Speaker: Jamie Warner, CEO, Invarosoft
Jamie Warner: Okay, this is a passion area for me, so why the vCIO / QBR process, in my personal view is broken? Well, firstly you can see a longer answer to this question at www.invarosoft.com/vcio where I give you a visual representation of what I think is going on and what's wrong and I'll try and condense that now into a few minutes for you. So the main thing that I think is going wrong is firstly most MSPs consider the vCIO / QBR process to be a technical process, it's usually done by someone in a technical capacity, the business owner or somebody else, and it's probably seen more as an operational thing where you have to go, you do your audit, you come back to them with your recommendations. The problem is, is that when you have someone that is non technical, sorry, non sales focused doing that, then the sales aspect of that process falls off a cliff and the reality is everything that you recommend to a customer essentially has a dollar attached to it. If it has a dollar attached to it, whether it be professional services or the products you're selling, then essentially you need to be treating it as a sales pipeline. And so I believe firstly you have the wrong person front ending it and because someone technical would go out, do the presentation and go sweet job done. I told them they can come back to me when they want to buy something and they will literally forget about it, they won't chase them (the client) down. And so that leads to the second problem, if you don't see it as a sales function, and it is supported by your technical team. Don't get me wrong, whoever's out there talking needs to have got all the correct information and anything that's recommended has to be done by your technical team. So effectively, when you look at your clients, if you put all your clients down a spreadsheet and down the left hand side, and then you thought to yourself, well, how much could I possibly sell to them that they actually need? It probably averages $10-20k (per client). If it's $10k, you've got 100 clients, there's $1 million dollar pipeline. So if you don't see it as a pipeline, then you're not going to do the things you need to do to sell and have those conversations. And the difference between an MSP that grows faster and sells more stuff to their existing partners is that they see that, they understand that it is a pipeline and they have, I believe there's a concept called 'sales compression' where all they're doing is squeezing that deal flow into a shorter period of time. So that's the second problem is that you're not seeing it as a pipeline, you're not squeezing the deals and it just stretches out over time. You probably will sell the stuff they need, but they're probably dragging you along, making you do it and that means it's too slow. The final problem is in the way you present. Most of the tools that are out there are actually causing the problem. It drives me mental now that I've seen this space as we've had to build these tools because the market wanted us to we've brought our (MSPs) process to the table. And essentially the problem is this, is that the tools that are out there essentially are focused on the audit (assessment) your traffic light system and then they just have a budget, when you just have a budget (one option). When you go down that list with a client, let's say you've got an hour for the meeting. You spend all your time talking about the audit and yes, you do talk about budget. You go to Office 365 from your File Server, $5000 project, new UPS $1500, Internet Connection, $300 a month, Firewall, $2000 whatever. But then when you get to the end and you've spoken to a customer like that, the customer says to you, okay I get it, there's the stuff we need to solve. What's the next step? I'm glad you asked. Well do a quote and we'll come back to you with a quote. Now you've got to book another meeting. The client's interest has waned. You may not get them in that next meeting and then when you do get to the next meeting, you're using a quote to get them to make a buying decision which when you present one option to a customer a) can scare them off so then they go dark because if it's $10-30,000 they go whoa hang on and then they don't come back to you and b) it's a yes or no proposition. Take it or leave it in a quote. So what we believe to solve that problem is using the sales methodology of good, better, best to present recommendations. Which is what you have in your vCIO Platform with Invarosoft. You can present options, it shows you're on their side, it shows you understand budget. You help them choose the right solution and at the end you have a total and you can basically say to them well what's standing in the way of going ahead? By having good, better, best you don't play your hand on price. Let's say it's $10k, $20k and $40k The client thinks well I want to spend $40k, so immediately they think they've saved $20k. That's how the psychology works. So you can have the minimum requirements they need in the first column and then build it out from there. So it's like getting a horse to water. So hopefully that helps you with the tip around the vCIO Process. Watch more www.invarosoft.com/vcio
