9 Tips for MSPs and Resellers: To Win, Retain and Grow Business

It’s a tricky time in partner land, as the demand for IT support and services continues to grow, but economic headwinds mean that many businesses – especially SMBs - may also be struggling to stay afloat, let alone to grow.

In one recent forum, a Microsoft partner laments, “Sadly due to economic difficulties we have lost 5 customers due to absolutely no fault of our own – the companies have gone bust.” He continues, “(in our) existing customer base we have double the maximum growth”, and “…we have gained 17 net new customers. Of those 17 though, sadly only 3 are above 11 users.”

By contrast, other partners share that “We had our greatest ever growth!”

Regardless of your business circumstances, there exists a tremendous opportunity to expand your client base and to boost revenues if your capabilities are aligned with customer needs, and the prevailing market trends. It’s sometimes called ‘product market fit,’ and it’s easy said than done. However, a tough competitive landscape requires partners to discover strategic approaches that differentiate themselves in order to win new business, to retain customers, and to maximize profitability.

Even better, if partners can align their points of difference to amplify tailwinds and channel momentum. As one ecosystem is encouraging, calling for its partners to showcase specialisations in 1) copilot, 2) AI design, and 3) building more resilient cybersecurity stacks for business customers. All three are highlighted as opportunities for partners to position themselves ahead of the curve for optimal growth in the year ahead.

With that context in mind, we outline nine strategies that partners can implement for the best chance at attaining their goals.

To attract new clients, partners must first understand their target market. This involves:

• Identifying Ideal Client Profiles:
  • Determine the industries, company sizes, and specific IT needs that align best with your services.
  • A good place to start is by analysing your current customers to see where you’re winning the most business, and which accounts are growing. That will be a good proxy for the customer that best aligns with your strengths.

• Market Research:
  • Conduct market research to better understand the pain points, challenges, and needs of current and potential clients within your target sectors.
  • Market research doesn’t need to be as daunting nor as extensive as it sounds. For example, it can range from simply asking customers a series of questions in every meeting or on each call, through to online surveys, or published data and reports that already exist, or even keyword analysis. It’s anything that gives you insight into what services and solutions businesses are looking for. No need to re-invent the wheel. Start with the low-hanging fruit and ‘fish where the fish are.’

Generic solutions rarely stand out. Partners should tailor their services to meet the specific needs of different industries and businesses. This can include:

• Customized Service Packages:
  • Develop service packages that address common pain points or emerging business trends and needs, like copilot, AI design and process automation, or cybersecurity.
  • Tailor solutions for specific industries, such as healthcare, finance, or retail, and

• Build Scalable Solutions:
  • Ensure your offerings can scale with your clients’ growth, providing flexibility and long-term value.
  • Bundling services is a good way to scale services as your relationship with the customer grows, or as their needs change and mature. It also increases your share of wallet and makes customer relationships more sticky. As a hint, your simplest bundles or packages should feature the easiest and most transferable services, and then bundle more complex solutions on top for higher level packages. For example, banks use credit cards to win new customers, because it’s easy to compete on price and features and benefits, and most customers have cards with multiple providers. Banks then try to convert the customer to a second and third service like an overdraft or merchant facilities. It’s a concept called entanglement, and it’s generally accepted that once a customer has three or more services they will never leave, because it’s too hard.

Staying ahead of the technological curve is essential for partners. By leveraging advanced technology, partners can practise what they preach, showcasing services, solutions and expertise to customers, plus they can provide superior services, attract more clients and achieve better margins.

• Automation and AI:
  • Use automation tools and AI to streamline your operations, enhance service delivery, and provide proactive support.
  • Marketing, Customer Support and Finance are all easy examples of places to start. AI and automation can help to generate diverse and compelling content, chat bots can deliver 24/7 frontline availability and help to achieve first call resolution for predictable and common tasks and problems, and automated data feeds and transaction matching can automate many tedious bookkeeping tasks.
  • For more complex tasks, tailor custom scripts to help with ideas and problem solving as well.

• Cloud & SaaS Services:
  • Offer robust cloud solutions, including cloud migration, management, and cloud email security services to meet the ever-growing demand for cloud-based services.
  • Better still, seek out SaaS solutions like MailGuard that provide stable and predictable recurring revenues with low support overheads.

A strong online presence is crucial for attracting new clients. Partners should focus on:

• Professional Website:
  • It’s your storefront, your first impression, and the main point of contact for many customers. Create a professional, user-friendly website that clearly communicates your services, expertise, and value proposition.

• Social Media, SEO, Email and Content Marketing:
  • Optimize your website for search engines to attract organic search traffic, building landing pages and on page content that performs well for in demand services.
  • Regularly publish valuable content on your website and share it via email subscriber lists and social media. They’re all free channels and opportunities for you to create a larger footprint and pool of prospective customers.
  • Ideal content includes blogs, landing pages, whitepapers, and case studies, to attract and engage potential clients.
  • Aim for a regular and frequent cadence to stay top of mind, keeping in mind the two principles of reach and frequency. Aim to reach as many qualified prospects as you can, with a frequency that ensures that your messages are being received and understood. Careful not to spam them though, so it’s a fine balance and important that your content is relevant and adds value. Data suggests that we see between 6,000-10,000 ads per day, so there’s a lot to cut through, and the rule of 7 says that on average customers need to see your brand or message seven times on average before they will consider making a purchase.
  • Use content marketing to add value and provide insights. When a qualified customer downloads content, you can capture and qualify leads. Creating content that speaks to common business challenges and providing clear calls-to-action will allow businesses to self-identify as a prospect with a need for your solutions or packages.
  • Aim to include emotional messages that touch on customer needs and wants, rather than functional and rational messages that simply call out features and benefits.

