Want to get leads on steroids for your MSP? Delivering an educational webinar in a joint venture (JV) arrangement with another professional services provider, such as a contract attorney or a cyber insurance expert, can elevate your image fast and position you as a trusted authority. Having a JV relationship also helps you build your list quickly and reduces cost per lead and cost per sale.
In short, it’s a win-win-win arrangement—both parties get access to fresh prospects, and those prospects get free, valuable information.
This article will walk you through all the steps to follow and content you need to deliver a successful webinar with a JV partner to prospects and current clients. In our example, we’ll use a contract attorney as the JV partner.
First Steps
If this is your initial foray with a JV partner, here are your first action steps:
- Make a list of potential contract attorneys that understand the IT space and the MSP industry.
- Do your homework to align with your JV partner’s goals and key initiatives.
- Brainstorm a partnership strategy that will help them.
- Reach out to get an initial call scheduled.
- When they say yes, take the lead. It will be your responsibility to do all the work to make the event happen.
Choose a Topic that’s Educational and Addresses a Pain Point
There are so many MSPs competing for new customer acquisition, so your topic should address a true need or pain point of the small and medium businesses you are targeting.
One area many small businesses struggle with is differentiating a full-service and ethical MSP from a cheap “trunk slammer” that promises the world but in fact is leaving them vulnerable to risk.
“Your prospects typically aren’t technically savvy, so they don’t really know how to discern between different IT providers,” says Michael Glasser, executive vice president of managed IT services for Frontline Managed Services, a global MSP specializing in managed services for law firms. “They say all the right things, it’s up to the business owner to figure out what exactly they should be looking for, because the IT industry is not regulated like a lot of other industries.”
Brad Gross, an attorney who specializes in the IT service provider industry, agrees. “Many businesses, when they bring in an MSP, perceive that they might have some sort of problem, but they’re not quite sure what it is. And suddenly they’ve heard a lot of things about security and compliance, disaster recovery, but they’re not sure what their needs are. So they jump at the first managed service provider that says, ‘hey, we do security and compliance.”
The problem, he says, is that the business may get into long-term contract they’re unhappy with—or worse, puts them at risk because of poor coverage or holds them hostage from changing providers (or makes it extremely difficult).
That’s why choosing a managed service provider “is a very serious decision,” Glasser emphasizes.
So helping SMBs choose an IT provider by educating them on what to look for not only provides a needed service but positions you as a trusted authority.
Putting Together Your Promotion
Here’s a sample title and description to use for email, direct mail, and social promotion:
Title: What Every Business Owner MUST Know and Look Out for Before Signing a Contract with an IT Services Company
Description: If you’re a business owner outsourcing any aspect of your IT, it’s extremely important to know how to pick a competent, ethical IT company. Choose the wrong one, and you could end up with significant downtime and business-disrupting data loss, compliance violations, lost customers and even ransomware attacks. But how do you know what to look for and what questions to ask? What “gotcha” clauses should you look for in the contract? And what should you demand from your IT company before turning over the “keys to the kingdom” of your IT? We’ll answer all of this and more on this webinar.
Subjects to Cover in Your Webinar
Here are some sample questions to prepare a slide deck.
What Are Some Things That Can Go Wrong If You Choose the Wrong Provider?
- If you have a cyber incident, your current IT provider won’t allow a third-party incident responder access to the environment.
- You want to change IT providers, but your current provider is holding your data hostage because your contract does not provide for transfer of data.
What Are the Most Important Business Questions to Ask When Vetting an MSP?
- Do they have industry knowledge specific to your business?
- Do they understand how you run your business?
- Do they know how to support your line of business applications?
- Do they understand industry-specific and state-specific compliance requirements?
- Do they conduct quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and plan an ongoing roadmap and budget for upgrading your environment?
- Do they provide a dedicated account manager or client success manager?
What Are the Most Important Security Questions to Ask When Vetting an MSP?
- Who owns and operates their NOC and SOC, and are they 24/7?
- Are their systems up to date with patches?
- If a third-party solution fails, who is responsible?
- How do they provide backup and what is their restoration timeline?
- Are they SOC or 27001 certified?
- Do they have at least one security expert on staff?
What to Look for in a Contract to Avoid ‘Gotchas’
- Not having a contract is a serious red flag – walk away.
- If you can’t understand the terms of the contract, ask questions and NEVER assume ambiguities will be ironed out in your favor.
- Does it spell out what happens in a dispute?
- Does it specify what the remedies are for failure to meet the SLA agreement?
- Does it specify how many times failure to meet the SLA agreement can occur before you can get out of the contract?
- Does the contract spell out how the end of a contract is handled, such as who has possession of data, passwords, and configuration files?
- Does the contract include transition services?
Taking Questions and Spurring Discussion
A successful presentation will (and should) trigger some back and forth conversation with attendees. Ask attendees to think about their businesses at a foundational level, suggests Gross.
During the part of the presentation about security, urge attendees to be situation-oriented when asking questions, Gross says. For example, what’s the MSP’s solution to a phishing attack?
Also during the session, don’t overlook the fact that no solution or provider is foolproof. “Customers need to know that things break in IT,” Gross says. Urge attendees to “think about quantity, timing, and remedy. If you don’t put a remedy in the contract, it will be determined by the person who holds the most power, probably the MSP because they have the data.”
If your audience is the silent type, use the above as prompts to get the discussion going.
Next Steps
If your presentation—and your JV relationship—go well, think expansion. If you held a webinar, make it available on demand on your website. Then reach out to business associations and chambers of commerce for opportunities to present it in person.
Work with your JV partner to brainstorm new session topics, and of course, follow up with all the attendees.
Next, start targeting another JV partner in a different industry, such as cyber insurance.
The advice in the article was taken from a webinar with Robin Robins, CEO of MSP Success and TMT, Brad Gross, and Michael Glasser. View the full webinar below.
