Most Modern MSPs would probably say that, after customer satisfaction, customer acquisition is their #1 priority. If your business is going to scale efficiently, then you need a repeatable sales model and a predictable sales engine. But what does that really mean? Well, among other things, it means you are fueling your sales funnel with the right quantity and quality of leads to drive customer acquisition forward each and every month. In this post, I break down the stages of the funnel and the key metrics that will tell you if you are fueling your sales funnel effectively.

Thanks to the volume of industry dialogue surrounding inbound marketing, there is a general understanding of the stages of the sales funnel and how marketing should function as a demand generation machine. The funnel is divided into three stages to represent a prospective buyer's progression through the sales process and the marketing strategies that are used to nurture interest. The sales funnel stages are illustrated in the diagram below.

Content Marketing is one of the many buzzwords that has become part of the language of inbound marketing in recent years. The Content Marketing Institute (a valuable information resource on the subject) defines it this way:

So you're a Modern MSP that just created some new cloud bundles designed to provide business-outcomes to your clients. Congratulations! All of that hard work to design, develop and launch your cloud solution into the marketplace is finally beginning to pay off. Or is it? How is customer acquisition going? Are you bringing new customers on board without the use of personal networking or leveraging friends and family? Or are you still cherry-picking new deals?

If you are like most IT Solutions Providers, you have been reading the press and hearing from industry luminaries about the variations of cloud business models. They include the Managed Services Provider, Cloud Solutions Provider, Cloud Services Broker and my most recent favorite - the Modern MSP. No matter which title you give your cloud business any can serve as an intermediary between the hundreds of possible cloud services and the dozens of customer segments who can potentially use them. So now you are ready to get started building your business...right?

Now that you have transformed your premise-based IT solutions to the cloud and your product-focused business to a recurring revenue services model, there is one more transformation you have to make. You must transform your marketing approach in order to attract and engage new prospective buyers for your cloud services.

In a previous post we provided a primer for the ModernMSP on the concept of “COC” (the acronym for Cost of Customer Acquisition aka COA used by many executives and investors in recurring revenue businesses) and we talked about why COC is such a critical part of an ModernMSPs growth plan. We believe that COC is the single most important factor to measure and control when scaling a cloud/managed services business and maximizing its valuation either for an upcoming investment round or for an M&A event. So in this post we are going to take the COC concept one step further and explain the nature of its impact on both short term and long term profitability for a ModernMSP business. To help make this explanation as clear as possible, we have created a diagram to illustrate COC in action. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words and COC can be a difficult concept to grasp with only a written definition and a formula for calculating its value.

As business people, we are all familiar with the age-old concept that acquiring new customers is many times more expensive than retaining existing customers (by some reports 5 to 7 times more expensive). In a ModernMSP's business, the value of customer retention and the contribution of add-on business from an installed base cannot be overstated. However, the fact remains that new customer acquisition is essential to accelerating the growth of a managed services business.

There is all of a sudden a lot of hoopla around the "ModernMSP" - the latest title being applied to what many been calling the CSP or CSB or next-gen MSP. From what I can see the teams at Microsoft and BitTitan (and maybe others) are leading the charge here - and I like it - seems fitting to me.  But that's a title only - the vast, vast majority of IT Solutions Providers are not ModernMSPs - they just aren't - not even close. The vast majority of IT Solutions providers aren't even MSPs let alone ModernMSPs - although many call themselves MSPs. But that's all OK. Simple definition of a ModenMSP - a "cloud-first" IT Solutions Provider that is making their business from cloud - how's that for simple.

Does this image look familiar? I blogged about it a few days ago. It's the cloud business chasm IT Solutions Providers (VAR, MSP, SI etc) must cross to be what I call Cloud Revenue Producers. I also briefly mentioned what's contained in the next-gen playbook. Well, here are some more details.

It seems like there isn't a day that goes by where I don't see the same old partner playbook being presented to IT Solution Providers by cloud tech vendors - how to market, sell and support their cloud technology. The cloud tech vendor then says "why aren't my partners using my playbook and why are they not selling consistently?"