Meet J.B. Frierson, Senior Account Manager
Today we turn the spotlight on J.B. Frierson. J.B. quickly became a tremendous asset to the entire team at The 20. Read below to find out more about J.B.
What do you do here at The 20?
I am an account manager.
Describe The 20 in three words…
Scalable. Innovative. Brilliant.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an engineer.
What’s the most challenging thing about your job?
It’s a tremendous opportunity and challenge to partner with our clients to help them grow their business and achieve their goals.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Learning sales allowing me to grow my clients here at The 20.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
Hard work and dedication.
What do you like most about The 20?
The culture.
What do you like to do in your spare time? / What are your hobbies?
Spend time with family. I like to workout, read, and write.
Where are you going on your next vacation?
Cabo San lucas
What’s your top life hack?
Plan my weeks on Sunday
Interested in working with J.B. at The 20? We’re hiring! Check out our Careers page for more info.
Meet Eric Emerson of E-Squared IT!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
E-Squared IT is located in Clinton, New Jersey and has been open since 2015. Things really started taking off in 2018 right around the time we joined The 20.
How long have you been a member of The 20?
We’ve been with The 20 since around May 2018.
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
I came from small / medium sized MSPs before going independent and lacked the knowledge necessary to grow our MSP to that next level. Outside of some mastermind groups / reddit focused discussion groups there was zero companies that had what I was looking for.
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
Biggest change for us was our revenue. In 2020 alone in a down economy, we’ve more than tripled our monthly recurring revenue. It has been a serious game changer.
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
The biggest benefit is the collaboration with other like-minded MSPs. We tried to start a local mastermind group of local MSPs here in Jersey and were essentially told to go kick rocks. No one wants to share their “secret sauce” with the competition. Now with the20 we can share ideas of what works and what doesn’t work without having to worry about potentially losing local business.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
100% you have to treat your clients like they could leave at any moment. Treat your clients like they are your only client, and spend time learning about who they are as people along with the tech stuff. The soft skills are becoming just as important, if not more important than the tech knowledge
What are your biggest business challenges?
Our biggest challenge this year was delivering on our QBR / customer service promise during a pandemic. It became extremely hard to connect with our customers when its chaos in the outside world.
What are your areas of focus for 2021?
Our biggest areas of focus will be continuing the sales and marketing push we did for 2020, but doing so in a controlled way that doesn’t degrade overall service delivery. This year was A LOT, all at once.
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
Marketing and sales matter more than you could possibly imagine. Carve out a budget for Google Adwords / Linkedin and push every dollar you can to those platforms.
What book are you currently reading?
The last book I finished was Everything is F*cked by Mark Manson!
Favorite blogs / podcasts
I cant seem to find any MSP / tech related blogs that aren’t overly vendor heavy, so im going to have to offer up the king of fake business himself Mr Tim Dillon on the Tim Dillon show. He’s a national treasure and must be protected at all costs.
Interested in becoming a member like E-Squared IT? Click here for more information!
Windows Virtual Desktop is a service hosted on Azure which allows clients to consolidate their workflow like a traditional RDS server, but with a Windows 10 VM instead which is more intuitive to most users. This is a powerful technology for MSP’s which can cut both you and your client’s costs, reduce technical overhead, and increase security. It works out to a large win for everyone involved for most workflows.
Azure has become one of the biggest virtualization and cloud platforms with a medley of offerings and services which meld together into a Windows administrator’s sweetest dream. Let’s see exactly what Windows Virtual Desktop is, what it does well, how to get the most out of the platform if you’re not used to the cloud, and the security and backup features you get as well.
What Is Windows Virtual Desktop?
Windows Virtual Desktop boils down to a solution which allows you to manage a cloud Windows environment without having to manage the tedious parts of infrastructure, maintenance, or the pain of licensing. It is the natural evolution of RDP. We previously wrote about the more technical aspects of what makes a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure work. Let’s look at the features Windows Virtual Desktop offers to get a taste for what it does in practice rather than theory. Microsoft lays their Windows Virtual Desktop offering out with the following features:
- Set up a multi-session Windows 10 deployment that delivers a full Windows 10 with scalability
- Virtualize Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise and optimize it to run in multi-user virtual scenarios
- Provide Windows 7 virtual desktops with free Extended Security Updates
- Bring your existing Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and Windows Server desktops and apps to any computer
- Virtualize both desktops and apps
- Manage Windows 10, Windows Server, and Windows 7 desktops and apps with a unified management experience
You get the ability to use a multi-user, multi-session version of Windows 10 which means a more simplified changeover and an easier licensing situation. You also have the option for Windows Server or an up-to-date version of Windows 7. Desktops and apps alone can be virtualized with this solution.
Windows Virtual Desktop makes it easy to get users virtualized cheaper and more efficiently than other solutions. You handle the setup, they handle the infrastructure (Azure AD) and maintenance (mostly). Microsoft also makes it easier than RDP, you don’t need a gateway server and RDP setups deployed to each desktop, your users just use a simple native app or an HTML5 webapp.
