Eight ways to outshine your competitors in a crowded managed services market

Gone are the days when companies needed convincing to shift to outsourcing. The main challenge is to provide a broad spectrum of services so that clients rely on your organization more and more. Customer reliance is key to customer retention.

Services such as remote monitoring, cloud computing network security, and backup and disaster recovery have great potential to grow in 2020, as more organizations are offering (or looking to offer) work-from-home options to their employees due to the pandemic.

The value of market differentiation has been highlighted a few times before in this guide. The reason for that is that market differentiation is the easiest way to stand out. If you're a new MSP trying to take on older, well-established ones, you may not win simply due to lack of resources.

Finding a vertical, for instance, and nurturing your strengths around it will provide you the ability to deliver superior services to your clients and help you create a base of loyal customers. Once you've mastered a vertical, you may try to expand into more verticals associated with it in order to target and acquire a larger customer segment.

At the end of the day, it's your ability to provide superior and consistent services that matters most to your clients. If you're able to deliver high-quality services, your customers will become your brand ambassadors. They'll bring business to you instead of you seeking out new customers.

Build a better talent recruitment strategy and provide ongoing professional development opportunities to create skilled employees who will be more than happy to help you take your business to new heights.

Most organizations face difficulties in determining their exact target segment. Determine your target market by creating a buyer’s persona. To do that, answer these questions:

• Who's your ideal customer? (basic profile)
• Where are they found? (touch points)
• What do they want? (pain points)

To better understand your customers and find the answers to these questions, attend trade shows and user conferences and monitor social media. Once you do your due diligence and are able to clearly answer the above questions, create a strategy to approach these customers.

Lessons learned from trade shows and other channels can be conveyed to sales teams to equip them with the right approach to engage with potential clients. To support this approach, create a content strategy with the help of the marketing team. Develop informative content that projects your knowledge and ability to provide solutions to your audience.

With increasing cybersecurity issues and the growing vulnerability of organizations' data, it's highly important for you to embed security solutions within your service offerings. Customers need to know how you put security first and, therefore, how you would be able to provide a robust solution to protect them from such issues.

It's very important that you're prepared to offer more to your clients once you've established a strong customer base, especially with subscription-based customers. A simple service bundle upgrade from Silver to Gold or Gold to Platinum could get you as much revenue as acquiring new customers.

The best way to provide that "something extra" to your clients is to keep up with the latest trends. Obvious technology areas to concentrate on are automation, DevOps, advanced analytics, deep security, IoT, and native cloud application design and management.

Life after the pandemic isn't going to be the same. Now is the right time for your management team to take a step back and invest some time and resources into creating an executable strategy.

With a bit of market research and intimate knowledge of customers' requirements, select activities that can be taken up first this year. After prioritizing initiatives, create a high-level project plan that includes detailed information on how to create, execute, implement, and sustain these activities throughout the year.

Review your existing resources, processes, and capabilities. Go through your service offerings and make sure that your bundles include all the must-haves and value adds. This will certainly help you in differentiating from others.

Dealing with a variety of customers will require you to be highly flexible, as each customer’s requirements will vary. To do that, you need solutions that are robust and flexible. Take a help desk solution like ServiceDesk Plus MSP. It helps you easily log in to a customer's portal and resolve most of their issues without actually going to the client's site, thereby helping you drive down costs for the customer by avoiding on-site activities.

Additionally, comprehensive solutions such as ServiceDesk Plus MSP come with built-in PSA and RMM capabilities along with key ITIL-based capabilities. ServiceDesk Plus MSP also allows you to remotely access non-cloud systems and integrate easily with other business applications.

Being able to show your simplicity and flexibility will help you stand out in the crowded MSP market.