In this episode of MSP Founders Den, we talk about your role in deciding your approach to continue growing your business, are you being strategic or are you running more tactically? We 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 everyone this is Jhovanny Rodriguez, co-founder of both an award-winning MSP as well as a channel-only VoIP services company and today I’m here to talk about how to open doors using what I like to call “add-on” or “secondary services” like VoIP, security, backup and disaster recovery.

We talk to a lot of MSPs and what we keep hearing is that they are looking for different ways to add revenue to their business to grow their business; so we've created this series of videos to share some of the things some of the experiences that we've had throughout the years after running an MSP. We hope you can make the most out of this video blog.

One of the challenges that we see and that we have had ourselves at the beginning of our journey is that throughout the sales process; as we are trying to sell and add customers, we may not be reaching them at the right time. It is hard enough to prospect as an MSP owner, especially if you are starting out.

Sometimes, when you do get to do some prospecting what happens is that you might not be knocking on the door on the right date. They will tell you “you know what I’m very happy with my IT provider; I am not looking at speaking to somebody new at this point”.

And you are already there, you don't want to just walk away without giving it another shot. One thing that worked for us and some of our green link partners are doing is having an arsenal of things to continue that conversation.

So we're going to show you some lessons that we learned over the years.

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

Lesson #1 - Share your knowledge
So yes, they already have an IT person or an IT provider but it could be that they have not looked at the cost of their telecommunications in a long time, including the internet provider costs.

The aim is for you to switch that conversation and to think of any other product or service in your portfolio to offer, even if it is not your big deal. I mean your bread and butter is Managed Services, those are the big contracts, that is where you make the big bucks but what if you had something you can offer them?

They do have an IT person, so they have a resource but it could be that they do not have the proper AV. It could be that they do not have the proper monitoring tool to let them know when a critical system goes down or it could be that it has been forever since they took their ISP services. We bump into many customers who signed contracts years ago and they have a 1.5-megabit. If they had somebody to tell them “look you, I just converted somebody down the street to fiber, and the provider is offering fiber in this area”. Not only is it much faster speed and more reliable but it's going to be probably cheaper and then it would open the door for other services that they can do on a t1 like VoIP services.

They might be paying for phone systems and maintenance on those phone systems at multiple locations.

If they could, not only reduce the cost of the internet but also, they were able to convert those sites to cloud services; now they would have dialing between locations and business continuity in case, the building goes down or loses power. Imagine the end of the day if you were able to help the customer with that project: reduce costs and bring efficiencies; even though he has not even hired you yet as an MSP.

You are going to be the very first person he calls when he feels that it is time to move to another provider.