What Makes Windows Virtual Desktop Amazing?
This solution basically provides you a way to make virtual desktops for clients to work off of (which are especially important with work from home), but that isn’t all it does. It also allows support for Windows 7 which is compliant (i.e. it is patched and up to date from the vendor), and it allows porting over existing RDP setups. You get everything a traditional Windows virtualization solution could provide, plus an easier way to administer it and use it. It offers an easy line for clients to move over as well.
If you have clients with old Windows 7 desktops or Windows Server 2008 R2 boxes, you know how painful they can be to manage. The extended support on its own is far too expensive for most companies to realistically consider, so they take their chances with VM’s or trying to isolate the machine from the rest of the network. No matter how it’s done, it’s either expensive or painful for everyone involved.
The Azure setup streamlines maintaining a domain environment. Domain costs can become especially costly per user in smaller traditional setups. Ease of use is a general feature across the board for Azure. That being said, Azure can be hard to get going with since there are just so many features and options.
Augmenting Azure
We offer project services for migrations to help our partners focus on business while we focus on the boring parts. We partnered with both Crayon and Nerdio to augment our Azure offerings. Azure is complicated and can be difficult to navigate, but solutions like Crayon and Nerdio both have different offerings which fill in the gaps. They help handle translating the client’s need into something which can be cost effective with Windows Virtual Desktop (among many other Azure services).
Transitioning to Azure is easy if you’re somewhat technical and can follow directions, but you can end up with 10 different solutions which do the same thing and vary wildly in cost. The cost all depends on how well you understand the platform and what you need to satisfy the client.
Any MSP can handle the technical side, but the platform requires knowledge and experience to leverage it as efficiently as possible. It can be hard to find the time to maintain your business obligations while staying ahead of the dizzying number of XaaS platforms. Paying for a project to migrate or working with a vendor to simplify Azure and Windows Virtual Desktop setup can ensure your first migrations are a success and stay on track for cost and expectations.
It’s easy once you understand it, but it takes a lot of time and effort to get to the point it all comes together naturally. You can choose to learn on your own slowly, or you can get a jumps jump-start with expertise to immerse you in Azure and learn as you go. Neither solution is the right answer for all MSP’s or businesses, but if it gets overwhelming, there are options to get through the most mundanely challenging parts.
Azure Backup and Security
Azure offers a backup service which makes recovery and backup administration trivial if you’ve already bought into the Azure platform. Azure Backup doesn’t just work for devices hosted on Azure, you can also run it on traditional on-premise setups. It isn’t always the most cost effective solution outside of Azure however.
You also have a simplified network interface which abstracts your networking away from supporting a virtual appliance. Some providers still require you to support virtual firewalls and similar if you want the service to work and be secure. Azure makes it easy in general and keeps it easy enough that some power users can even administer it.
Azure Backups running as a cloud appliance rather than an on-premise machine or similar provides an advantage for security as well. Some crypto and ransomware variants are known to target HyperV machines or certain backup solutions to make recovery more painful. It’s a lot harder to do when it’s a one way transfer into the cloud rather than a machine sharing the same network.
I mentioned compliance earlier with Windows 7 with Windows Virtual Desktop, but this is a huge selling point to some clients. They need a legacy OS and they need to do things right or else have a hugely inconvenient network isolation project. We’ve had vendors suggest clients with applications on Windows Server 2008 R2 literally isolate and spin up a full, separate domain (intentionally using different credentials and user structuring), maintain a jumpbox (or two) which is at least partially isolated, and then suggest users transfer data by moving it from their system to the jumpbox, and then to the secure server to try and remain secure because extended support was too expensive. Or, they could just use Windows Virtual Desktop.
Conclusion
Windows Virtual Desktop won’t fit every client or every workflow, but it is a powerful offering and an efficient tool for many companies. Windows Virtual Desktop expounds on the possibilities in Azure with virtualization and creates the natural evolution to RDP and similar tools and technologies. Understand what it does and how, and you can understand when to use it, or when to not.
Services from Nerdio or Crayon can give you a shortcut to getting the most out of Windows Virtual Desktop and other Azure offerings. Windows Virtual Desktop is powerful, but it can be complicated if you are not familiar with the sheer volume of options. You can make the same basic system a dozen ways with a dozen different prices that all work the same; understanding how the options work and are billed is essential to making the right choices. It’s not hard on its own, but it can be when you’re trying to balance a business and selecting technology.
Sometimes it just works out cheaper long-term to rely on another expert to make the best choices and build the best experience the first few times. It’s important to remember how much your time or obligation is worth. We enable our partners to make use of these technologies to get the most bang for their buck.
Windows Virtual Desktop can provide an easier to manage environment which can be cheaper to operate for many clients. It abstracts away many security and infrastructure concerns, as well as unexpected costs. I’m yet to hear of a client moving to Azure or Windows Virtual Desktop and deciding to move back due to anything other than poor planning. The advantages are too great once you understand them.
