Tiffani Bova, who has been recognized as one of world’s Top 50 business thinkers, recently joined The Futurum Group as chief of strategy and research, specializing in channels and go-to-market strategies. She’s a former Gartner Distinguished Analyst and research fellow, a Salesforce global growth evangelist, a 2X Wall Street Journal bestseller author, and host of the What’s Next Podcast with Tiffani Bova.
In this conversation with MSP Success, Bova explains why data is the next frontier for MSPs—and the first step for growing revenue with AI. This is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
MSP Success: What are some of the changing dynamics that you’re seeing in the channel ecosystem and marketplace that will impact how managed service providers do business?
Tiffani Bova: There’s so much capability now that technology gives us, and as small and midsize businesses themselves, are they [MSPs] leveraging technology to do what they need to do to produce and provide better experiences, both for their customers and for the employees that work for them?
In the tech community, we’ve been selling digital transformation for a really long time. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that the partners in the ecosystem have digitally transformed themselves at a pace by which they’re taking advantage of what technology can bring them.
So I’m just going to give you an example. Remote monitoring and management gave them this huge opportunity to expand the customer set that they could serve without having to show up in person always. OK, let’s take that one step further. Could managed service providers leverage AI better and leverage the data they have about their clients so that they can actually anticipate what products and services they might need next or [identify] where they’re not maximizing the technology they’ve already invested in…using that analytics to not only improve my own business but to help my customers improve their business. AI relies on data, so these MSPs should have a lot of client data. How can they use that to inform them of what the customer may want next … and to really start to understand their business more clearly?
MSP Success: Is data the next frontier for MSPs?
Bova: There is data all over the place, which I think is a great opportunity for the channel to help customers of all sizes understand how to manage that data, keep the data secure, keep it clean, keep it consolidated. So then you can take advantage of that data for analytics.
So maybe it is a managed data offering where I’m going to go in and manage your various databases, make sure they’re integrated, make sure they’re clean, make sure they’re secure, make sure you’re sharing data across the platform. And I’m going to offer a managed data service in that way, because without the data, a client can’t use the AI layer. So if you’re trying to get to AI, you’d have to start with data.
Data is the new oil, but just like you cannot fill your car oil out of the ground, it has to go through the refinery—i.e., analytics. That’s the insight. Data for data’s sake does nothing; it has to deliver insight.
MSP Success: Are there any other emerging trends or tech that you think might be in a disruptor for the channel in either a good or bad way?
Bova: As end users start to leverage the power of automation, does that mean there is less opportunity for that customization and additional services? I don’t know.
Say, as an example, a partner has a call center client with 100 desktops. Now the client is using automation, so in that case the MSP might lose 25 seats. So does the MSP say, “Well, let me get ahead of that.” You know that technology is going to start to automate, not replacing jobs but replacing tasks, and if it’s replacing tasks, it might be less call center seats, but now all of a sudden you refocus people on more complex tasks that require humans and the customer success team gets larger. And in that shift to a higher value task, do [MSPs] have an offering to then manage that? Customer success may need access to CRM tools or other kinds of capabilities.
MSP Success: How do you see the role of distribution changing in this marketplace?
Bova: Marketplaces was something I banged the drum on when I was in my prior role for distribution to really stand up those aggregation platforms of multiple cloud services that partners could get their hands on. And what’s been great over the last eight years is those have gotten very mature and you really see them amplifying.
But I would also say that distribution, similar to what I was saying [about MSPs], has a ton of data. Are they analyzing it? Packaging it? Are they helping partners understand what we were just talking about? They have more data than anybody and so are they using it in a way that allows partners to be smarter, vendors to be smarter—all with a goal of making sure customers are maximizing the technology they’re acquiring. Because right now the text stack has gotten bigger and it doesn’t necessarily mean clients and customers are using everything they can with technology.
MSP Success: So the last time we spoke, we discussed your latest book, The Experience Mindset, and you talked about the importance of balancing customer experience with employee experience to successfully grow profit and revenue. How does this apply to an MSP business?
Bova: Let’s just take a partner who may say, “I’m totally customer centric. We know what our customers want. We know what they need. We’re anticipating. We’re working with our vendors and with distributors. We care about our customers. And smaller partner organizations would be like, “We care about our employees. I know their families. The business is like a family.” Those two things working in concert are so powerful. When one of them gets out of line and you over pivot to customer or you over pivot to employee, it impacts the other.
I’ll give you this example in technology. Employees are exhausted from all the change that’s coming at them pretty consistently. And so as channel partners who are at the tip of the spear of this disruption and introducing technology, they also have to think about when they introduce technology into their own organization, are they preparing their employees to actually absorb it, use it, and benefit from it? Or are they just tossing a lot of change at their employees without understanding that they’re burnt out on the pace by which so much is changing?
Similarly, partners absolutely should be thinking about how much change they are introducing to their end-user customers. Are their clients even maximizing what they’ve already purchased? Are they burning out on the pace of how much projects and transformation is coming at them [and] never really getting the lift benefit?
MSP Success: So what do you recommend, because I think the MSPs would counter and say they must stay competitive—and grow revenue—by offering customers the greatest and latest?
Bova: If you went into the client said, “Let’s understand what you’re using and then figure out what’s the best way to integrate that and get more value out of what you’ve already purchased.” While that won’t necessarily allow them to sell something new right out of the gate, it sure does position them as a trusted advisor. But if you don’t care about their [the client’s] success, it’s very hard to sell them more.
