Sell More Prospects on Your Managed Services Offering

A Reddit user recently posted this question to the MSP subreddit:

“We’ve been asked to provide a proposal for managed services. … Our initial feeling is that the IT guy doesn’t know exactly what he has. …. I’m looking for something that might aid me in discovery to make sure we don’t miss anything in the proposal. I know it’s never quite this simple, but something that can crawl the network and say, “OK, here’s what things look like, they have this, this, and this.”

We get variations on this type of question all the time.

In fact, it can be “quite this simple” to capture the layout of a network with Auvik. One of our key features is the automated network inventory and real-time network topology. Install Auvik, add credentials, and we do the rest.

Within hours, you’ll know what’s on that prospect’s network—even the gear they don’t know about themselves. And you’ll know exactly how it’s connected and performing.

4 reasons to use Auvik when prospecting a new account

We encourage partners to use Auvik during the proposal phase with new accounts for four key reasons:

1. Auvik helps you make more accurate assessments and recommendations.

Auvik gives you a complete picture of the network so you can make better, more accurate assessments and recommendations. You won’t get caught by surprise two months into the engagement by something you didn’t realize was there. And sometimes, a quick win here can land you the business.

This is how Thriveon, an MSP that uses Auvik, stacked up during an account evaluation against a competitor who wasn’t using Auvik. Service manager Jake Bloedow tells the story:

“We had a prospect that was having network trouble and they had another MSP there for about a week, spending 14 to 16 hours a day trying to fix the problem. We deployed Auvik at 4:00 p.m. By 5:30, we looked at the network map, saw there were two loops in the environment, called the client at 6:00, had them unplug the two loops, and they were fixed.”

2. Auvik helps you quote accurately.

This helps ensure you don’t have to eat expenses or go back to the client for more money because you found something you weren’t expecting later on. Often, you can also push quoting to lower-level techs if they’re using Auvik.

Jake Bloedow from Thriveon adds:

“From the sales side of things, we sell our switch projects based off the number of VLANs that exist. I can have a non-technical person click into Auvik, click on the switch, see it has five VLANs, quote that five, send it over to the customer, and have it signed without having a technical person involved so they’re freed up to do higher things. It’s a better use of their time.”

3. Auvik helps you look like a superstar.

DJ Forman, the CTO at ITque, says Auvik helped illustrate that his team was extremely experienced and capable:

“When we were in the meetings and looking at the live reports, looking at the visualizations, we were able to—in real time—talk about issues and give [the prospect] answers. We didn’t have to say, “We’ll get back to you in two weeks.” We said, “Let’s log into Auvik together. Let’s do this in real-time.” And within 5 minutes, we were able to show them a vast, deep understanding of their network and show them things that were in their network that they didn’t even know were there.”

4. Auvik helps close more of the right prospects.

Entering into a managed services agreement is a partnership. Your client is trusting you to keep their IT running so they can focus on their core business.

ITque CEO Rob Naragon says Auvik’s visibility blows prospects away:

“When we show a potential client what Auvik can do and how powerful it is, and how we can drill down to specific ports on a switch or certain areas of a network and get really, really detailed information, it just blows them away. That’s one of the closing factors that we have with our accounts.”

But now that you’ve wowed them, you as the MSP are investing your most valuable resource—time—into the client. To ensure success, you need to be sure they’ll actually take your recommendations.

During the proposal stage, one Auvik partner identified an older firewall that was long overdue for an upgrade. The recommendation was made to the prospect. The conversation could have gone two ways: the prospect could take the recommendation or push back. If they said no at the proposal stage, how successful do you think the relationship would be?

How does Auvik charge to prospect a network?

Another question we frequently hear us, “How do I pay to use Auvik for prospecting? We don’t have a contract yet. It’s just at the proposal stage.”

No problem!

Let’s say you’re an Auvik subscriber who normally pays for 40 billable devices across your paying clients. Your new prospect account has 10 billable devices. You run Auvik on their network for five days to give yourself plenty of time to dig around, export a network inventory, and make an assessment.

Let’s assume a 30-day month. So…

• You had your core clients with 40 billables on the account for the entire month
• You had an additional 10 billables on the account for 5 days
• That averages out to 41.6 billables for the month

… and that’s the usage you’re charged for the month.

We round to the closest billable so you’d pay for 42 billables that month. In other words, your 5 days of prospecting for that one client works out to an extremely modest charge. In some cases, it might work out that you pay nothing extra at all.

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