Meet Mike Bramm of BomberJacket Networks!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
BomberJacket Networks is located in Minnesota, Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St Paul), Established: 2001, Previously a Value Added Reseller- System Integrator
How long have you been a member of The 20?
5 months
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
24x7x365 Support Desk/NOC
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
Breaking old Break/Fix habits
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
Tim’s Sales Pitch
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
Marketing, Hard Work, Persistence
What are your biggest business challenges?
Having enough time
What are your areas of focus for 2020?
Marketing
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
Join The 20 Way
What book are you currently reading?
You Can’t Be Everywhere – Marie Wiese
Favorite blogs / podcasts
Building a Story Brand with Donald Miller
Interested in becoming a member like BomberJacket Networks? Click here for more information!
Microsoft Azure and What it Means for Your Business
Microsoft Azure has made waves in the virtualization and cloud computing space since its inception. It’s not the only player in the game, but it has quickly become one of the biggest and one of the best for many small and medium businesses. Azure rivals Amazon’s AWS offering in terms of scalability and scope, but occupies a different market space in some respects.
Companies or entities who primarily use Microsoft products will benefit from looking into Azure. If you run an MSP, this is going to be most of your clients. Most businesses leverage Microsoft products in some capacity, so there are advantages for many technical and non-technical companies in general. Licensing costs can eat the financial advantage some platforms have over Azure.
The purpose of this article is to explain the very basics of Microsoft Azure, what makes cloud computing work, and how it can be a boon to a business. This document will be somewhat technical, but parts of it will be accessible to end-users and clients to help explain some of the core concepts in a way that makes sense. Let’s go over cloud computing, cloud infrastructure and virtualization, Windows virtual desktop, serverless computing and more, the general cost, and what resellers offer.
Cloud Computing in a Nutshell
Almost everyone has heard of the cloud at this point. It’s not even correct to say that the cloud is the future; the cloud is essential for scalability. The cloud is a case study in the economics of scale in computing. The cloud is a culmination of computing knowledge, computing abilities, and the hardware and bandwidth to make it all work.
Pretty much anything you can think of in standard computing exists in the cloud. If you need a server, you can virtualize one. If you need a data store, you can spin one up. As long as it is something which can be done conventionally, there’s probably a cloud provider which does it. The joke in IT is that the cloud is just someone else’s computer, which while cynical, isn’t wrong either.
Cloud computing is just someone else abstracting the data center infrastructure required to run different infrastructures or systems into an offering which plays off of their scale. You’re paying a little more regularly to not have to deal with matching CPU architectures, balancing racks, and having to maintain equipment. Someone else handles that so you get to pay for exactly what you need and so you can scale without having to deal with the hassle. You trade risk for an amortized and averaged out cost. We’ll get more into these factors with the cost impact section.
You can think of it as looking to rent for a bit more per month than you’d pay to own in exchange for a less unpredictable experience and without having the same degree of maintenance. When something breaks, it’s the owners problem to fix it. The cloud hosting provider is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure, the backend that lets you work, and resolving internal issues. Tasks that used to take a whole team to maintain can be relegated to a single individual or even outsourced to an MSP to manage since the vendor handles the more painful parts.
Cloud Infrastructure and Virtualization
While most cloud platforms started with basic virtualization, they had to be able to adapt to and incorporate multiple types of infrastructure to be effective. Eventually the focus shifted from just being able to run “stuff” in the cloud to the cloud having to become an extension of your computing infrastructure. To put it simply, to have SaaS, you have to build the pieces which can allow PaaS, IaaS, etc. which can be repackage and resold as XaaS. Azure has this entire angle nailed, arguably better than basically any other provider (for most use cases).
Basics of Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure
Feel free to skip this section if you’re already familiar with virtualization and cloud infrastructure in general.
Virtualization is the practice of running the equivalent of a specific computer system on a virtual machine (VM). Instead of installing the OS onto a physical computer, you install it into a controlled subsystem (which emulates a physical machine) running on a hypervisor. The hypervisor (HV) is the system which runs the operating system which maintains the virtual machine and the internal infrastructure to make it functional, but its health is independent of its virtual machines. If a virtual machine has an issue, the hypervisor shouldn’t be impacted (there are exceptions, ring -1 exploits, etc., but those are far beyond the scope of this article).
A VM should be a compartmentalization of the features it is supposed to abstract. The fewer features you have, the fewer moving pieces there are, and the less likely it is for something to go wrong. The HV shouldn’t run essential roles for a domain or similar (in most cases), and the individual VM’s can afford to do less. With a hardware setup, you have a limit based on the hardware, the cloud tends to be infinite for all practical intents and purposes.
To make a VM useful, there has to be infrastructure in place to make it function. The idea to virtualize came first, but the infrastructure is what makes it all work. You have to handle VPNs, routing, network setups, etc. to make a virtualized machine do anything. The work had been done, so it was only natural to expand the offerings to do more and more as it became more practical and refined.
