Give SMB Customers An Enterprise Experience

By The Business Solutions Network

Providing certified engineers, 24/7 NOC (network operations center) support, and service level agreements (SLAs) are ways this IT solutions provider meets SMBs’ business needs and achieves year-over-year 30 percent revenue growth.

One of the ways this MSP differentiates itself from “learn-as-you-go” competitors is by investing heavily in vendor certifications, says John Jensen, director of sales, JensenIT.

Photo by David Joel Photography

It’s no secret to most IT solutions providers that there are big opportunities in the SMB market, which is commonly defined as companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. The Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy says that small firms accounted for 65 percent (or 9.8 million) of the 15 million net new jobs created between 1993 and 2009. According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau data, firms with fewer than 500 workers accounted for 99.7 percent of employer firms and 49.4 percent of private-sector payrolls.

Many SMBs operate lean when it comes to hiring IT resources, yet these companies have many of the same business needs and challenges as their enterprise counterparts, including a strong dependency on IT solutions and services that enable unified communications and collaboration, mobility, and analytics. Plus, all these business-critical apps, services, and infrastructure must be highly available and protected with BDR (backup and disaster recovery), security, and business continuity solutions.

Additionally, the SMB market has become a prime target for cyber criminals. The 2015 Symantec Internet Security Threat Report sums up the reason: “SMBs may find themselves the targets of malicious attacks by virtue of the relationships they have with other organizations. For example, a company may be subjected to an attack because it is a supplier to a larger organization, and attackers may seek to take advantage of this relationship in forming the social engineering behind subsequent attacks on the main target, using the SMB as a springboard for these later attacks. SMBs are perceived to be softer targets, as they are less likely to have the same levels of security as larger organizations, which have larger budgets applied to their security countermeasures.”

Jensen Information Technologies Inc. (JensenIT) is an MSP that agrees wholeheartedly with the above message, and it’s doing something about it. Over the past few years, it’s taken several steps to provide its SMB customers with an enterprise experience.

Step 1: Make Certification Training A Top Priority
The IT channel has its share of “learn-as- you-go” companies that have a singular go-to-market strategy: cheap labor rates. These are the same companies that put forth little effort educating clients about new technologies and business threats and opportunistically wait to capitalize on customers’ IT disasters. JensenIT takes a different approach that starts with the way it trains its employees. “One of the primary ways we differentiate ourselves is by having an engineering staff that’s fully certified in implementing and troubleshooting the solutions we sell,” says John Jensen, director of sales, JensenIT. “Our staff averages one week per month in time spent obtaining or maintaining certifications with our core technology vendors.”

To illustrate where this certification training pays off, Jensen shares an example of one of his company’s most common sales items: firewalls and security- related items, which comprise about 30 percent of the MSP’s hardware sales. “The difference with the Cisco and WatchGuard Technologies firewalls we sell and the software-based ones that come with Microsoft Windows is a matter of granular control,” says Jensen. “A software firewall will allow an end user to block all users from visiting Facebook, for example, but a business-class firewall appliance has additional applications that will allow an exception to be made for the marketing department, which manages the company’s Facebook page. Additionally, a business-grade firewall gives business owners/ managers visibility into users’ Internet and application usage.” Offering tools that enable this level of granular control is an important element in protecting companies from security threats and productivity-draining activities, says Jensen. And, having engineers who are properly trained on knowing how to configure these tools is a must-have prerequisite to provide SMBs with enterprise-level IT service and protection.

Step 2: Off-Hours Support Is Essential
Another need SMBs have — especially those prone to shift work such as in manufacturing — is after-hours support. Many VARs and SMBs avoid clients with these needs because it can be costly to a solutions provider to pay for round-the-clock staffing, knowing that support is required only rarely. JensenIT has discovered that partnering with value-added distributor companies like Ingram Micro solves this issue and allows the MSP to provide customers 24/7 NOC and help desk support at an affordable rate. “More and more small businesses have the need for afterhours support, but it’s not feasible for them to have internal IT support available at all hours, and it’s not feasible for us either,” admits Jensen. “Our outsourced NOC and help-desk partner allows us to purchase a 1-800 number, which then enables the partner to respond to after-hours IT calls as if they were one of our employees. These services also are integrated with our ConnectWise business automation software, so we have full visibility into all after-hours support activities and can follow up the next morning as needed to verify the problem was resolved.”

Not only is offering off-hours support an important way to build stickier customer relationships, says Jensen, it’s the key to offering an SLA with 1-hour callback. “Being able to guarantee customers quick resolutions to IT problems and minimal downtime becomes another key differentiator once the customer understands the real cost of downtime,” says Jensen. “This is also another luxury some enterprises take for granted but is a serious pain point for a lot of SMBs.”

Ramp Up Your Efforts To Sell Cloud And Managed Services
JensenIT has been selling managed IT services for about five years, and today about 50 percent of its customers are on a managed services contract. The MSP’s goal is to boost that number to 75 percent within the next couple of years, which will be no easy task. “Through remote monitoring and managed services we can resolve a large percentage of IT problems ranging from printer issues and connectivity problems to cleaning up infected PCs — without the cost of traveling to a customer’s facility,” says Jensen. “Sadly, about half of our customers still don’t understand the value and cost savings that a proactive managed services agreement could offer their business.”

To convert more SMBs over to cloud and managed services, JensenIT is creating a holistic marketing program designed to educate customers about the benefits of cloud computing and proactive managed IT services. “We’re planning to incorporate a variety of methods and approaches including customer success stories and face-to-face meetings and highlighting key benefits such as fixed monthly IT costs and less downtime,” says Jensen. “We’re working more closely with our leading manufacturers and scheduling customer training events where we can educate customers about cloud products and managed services. We’re even incorporating free trials of subscription-based software apps such as Microsoft Office 365.”

A common objection the MSP receives from customers who are skeptical about moving their IT resources offpremises and paying a monthly fee is, “What happens if my Internet service goes down?” While not a common problem, Jensen says his company provides customers with failover options. “For instance, if their main ISP, Cox Communications, goes down, we can configure their service to automatically failover to AT&T’s Internet service. Again, these are solutions and services many enterprises take for granted but not a lot of SMBs can afford. Our vision is to find ways that allow SMBs to have an enterprise experience without breaking their budgets in the process.”