Handling Common Customer Obections

Ted Warner, long-time MSP and president of Connecting Point in Greeley, Colo., shares some advice on handling common customer objections to the managed services model.

The Human Touch: We have several existing clients who were used to doing business with us in the old mode, where we would send a person on-site the first Thursday of every month to sit down with them. Now that we're doing a lot of things remote, they don't see us on-site as often. We now send reports once a month that are customized for the client, and we also hired a managed services consultant to visit our customers once every quarter to keep that human touch. Also, with every dollar of managed services that we spend, we get 30 cents of project-based work back, but we wouldn't necessarily be getting that if we weren't seeing them face-to-face. In the managed services model, we find we can now make better suggestions for our clients and be more consultative because we know their business so well. We can also eliminate bidding scenarios, for example, so they're less likely to go with someone else for, say, an Exchange migration.

The Pricing Challenge: In general, customers spend more with us in the managed services model than they did before, but we can also do more for them. And we find that a client over time actually spends less money. Diagnosis is 80 percent of solving the problem. So if we [solve] the problem quickly, that means less cost for the end user. We're now solving 70 percent of problems during the first call into our help desk. Also, there's no way to manually check everything that you can do electronically with software, where you can check all of the critical services. We also use references in a lot of presales engagements and have our loyal customers who have been with us for a while talk to new clients.

Be The First To Know: Another area you can get into trouble is if a client finds something wrong before you call them. If, say, a server goes down, they'll say, 'How did you not call us; this is what we're paying you for?' The best thing is to call the client before they know. We ask our customers if they want us to just remediate problems for them or to call them first, and many say just fix it. So we fix it, but then we call them to let them know.

Focus On The Processes: It's not the tools that matter as much as the people and processes around them. You've got to know what to do when you get an alert. If you're just jumping around to different platforms all the time, you've got to reinvent yourself each time, and that gets expensive.