The Advantage of Azure with Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure
The easiest way to understand this growth is to look at the question: “Why do companies use virtualization?” Virtualization is a way to reduce risk and (usually) costs; you trade absolute efficiency for something which is less prone to incidents and accidents, but is easier to maintain. The easier the process, the easier the client will be sold on the whole system. This is the angle Azure has taken in general.
Azure isn’t the cheapest provider by any stretch, but they’re one of the easiest to migrate to (for Microsoft solutions), and one of the easiest to get going with. The basic Azure console is easy enough the average technician can figure it out with a little help from Google (mainly for differences between options). Resellers make it even easier by restricting options while simplifying controls.
Microsoft Azure is basically a one stop shop for setting up a virtualized environment. You can set up VM’s, set up the infrastructure they need, and so much more. Data stores, VLANs, etc. are all trivial to get working with Azure. Networking setup is a matter of clicking the right things instead of handling firewall appliances like some older providers. Azure even offers backups, advanced desktop options (DaaS), etc. If you can do it in a data center or with standard hardware, you can do it with Azure.
Windows Virtual Desktop
Azure’s primary Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution is Windows Virtual Desktop. It is the spiritual successor to traditional terminal servers allowing each individual use to have their environment imaged out of a standard base system. You pick the applications and similar, the rest is handled by the system itself.
Windows Virtual Desktop allows you to cut down on resources for what kind of system you or your clients need to work. Pretty much any basic laptop or desktop is going to be good enough to work off of no matter what the client needs to do. You get the advantages of a terminal server environment without having the resources shared (unless you want to). Most services offering this type of virtual desktop system are going to use Azure as the backend due to licensing costs among other factors.
Windows Virtual Desktop is the culmination of all of the advanced features of Azure distilled into an offering. The process appears completely transparent from the infrastructure down to the end-user’s login. It takes the pain away from IT departments and MSPs while offering an improved user experience which can be quite cost effective.
Serverless Computing and More
Azure leverages the cloud to provide even more types of offerings which fit in where standard cloud offerings don’t. Serverless computing isn’t anything new, but it is much easier with platforms like Azure. Consumer AI and other offerings exist as well which can be used to build all sorts of new technologies, all in the same place.
Serverless computing is the practice of abstracting a program beyond the confines of where it will run. The system itself isn’t lacking of a server, but the design process and implementation is; you think outside of the traditional paradigm of being at the whims of the operating system and local elements in favor of using standard interfaces and abstract implementations of traditional operating system functions. Basically, your programmers are focused on programming and an authority (for the system employed) and the vendor (where it is hosted) maintains the overall security and other nuts and bolts for the rest of the process.
Azure isn’t just a platform for developing an IT infrastructure, but it can serve as a way to run applications and services, and tie them all together as necessary. If you’re dealing with .NET or C#, they’re one of the best places to move these applications. The initial migration can be a little painful, but the reduction in maintenance (especially with a Windows environment) is worth the cost.
Microsoft Azure Cost
Azure tends to be one of the more expensive cloud providers for many use cases, but it makes up for that cost with what it offers. When you’re calculating the cost of a cloud provider, you can’t just look at the cost of equipment versus the cost of the cloud. What all goes into the instantiation, maintenance, and service of your infrastructure?
The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is what really matters when shopping these solutions. For some IT shops, this means running everything on Azure just won’t make sense internally, and that’s okay. For most other companies which use Microsoft products, Azure has a lot to offer. The biggest issue with looking at Azure is figuring out how to compare the apples and oranges with traditional offerings.
Azure works on a basis of cost of computing. The more you use it, the more it costs. For virtual desktop environments, you can look at their estimates to get an idea of what it takes to run a virtual desktop environment. They offer a standard calculator as well to get an idea of what you’re looking at for each item. Keep in mind though, licensing and similar is included with most offerings.
How much does it cost you to set up and maintain a server? What happens when a drive blows or the power surges? How do you back it all up? How many people do you or your client keep on the payroll just to do basic administration of the system? Who do you have on call, and how much do they cost to support it around the clock? What is the cost of down time, and how long does it take you to get back up? Are these resources split between multiple departments or tasks which have their own unpredictability?
The deeper you dig, the more favorable the cloud is going to be for most business purposes. The cloud functions on the economy of scale, and while a huge MSP with thousands and thousands of endpoints might be able to compete, the profit margin to liability ratio may not be worth it. As cloud providers get bigger and better, the thin margins on cloud computing services get thinner for smaller shops.
Resellers
Resellers such as Nerdio and Crayon work to make administering Azure easier without necessarily costing more. They use their volume to get competitive rates which allows them to help you help your client or yourself. Azure offers so many offerings it can feel daunting without someone to show you what you need first.
Nerdio dives deeper into Azure and combines their expertise with the raw backend that Azure provides. They offer IaaS, DaaS, and ITaaS (among other things). You’re paying a bit more to get assistance doing the harder parts of Microsoft Azure. While Azure itself is straightforward, it can be overwhelming with the sheer volume of options and configurability it offers. Services like Nerdio aim to reduce the complexity for you and your client.
