In the webinar: Unleash MSP Success, cybersecurity experts Barracuda MSP covered ways to increase efficiencies within your MSP, to make it more profitable.
Demonstrating the importance of choosing the right vendors to work with, while offering services to help you sell and market your business.
Speaker Ken Bartlett, Sales Engineer Manager at Barracuda MSP, demonstrated how consolidating your vendors and leveraging better security solutions can be more attractive to clients, and less expensive than trying to do it all in-house.
3 Ways to Unleash MSP Success
In this webinar, Barracuda MSP’s Ken Bartlett broke down how MSPs can improve their service offerings in three ways:
- Vendor consolidation
- Improve effectiveness, reducing operational costs
- Integrate & automate
To kick things off, Ken took a straw poll to ask the audience how many vendors they were currently working with in their business.
The results showed that 60% were working with between 11-20 vendors.
Vendor Consolidation
Vendor partnerships allow you to deliver your services cheaper and with greater expertise.
However, the more vendor partnerships you have in your MSP business, the more complex they are to manage. If you’re working with lots of vendors it can become very expensive to integrate them all together too.
Vendor consolidation offers a number of benefits.
By reducing the number of vendors that support your stack, you can:
- Minimise compatibility issues
- Improve response times
- Reduce overheads
- Streamline your operations
- See increased volume benefits
Being selective about which vendors you choose to work with comes down to how good a fit they are for your business.
Therefore it’s wise to look for vendors who:
- Have a comprehensive MSP-focused portfolio
- Understand and work with your business model
- Offer partner sales and marketing support – not just operations support
The goal is to leverage the fewest possible number of vendors that can help you grow your business and protect your customers’ entire digital footprint.
MSP-Focused Diverse Portfolio
According to Ken, when it comes to cybersecurity for MSPs, you should be looking for protection across the common attack surfaces.
The common surfaces are:
- Users
- Endpoint
- Microsoft 365/Google Workspace
- Networks
- Applications
- Data
With efficient service delivery and provisioning capabilities.
When it comes to security vendors, MSP partners are seeking ease of ordering, ease of deployment and an ease of management. Plus simplifying their back-end systems in order to have a simplistic and elegant approach when it comes to delivering services to their clients.
Vendor Sales and Marketing Support to Unleash MSP Success
As well as referrals and selling services to existing clients, Barracuda have listened to the MSPs that attend their partner events on the struggles they have with sales and marketing efforts aimed at new clients.
As a result of this, Barracuda now provide:
- Free sales call preparation and proposal support
- Quarterly Business Review (QBR) and product roadmaps
- Email and social media templates for marketing campaigns
- Additional brandable marketing materials
- Event support
Barracuda Security Portfolio
The security offering from Barracuda covers a lot of ground. From the cloud security of Microsoft 365 applications, to general firewall and perimeter access, to endpoint management, user training and data protection.
These tools are available through a flexible consumption approach. This means that can be deployed in whatever capacity suits your client’s needs.
There are a bunch of tools available to help sell these security services, such as an email threat scanner and a vulnerability manager to help clients see the value of what you’re providing as their MSP.
Ken went onto explain three of these sales tools in a bit more detail.
- Email Threat Scanner
- Vulnerability Manager
- Site Security Scanner
The Email Threat Scanner does a thorough threat scan across all of a customer’s Microsoft 365 email inboxes. It determines any high-risk users, and it showcases any domains that are at risk of spoofing.
The scanner will also provide an in-depth view of any threats that have got through your existing security system.
The Vulnerability Manager provides a scan of websites and applications to find any application security flaws. The report gives information on threats, and provides a risk level assessment with talking points and items for action.
The Site Security Scanner employs a real-time security scan of your network to spot vulnerabilities in patching, antivirus, network security and user passwords.
All of these tools allow you to start a conversation with existing and potential future customers. By showing them where their current vulnerabilities are, you have the opportunity to show how your offering can help make them more secure. That’s another way to unleash MSP success!
Improve Effectiveness/Reduce Costs
When it comes it in-house services you have to leave the ‘do it yourself’ mentality behind.
The goal is to be able to deliver 24×7 security at scale. Doing it all in-house requires a lot of capital and infrastructure. But even then, hiring the right people when there’s a skill shortage can make this all extremely costly.
As an estimate, if you’re looking after around 10k endpoints in-house, the staff and infrastructure required can cost up to approximately $4.5m a year.
Then there’s the cost of scaling-up when you win new clients.
Security-as-a-Service with Barracuda
Barracuda can offer these services as a vendor partner at a much more scalable level.
- XDR/Security Operations Centre (SOC) – Barracuda XDR
- Network Operations Centre (NOC) – Barracuda RMM NOC
- Help Desk – Barracuda RMM Help Desk
- Security Awareness Training – Barracuda Managed Security Awareness Training
Integrate and Automate
To get the best out of a technology partner, MSPs should look for vendors who streamline activities between platforms, solutions and billing.
Vendors who offer PSA integration in order to make your life as service providers easier to manage, easier to buy from and easier to deploy.
Find a trusted technology partner running multiple integrated solutions and multi-layered security. Offering additional external integrations, making it easier to deploy a better fit for your clients.
Moving Forward
To increase profitability, Ken has observed a lot of MSPs swapping out lower margin services for higher margin services. Using the ‘land and expand’ model, and starting with unique differentiating services like Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). These solutions are traditionally more efficient too. By demonstrating the value of these tools over the more basic services such as antivirus and firewall, you’re showing that it’s not just a flashy new tool, and it will provide better protection for your client’s business.
Next steps:
- Evaluate your existing processes and partnerships
- Identify areas where you can improve efficiencies
- Try one of Barracuda MSPs free sales tools to see how it can lead to sales conversations
Unleash MSP Success Q&A
At the end of the webinar, there was time for a couple of questions from the audience.
Q: How does one become an MSP partner?
A: If you have purchased a Barracuda product and qualify in the terms & conditions, that’s it. There’s no minimum spend, and it includes any proof of concept or trial periods as well.
Q: How can we learn more about how MSPs can leverage Barracuda and help them become more efficient?
A: You can read the case studies of how Barracuda has helped to transform their partners’ businesses on their website. There are dozens of case studies listed here from a diverse range of companies.
You can read the partner stories here.
Conclusion
For MSPs that have a lot of vendor partners, it’s wise to see if you can improve your efficiency and profitability by incorporating a consolidated vendor approach. Particularly if you’re finding a lot of support calls occurring due to integration issues.
As long as you’re providing value and covering the common attack surfaces of your clients’ businesses, you can justify the intent to consolidate.
A good vendor partner that will support you in your sales and marketing endeavours is a smart bonus.
Have you made a successful move to consolidate vendor partners in the past? Did this work out much better for you in terms of profitability? Or did it cause some upset with your clients? We would love to hear about it in the comments.
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I'm a small business owner, technical writer and blogger, with 15 years experience in corporate IT. I frequently attend MSP peer groups and create content relevant to IT service providers and business owners.
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