Who Owns the Relationship

Often MSP customers are loyal to a single person in your organization. This is not a bad thing, but it can create a potential for serious injury to customer relationships or loss of customers. Customers can attach themselves a salesperson, a service technician, a purchasing manager, etc. This is an employee from which a customer has received superior service, has a personal relationship with the employee, or possibly is the initial employee with which that they had contact at the company.

Some organizations try to avoid these relationships with key customer employees because they do not understand the difference between a transaction relationship, and value based relationship.  Our MSP coaching tips are designed to encourage you, or your employees, to create these value based relationships with your customers and their representatives. These relationships with your MSP clients will create a better atmosphere of comradely, honesty, and ultimately will create customers for life, if your product and service has been designed to WOW the customer and create value based relationships..

Some MSPs try to stick to the mentality that “We are contractors or technicians only”.  Others have the mentality that our MSP is only relationship based; which means that one person always has to be on point at all times. Clearly your MSP needs to find a happy medium. That’s where MSP coaching comes into play, helping you understand how to deliver a value, solutions based relationship, instead of a transaction one that dissolves into a race to the bottom regarding price..

The downside of your employees creating the relationships with your MSP clients is that if those employees go rouge, leave your MSP, or become disgruntled then you have a problem on your hands. Your MSP customers could easily up and walk out the door before you can cry foul. As an MSP Coach, this is not an uncommon occurrence with MSP sales teams, sales engineers, and high functioning service technicians. So how do you protect yourself against the loss of these customers, which encouraging customer/employee relationships? That’s the trick. With our experience in creating multiple successful IT and technology companies, and coaching MSP companies across the nation, we can help you navigate the murky waters of MSP customer relationships and your MSP employees.

Our MSP coaches specialize in you not only getting new MSP customers, but more importantly how to create sticky customers. Sticky MSP customers are customers that not only have stuck around, but they consume more than one good or service from you. Sticky MSP customers typically consume email services, backup services, network services, support services, server and computer services, hardware purchases, security services, etc. A piece of the puzzle when creating sticky MSP customers is to maintain a customer relationship with key employee(s) in your customers’ organization. Do not forego the benefits of having your employees having relationships with your MSP customers, but do it with appropriate caution and care.  We teach and coach you how to navigate this issue successfully.

Your MSP employees might be good at customer relationships, but be very careful with how you manage this. Even if you fully trust the employee to which your entrust your customer relationships, or even if you are the person that owns the relationship, you must keep in mind your goal is to create value in your MSP. There might come a time that you want to sell your MSP and if you are the sole manager of the customer relationships, then your MSP does not have as much value. There are other scenarios that can cost millions of dollars due to lack of managing the customer relationship. Our MSP coaching team can help you create, manage, hone, and transfer customer relationships, while creating sticky MSP customers that create value in your MSP.

Contact us to schedule a 10 minute conversation with one of our founders to see how you too can find time and financial freedom.