Crayon is similar to Nerdio in what they offer, but the devil is in the details and the implementations. Crayon can allow an MSP to offload many of the more mundane duties. The exact differences that make them each offer unique value is a bit outside the scope for this article. We work with both since both are subtly different with their implementations and the other offerings they provide.
Meet Joe Martinez of KITE IT Pro!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
KITE IT Pro’s headquarters are in Tucson, AZ. In 2014, we started off as a consumer/business break-fix company and made the decision to primarily focus solely on managed services in 2018.
How long have you been a member of The 20?
We have been a member of The 20 for a little over 4 months.
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
The size of our company really forced us to look to partner with The 20. Scaling our service delivery was a huge issue for us. We were not in the position to hire technicians or take on clients over a certain size in fear of service overload. As we added new clients, we were essentially growing ourselves out of business.
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
CONFIDENCE. We knew that we delivered our clients great IT service, we just lacked confidence in scaling. Partnering with The 20 has allowed us to discover the difference between scaling our service and scaling our business.
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
We love the community of The 20. The engagement between partners is priceless. In this industry, every company holds their secret sauce under lock and key. As members of The 20 community, we are learning from seasoned industry veterans on how to successfully grow and protect our business.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
Hard work. The 20 is designed to alleviate growing pains. Everything you need to grow your business is in The 20. Hard work is not just defined on the hours you put into delivering service, hard work is also defined by the ability change who you are as an owner, partner, and as a company. Change is the hardest work you will ever have to do.
What are your biggest business challenges?
The biggest challenge we face is lead generation. It is always the principal challenge for each IT service company.
What are your areas of focus for 2020?
Lead generation and building a sales pipeline. Now that we can scale our service delivery, we can “get out” in front of potential clients and develop our business. The ability to get out from “behind the console” has been invaluable. We can make more effort towards focusing on lead generation and sales which is paramount to our success.
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
If you are looking to grow your MSP, join The 20. Stop wasting effort in hiring help desk technicians or getting yourself stuck “behind the console”. The 20 gives your company the freedom to focus on lead generation and sales…the scaling is provided. We wish we would have done this back in 2018.
What book are you currently reading?
Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen – Donald Miller
Favorite blogs / podcasts
Cyware Daily Threat Intelligence – Cyware Labs
Frankly IT (podcast)
Connecting The Channel (podcast)
Interested in becoming a member like KITE IT Pro? Click here for more information!
How B2B Sales Have Changed for MSPs
Technology has continued to increase at a dizzying pace. A decade of knowledge and expertise can be rendered obsolete in less than a year if you don’t keep up. A standard business can coast on what used to work, but they hit a hard wall sooner than later. The nature of IT has changed, so it’s only natural B2B sales strategies should change too.
Business to business (B2B) sales have changed for MSPs. Technology has gotten too complex for non-dedicated resources, many sales packages focus on what they offer versus what problem they solve, and there’s a tendency for businesses to move towards risk reduction rather than optimal efficiency. These aren’t the only factors, but they are major ones.
Each of these factors impacts B2B sales in a different way, though they all contribute to the overall picture. Some of these will be relevant to your clients, and others won’t. There is not a silver bullet for B2B sales, but there are tricks and techniques which can increase your odds.
Understanding and the Complexity of Technology
When you run an MSP, you have to balance keeping up with technology and keeping your business running. One feeds into the other, but to most businesses, technology is just a tool and not a trade. You see the dividends from staying up to date, but your clients usually just see unnecessary expenses.
It costs both time and money to keep up with technology. While individuals (hopefully) understand technology at the business, the business as a whole has no idea what goes into their day-to-day functioning. Your job when trying to sell is to become the “individual” or “team” a company can rely on for their technology needs.
Selling a client on filling their technical needs is a lot more future proof than selling on support only. What happens when the client makes a terrible decision and you’re contractually obliged to support it? If you can actually walk the walk, you want to be pushing clients towards things which help make their jobs easier, and your support more efficient. You want to paint your service as a shortcut to modern technology rather than just a new generation of break-fix.
Selling Solutions
Any given task at a business requires a complicated number of systems which should be as transparent as possible for the end users. Some businesses may expect their internal IT to work in conjunction with your offering, but those are less common. Most businesses just want someone to take IT off of their plate.
The users don’t care how the system itself works, just that it does. Most want to use it to do their jobs without having to think about it. Sell them on what a solution does rather than on what makes it work.
Simplify your offering into things that make sense for your clients. Most clients don’t care that the cloud environment you’re selling them on has SSDs rather than spinning rust; they just care it’s faster. The more technical terms can help them feel in the know, but let them know what a solution means for them specifically to sell it.
How does your solution solve their technology needs and how does it make their jobs easier? The more efficiently you can convey this and help put it into terms explaining how it impacts them, the easier it is to sell. They’re not picking you to explain the nuts and bolts (usually), they want you to provide solutions which fit their problems.