Clients want to work with knowledgeable and reliable partners. Demonstrating your expertise and building trust can significantly impact your ability to win new business. It’s often referred to as ‘social proof’ or a ‘belief stack.’

• Certifications and Partnerships:
  • Obtain and display relevant certifications with Microsoft, Amazon, Google or elsewhere, and establish partnerships with leading technology vendors to showcase your credibility and expertise.

• Case Studies, Testimonials and Ratings & Reviews:
  • Share customer success stories and testimonials from satisfied clients to build trust and demonstrate the tangible benefits of your services and solutions.
  • Use those stories and case studies to offer insights into how other customers have extended their relationship with your business by taking advantage of additional services and solutions, and
  • Wherever possible, ask customers for ratings (five stars) and reviews.

Offering free IT assessments or consultations can remove one of the earliest barriers to winning business, by allowing prospects first-hand experience of what it’s like to work with you, and to interrogate your subject matter expertise in a given field. It’s a great way to attract potential clients and provide an opportunity to showcase your expertise.

• Identify Pain Points:
  • Use the assessment as an opportunity to listen and to understand the needs and problems of the business. Try to demonstrate an empathy and understanding of their problems, to establish the foundations of a trusted relationship.
  • Use the opportunity to prioritise immediate challenges and future opportunities, along with key decision makers and influencers, strategic priorities for the business, and any budgetary or time constraints.

• Propose Solutions:
  • Provide a detailed report with actionable recommendations, demonstrating the value of your services and how you can address their specific needs.
  • Identifying the challenges and pain points of a potential client, along with decision makers, and time and cost constraints, allows you to assess the full spectrum of their needs and to respond with solutions that meet their short, medium and longer-term needs. Or otherwise, using a MoSCoW criterion to present a roadmap of solutions to the prospect aligned with time and cost imperatives, and prioritised as ‘must’, ‘should’, ‘could’ and ‘won’t’ do initiatives.
  • It’s also an opportunity for you to showcase other opportunities that you have identified for the business as a value add, and better still to introduce social proof by sharing examples of other key customers and similar services or solutions that you have delivered for them.

Word-of-mouth referrals can be a powerful tool for gaining new business. Encourage your existing clients to refer new clients by:

• Ease of Referral:
  • Simply asking the question is sometimes enough, especially where the decision maker or the project team genuinely see value in your service and solutions. They may feel like they are doing others a favour by referring your services, and in environments like LinkedIn it can also be a professional opportunity for the client to demonstrate their professional experience by referring your business.
  • It’s essential to make the referral process simple and straightforward for your clients, so your team may need to do some of the heavy lifting to work as an intermediary, but in return you’re receiving a super-warm and qualified lead.
• Incentives:
  • Offer incentives such as discounts, free services, or financial rewards for successful referrals.
  • For some advocates, there will still be the inertia of taking action to provide the referral, plus providing a small incentive will ensure that you retain a solid and trusting relationship with them.

Winning new business is important, but retaining existing clients is equally crucial for revenue growth. It’s much cheaper and easier to retain an existing customer, than it is to win a new one, or to win one back. Partners should focus on:

• Exceptional Customer Service:
  • Provide outstanding customer service to build long-term relationships and foster client loyalty.
  • Where possible aim to exceed the customers’ expectations by delivering an experience that will delight them. Those are the experiences that will turn a loyal customer into an advocate.

• Regular Communication:
  • Maintain regular communication with clients to understand their evolving needs and ensure their continued satisfaction with your services.
  • It may also help to ward off competitors, and at the very least to ensure that you are in the mix if there is a change in direction within the business, due to changing needs and circumstances, or changing personnel.

Continuously measure the performance of your sales and marketing efforts to identify areas for improvement, and opportunities to double down for greater growth.

Data is king and it’s a vital tool to guide your decision making and prioritisation of time and money. Equally important, it will empower your team with the information that’s necessary to unequivocally demonstrate the return on investment for customers.

• Analytics and Reporting:
  • Use analytics tools to track key metrics, such as engagement, open and click rates, lead capture and conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs.

• Optimize Strategies:
  • Regularly review and optimize your sales and marketing strategies based on data-driven insights. It’s important to be dispassionate and to let the data lead your decision-making, and not the other way around.

Conclusion

For partners, winning and retaining business, and increasing revenues and share of customer wallet, requires a strategic approach that combines understanding your target market, offering tailored solutions that demonstrate a product-market fit, leveraging advanced technologies, and building trust. By implementing these strategies, partners can not only attract new clients but also retain existing ones, ensuring long-term growth and success in a competitive market.

Keeping Businesses Safe and Secure

Prevention is always better than a cure, and one of the best defences is to encourage businesses to proactively boost their company’s cyber resilience levels to avoid threats landing in inboxes in the first place. The fact that a staggering 94% of malware attacks are delivered by email, makes email an extremely important vector for businesses to fortify.

No one vendor can stop all email threats, so it’s crucial to remind customers that if they are using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, they should also have a third-party email security specialist in place to mitigate their risk. For example, using a specialist third-party cloud email solution like MailGuard.   

MailGuard provides a range of solutions to keep businesses safe, from email filtering to email continuity and archiving solutions. Speak to your customers today to ensure they’re prepared and get in touch with our team to discuss fortifying your customer’s cyber resilience.

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