• You need to start addressing challenges that they might have: what are some of the things that right now are your biggest challenge? Or if you double tomorrow what would be the thing that would keep you up at night? Those are the type of conversation that you can help prepare and help set the picture or set the expectation for those projects that you are looking to be approved the next time you both sit down. There is always the possibility for some last minute surprises and we can leave a little bit of room for that in the budget but for the most part, those big expenses need to be planned.

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  Those are some of the things that we did in order for us to map the journey. And that does not just apply to the project approvals, it can also work during the onboarding process; paint the picture of what should they expect. Set the right expectation during onboarding and set the right expectation post-onboarding; in terms of what the day-to-day looks like and make sure you keep them up to date in terms of what are some of the things that you are currently doing.
  I feel that MSPs do too many things behind the scenes and we make it look easy many times; where the customer thinks this stuff is just happening just because and do not fully recognize it is the MSP work behind.

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  So make sure that you beef up your reporting whether it is through your dashboards or executive reports that you provide to your customer and just keep them up to date to whether it is marketing communications a newsletter that really displays all the work that MSPs do for small businesses