Risk Reduction
This all fits into the trend for more and more businesses to try and reduce risk. Smaller businesses have been trying to find ways to cut costs and/or reduce risk since well before the pandemic, but 2020 has made it that much more important. How can you reduce the technical risk your client has in terms of time and money?
The cloud didn’t work out as economically cheaper in the beginning, but it reduced the technical hurdles and cost to implement and maintain a solution for people who didn’t have the infrastructure in place. The risk reduction came in the form of preventing technical risk during implementation, reduced the dependency on local resources, and the fact it could prevent unexpected costs (you don’t need to replace hardware) was worth the additional cost per month. You can run a home brew “cloud” for cheaper than many solutions (though it’s getting harder with the razor thin margins), but even professionals tend to favor the cloud.
By abstracting a solution into an offering, you reduce the cost to maintain it. If a drive pops on a cloud environment, it’s the host’s problem. Companies want the liability and risk pushed off onto someone else. How can you be that solution without fronting too much of the risk? Becoming the glue which connects their disparate systems into one platform can be the offering they need.
Application and Practice
How do your offerings look and what solution do they provide? What itch do they scratch and how do they benefit a potential client? If you can’t answer these questions (even at a surface level) instantly after learning about a business, you need to reconsider how you’re doing things.
Another consideration is who you’re dealing with when selling to a business. A business can be composed of one or more different individuals with different levels of experience and knowledge. How do you explain your solution to who you’re working with without compromising what it does?
On the other hand, if someone you’re dealing with just doesn’t get it, what’s stopping you from getting in touch with someone else? Getting your foot in the door in the first place tends to be the hard part. Done right, you can seal the deal by targeting a different individual in the whole of the business.
Even businesses with dedicated IT staff may want to outsource parts of their business. If you can’t win the whole business, what’s to say you can’t win a part? Companies with full help desks may still hire an MSP to handle the pieces they don’t want to manage. The question then becomes is it profitable enough to do?
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it touches on the biggest weaknesses of many MSPs’ current B2B sales strategies. Clients may want you to fill the gap the last technical company left, but you won’t get far if you don’t think in terms of how you can solve their technical problems, especially the ones they’re unaware of. Technology is complex, and they want to shop on what makes their job easier, not what it does in absolute terms while reducing their risk to unpredictable expenses.
Once you find how to put these pieces together, you sell on the value you and your service provide rather than selling a gear in the system. Make yourself indispensable to your client while making your sales easier. A gear can be easily replaced, but the whole system can’t. Become the force which helps your client realize and manifest their technical dreams as a reality and both of you will profit.
Ready to 10x your MRR? Contact us today to see if your MSP is a candidate for The 20 membership!
Meet Alexis Williams, Marketing Coordinator
What do you do here at The 20?
I am a Marketing Coordinator and I work on PR and coordinating all content.
Describe The 20 in three words…
Family, Fun, Exciting
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Growing up, I always wanted to be a fashion designer. I had a sewing machine and a notebook with all my designs.
What’s the most challenging thing about your job?
The most challenging part would be the fact that I want everything to be perfect.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I would consider my greatest achievement graduating with two Bachelor’s degrees in four years. #GoMeanGreen
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
I think the most important quality for success is believing in yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself and put your best foot forward, why would you expect others to?
What do you like most about The 20?
The people, I have met the best people here and gained great friendships! They truly make everyday at work fun!
What do you like to do in your spare time? / What are your hobbies?
In my spare time, I am a proud Netflix binger and I love baking! I also happen to be a sneaker addict. With that being said, I spend a lot of time online shopping haha
Where are you going on your next vacation?
I’m hoping to go to Jamaica sometime next year but we will see!
What’s your top life hack?
Oreos. I swear they are the cure all for a bad day ????
Interested in working with Alexis at The 20? We’re hiring! Check out our Careers page for more info.
A Guide to Long Tail SEO for MSPs
Long tail SEO is one of the simplest concepts in SEO, but can also be one of the most confusing in practice. A long tail search is one where you have a non-trivial search to get more specific results. For instance, if you want to search for a backup solution like Unitrends, you might search for “Hyper-V cloud backup solution”. You (or your prospective client) can always use some other non-trivial set of descriptors which spells out a similar combination of factors the solution offers (for instance “VMWare” or “SaaS” in the mix), and this is what makes long tail SEO so valuable and so difficult.
Long tail SEO relies on you optimizing your content for long tail searches which would actually bring in the right audience. This form of SEO combines many techniques which help with all forms of SEO. You’re doing keyword optimization many times over while incorporating live data and reacting to changes. Let’s break long tail SEO down further, see how to target for long tail searches, then we’ll dive into when and where to do it, and how to make it work for you.
Long Tail SEO
If you’re a business, someone is searching for something that describes your business or what it does the longer the tail gets. Done right, this means that you get more prospects naturally. On the flip side, if it’s done wrong, you just get raw traffic with no real value looking for something else entirely. It works because the search engine becomes an artificial filter for your incoming demographic.
