Are you ready to grow your recurring revenue and sell more services?
So, you’re having success moving your customers to Office 365. More and more are ready for the cloud and all the benefits that come with it. That’s great news for both of your businesses, but you’re starting to realize that margin alone isn’t going to keep your company growing. And what next? After all of your customers have upgraded to O365, how are you going to keep revenue flowing and continue to provide value? This is where services come in. By developing service offerings for around Office 365 you are able to provide more value to your customers as well as grow your revenue streams.
Project Services
When you start to think about what kind of services your customers need, it makes sense to start with project services. For a start, project services to be packaged with the software itself, which makes it an easier sell. When moving from on premise to cloud, or switching from another solution user data will need to be migrated to the new solution. While self-service methods and solutions, many customers will be willing to pay for the ease-of-mind and convenience of having the migration managed by experts.
Another type of project service that fits in easily is user adoption, this is very beneficial to both you and the customer. It is in both your interests that the end users get the most out of the new solution and are using all the functionalities. The customer wants to get the most out of their investment, and you want to make sure that your customers are satisfied with their purchase and view you as a trusted provider that can do more than just sell licenses. There is a lot of software available that make it easy for you to create online training courses that your customers users can access on demand. It would also be good for you to have a session with the relevant stakeholders to set targets and expectations of what they want to achieve by implementing the solution and plan how the success will be measured.
Managed Services
Adding project services is a quick and easy way to boost your revenue from selling Office 365, but if you want to really grow your business, you will need to start offering managed services. When you grow your recurring revenue, you will be able to rely less on transactional sales as well as deepening the relationship with your customers. The global managed services market size is expected to reach USD 376.13 billion by 2025, according to a study conducted by Grand View Research, Inc. It is important you start to get a piece of this pie and gain an advantage over your competitors.
Besides the growth of the MSP market and the additional revenue to your bottom line, it is also a huge improvement to how customers view your relationship when you move up from being an IT solutions reseller to a trusted IT partner. As you build your expertise in the services you offer to your customer, you will be giving your customers key insights that have direct impact on their business strategy and operations. According to Forbes, “Digitally mature companies are 23% more profitable than their less mature peers. But, 70% of digital transformations fail.” It’s clear that all companies need to have a digital strategy in today’s world, but it is becoming increasingly complex and difficult for internal IT teams to keep up with the variety and complexity of solutions available today. By increasing the depth of your expertise, you can support businesses to make this transition.
When offering managed services for Office 365, your goal should be to provide solutions for key pain points your customers are worried about. One of the biggest concerns all IT pros have is security, although Microsoft has built in Advanced Threat Protection and other features, there are still security gaps, especially around user behaviour. One security service you can provide is active monitoring, unfortunately, many breaches are not discovered until it is too late, according to IBM, on average, companies take about 197 days to identify and 69 days to contain a breach. By supporting your customers with security monitoring, you’ll safeguard their business and give them peace of mind.
Another key service your customers will see direct ROI from is license and user management. Internal IT departments are often stuck putting out fires and implementing new projects that leadership is pushing, this means that in-depth management of existing systems is sometimes left on the back burner, and that could cause a slow leak of unneeded costs. You can provide tangible value to businesses by providing usage and optimization reports for solutions like Office 365 and Azure. Doing this will not only allow the business to save money out of pocket, but will also give them insights into how their users are consuming these solutions and allow them to better optimize their technology stack.
In today’s environment, you must future-proof your business. Building managed services packages around solutions you are already selling is a great place to start. We recommend you build your expertise and drive to become a technology partner with your customer by helping them digitize their business and get more value out of their solutions. This may seem like a challenging mission, but Voleer is here to help. We’ve built a suite of automations to help you and your end-users get the most out of the technology solutions they are already using. This includes key assessments and reports for areas like security and cost optimization. By using Voleer, you can ramp up your managed services business without heavy investment, by automating the groundwork, you can focus on guiding your customers and growing the depth of expertise.
Read more about supporting customers with Voleer in this blog post: MSPs: Increase Customer Satisfaction with Voleer Assessments. To learn more about how you can use Voleer to grow your business contact us today!
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