In this episode of MSP Founders Den, we talk about upselling your company important assets in order to achieve better integration with your customers and your full portfolio of products and services. We also share important lessons we have learned through our years on how to maximize the effectiveness of these resources.

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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."

Hi guys, this is Jhovanny Rodriguez co-founder of an MSP and a VoIP services company that focuses on the channel. Today we're going to be talking about upselling after getting through the door, and the reason why we're covering these topics is because what I hear over and over from MSPs is that they struggle with growing their business, adding revenue, adding leads and getting the company to be bigger than it is now.

So some of the challenges that I see with MSPs is that they have customers that only use a small percentage of the products and services that they provide. Things that are not standardized, and sometimes they're using different product or different things, and that makes the process a lot more difficult, ultimately leading you to struggling with supporting multiple vendors, not being able to go deep into the needs of your customers. As I said in a previous video blog,  a lot of these things that come together or are focused on a same patters are advantages that some of these vendors bring to the table.

Because we're focused on the day-to-day, we don't have enough time to have conversations with the customers. And we end up missing critical information about some of the things that they should be implementing and that they should have in your business as a standard. Last but not least, you're not meeting your sales and growth goals.

So I wanna talk about two lessons that we're going to be covering today that's surrounding the topic of selling or upselling after getting through the door.

So we're going to show you two 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 - Create a Spreadsheet
  

The first one is simple but effective. One of the things we used to do, and obviously, this is something that gets reviewed in the quarterly meetings or business IT or business review meetings that we set up, either quarterly, semiannually with our customers.

We had a simple spreadsheet that had all of our services on the top row, all of the different services that we offer. And we had all of the customers from top to bottom, and then we created formulas that gave you a green, yellow, or red. Basically, you type one, two, or three, and it gives you a different color. It was a good graphical representation of the number of services that our customers had from the services we provided.

So we were able to take a look at a customer and realize that they don't have the spam solution that we recommend. They might not have the business continuity solution or maybe they had backups, but they had not taken advantage of the business continuity planning. Maybe they don't have a remote and on-site customer, so maybe they didn't have on-site, which was something we recommend that they had.

So that made it very easy to have a discussion and have that view for us to review in their business quarterly meetings.

• Lesson #2 - Bundle Services 

Another thing we did was to bundle services in a way that we knew that these are things that the customer needed. In the very beginning, had the gold and the platinum plans and all that good stuff, and we said, You know what, we don't want the customer with the low-level plan. That's gonna be a customer that it's going to feel that if you identify a problem and we cannot remediate, it's gonna seem like we're trying to make some money on hours.

Very early on, we move to a single plan that the only thing we would remove would be the on-site service. And then from within that plan, we would try to include as many things as we can. Like many times the AV was included or then we came in and included the spam solution, and so on.

By bundling services, the customer doesn't have to worry about what it feels like nickel and diming for the different components. Now, there are some components that need to be separate, by nature. If you're adding telecommunications and you don't want to become a telephone provider, that might be something that you wanna do separately.

In case of our VoIP solution, we actually do the billing and send commission checks, so there's no telecom that it's being billed through your company. So effective thing is to have a conversation, have a pulse on what products and services your customer has from your portfolio. There are some other suggestions we've made in other videos like bring an expert, do the compelling reasons why they should have some of these services.