Some searches are worth more than others. Singular search terms (or short search phrases) are saturated or generic and there really isn’t a way to get ahead because the search itself is generic. The goal of long tail SEO is to focus on winning more niche topics that are less contested. Each term added to a search adds a filter which reduces the number of viable results. The more they zoom in, the bigger you get, but only if you’re in the continuously shrinking window.
We’ve touched on the basics of long tail SEO, but there’s a lot that goes into the process. Long tail SEO needs to be calculated based on how your clients search. Who are you targeting and what are they searching for? What keywords do you see from Google Search Console or similar and how can you put them together? Keywords are important, and knowing what keywords your prospects actually use for plain searches is the first step in making long tail SEO work.
You also need a way to track the results. If you haven’t used Google Search Console (or similar), you need to start now. An analytics system (Google Analytics, Bing Analytics, or even something like Koko Analytics) will provide insight into the metrics which will help you measure what people are searching for and where they’re going.
Measuring CTR and Other Metrics
These tools enable you to begin tracking the CTR (Click Through Rate) for a given search as well as the landing page. If 3 of your pages mention backups and associated terms, is one faring better than the others? If so, why? To optimize SEO, you need to understand what is actually working, then figure out why it’s working. Or, if nothing works, you need to figure out how to make the right changes.
Google Search Console gives you the query, clicks, impressions, and the search position for any term which involved your site. For our purposes, we can treat the ratio of clicks to impressions as the CTR for the site. Some organic searches will have a great ratio (some can be as high as the double digits for a percentage), others not so much (<0.01%). Position is important as well, with the higher the better, but improving your ratio will improve your position most of the time too.
Google can also give you a similar break down for any given page, and the clicks, impressions, and position it has which can get you a similar search CTR per page. Putting these two calculated metrics together won’t give you exactly what ratio you’re getting searches for specific pages, but you can combine analytic solutions to approximate this.
No set of numbers when working with search and analytic data will ever be absolutely right. If I compare the numbers from Google Analytics with the numbers from Google Search Console, the numbers between them aren’t usually going to add up exactly. The data is collected, culled, and combined in different ways so you get different results. Work off the trends and ratios rather than getting maddened by the fudge factor.
Targeted Keywords
These calculations give you how people search for you (keywords), where you show up (searches), and how individual pages show up. To improve your SEO, you ideally want to reconcile the first and the second sets of terms to be closer. The closer, the better your search does and the higher your natural position goes (usually).
What keywords define your MSP and your business? What keywords define what your current and ideal clients expect from your MSP? This is the specific part which gets a bit fuzzier for MSPs. You also need to consider what value each page adds and what people would search on it.
When targeting keywords, most businesses are playing with a level field. MSPs usually have a mix of B2C (Business to Consumer) and B2B (Business to Business) considerations which can be further exaggerated by the fact that peers and vendors exist across a spectrum of technical knowledge. Content has to be accessible and usable to both sets as a whole though. This isn’t to say you can’t target more jargon-laden terms, but you need to explain them.
Most clients won’t know what RAID is (or think it comes in a can), but a vendor is going to be confused if you never reference it directly in more technical pages. A page obviously for consumers won’t matter, but both sets of content need to exist and be targeted. Create your own information and writeup on topics which come up continuously with technical and lay versions.
How to Improve Long Tail SEO
Target the keywords which work for your business first. Build them into phrases which clients, vendors, or whoever you want to bring in would search for. Once you have an idea for the keywords which work well (this involves either looking at your metrics or keyword research), you can begin embedding them in content.
Apply these techniques like you would keywords to any content as we mentioned in The Top 13 Easiest Ways to Improve SEO for MSPs. You want content to include these words abundantly, but naturally. For instance, in this article, we have used the term “Long Tail SEO” over and over, but in a way where it flows.
SEO all works off of content, but there are little tricks which can help give you an edge. Use them to your advantage and target the keywords you need. For certain phrases, feel free to include them as is or with grammatical or filler words in between. If “MSP high uptime backups” is how people are finding you, feel free to work that in. “Our MSP prioritizes high uptime and safe backups,” or similar on an About Me page can help solidify that search.
What Not to Do
You can’t work every term, keyword, or phrase in everywhere. There are people who try, but it ends with the content either taking enough of a hit searches drop off, or else it becomes buzzword bingo. You can cheat the algorithm but not the reader usually. Target the keywords and phrases which actually matter and actually occur per metrics and research.
Prioritize the things which are the easiest to implement and provide the most value. Just because a keyword can get you to the number one position of an extremely cryptic search doesn’t mean it’s good. You need the right mix of a niche with accessibility.
Don’t omit cross-referencing terms and researching similar terms when prioritizing your keyword targeting either. Basically, how can you save time and effort by batching search terms? If “email parser” is a common term with many okay searches, it can be viewed as worth the same as one term which has a single usage and much more success. Keep in mind that there is a bigger picture when creating a strategy.
Don’t try to capitalize on searches which will conflict with your brand. There’s no such thing as bad press is a marketing cliché, but whether it’s true or not is different question than how SEO works. If you sacrifice parts of your content for the sake of targeting something else, you’re typically robbing Peter to pay Paul for your SEO. It can work, but it’s way beyond the scope of this article.
Making Simple Content Adjustments
I won’t touch on all the standard SEO techniques in here. SEO is SEO, the only difference is the focus and the purpose of each strategy. Good content gets you good SEO, but like anything, there are things you can do to get the most bang for your buck and “good” is often subjective.
If you see a phrase in the search console which is bringing in traffic, try to work it in, or work in the keywords. If a synonym beats out what you’re using, work it in. If your clients find you under “support desk vmware comptia certified”, but you use “help desk”, consider at least adding in “support desk” on any page the help desk is mentioned. I would also increase references to the rest of the terms (if relevant).
If a singular term is showing up with many variations, for instance: “vmware installation msp”, “vmware certified msp”, “vmware virtualization msp”, etc., and is bringing in a good amount of traffic, use it where possible. You can continue to expand on this as the tail for the search query gets longer and longer and work these things in as you go forward as long as the content stays relevant to the searches.
Deeper Content Strategy
As you move forward with your strategy, you’ll reach a point where there aren’t small things to change anymore. You need substantial rewrites, content is deprecated, etc. If things still kind of work, it can be worth a little cleanup first to improve results while you get the time to go deeper.
Long tail content tends to be more long lived for relevance, but less relevant overall. That being said, some things do have a lifespan. There aren’t many searches for CAT3 anymore, but there are plenty of references to its installation or usage left. While this example is neutral, old content can eventually hurt you if left unchanged and unchecked.
What content do you have which is completely obsolete? What just needs a change to something more modern to be relevant? This gets more complex with tech articles. A guide to fix a DOS-era POS system may still be relevant to why some clients hire you. Context makes the difference between your guide being a relic and it being proof of skill. Update your content with context as to why it’s still relevant. Search engines tend to favor content which is updated, so by adding context, you show the content is being maintained, and make it stay useful for readers.
Content that no longer serves a purpose needs to be culled. There’s probably going to be some useful pieces caught in the crossfire which need to be heavily reworked or redone. The weaker your search rankings, the more likely you have a lot of work to do. Sometimes, this may even coincide with an entire redesign of the site. You have to run the numbers and weigh the cost of redoing content to the reward it can bring.
Going Forward With Long Tail SEO
Understanding what long tail SEO can do for your business is the first step in using it. Research and analyze what people search for, what they search to find you, and the intersection between these. Calculate what each keyword means to your site and searches for you.
As you learn and apply these principles, you’ll possibly reach a point where minor changes just don’t work anymore. Sometimes you need to make some massive changes or effectively start over to get the results you need. Start with what gets you quick results and move on as possible.
Gradual steps will be more efficient for most working professionals than a huge changeover all at once. This gives you a chance to see results without a large investment. SEO is only as good as the content and strategy behind it, so figuring out what actually works first can make the next steps easier. Researching and testing works better in an iterative process.
Long tail SEO isn’t the only thing to focus on, but it can easily be combined with other techniques. You won’t hurt your SEO shoring it up to make longer queries lead to your content. The process of shoring up long tail SEO is going to incidentally affect “standard” SEO. As you work through long tail SEO, you get the data and metrics to fix everything else.
SEO is SEO as I mentioned before, the difference is in the strategy and implementation. Focusing on long tail SEO doesn’t come at the expense of other strategies, it enriches them. Done right, you aren’t trading one strategy for another, you’re batching the work and doing a little extra analysis. Even if you can’t apply everything, just starting the process can be enough to make huge strides with SEO.
Meet Trent Milliron of Kloud9 IT!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
Kloud9’s headquarters are in Cleveland,Ohio and we have offices in Cleveland, Akron, and Columbus Ohio. We started in 2006 as a break-fix company and began all inclusive services in 2010, as a way to assist businesses in budgeting but also as a way to have better control over tier infrastructure to prevent problems from occurring instead of getting calls because something is broken.
How long have you been a member of The 20?
Around 6 years
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
Buying power with vendors, also done for you integration with the vendor tools as well. Meaning you are buying into a set of tools where everything is working together as it should. Going further on this, also buying into sales and operations processes as well that work. And a community.
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
We have been able to streamline our service offerings and present them in way that increases revenue.
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
The camaraderie with likeminded individuals who want success.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
Always work on increasing revenue. If you are not growing, you are shrinking.
What are your biggest business challenges?
Developing Processes and Employees.
What are your areas of focus for 2020?
Expanding our service offerings in order to increase opportunities for our sales team. Also adding a defined cyber security service
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
Delegate, Use Metrics, and Spend Money on Marketing.
What book are you currently reading?
Scaling Up. Get A Grip.
Favorite blogs / podcasts
Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Dennis Prager, Candice Owens, Dave Rubin
Interested in becoming a member like Kloud9 IT? Click here for more information!
