How GO-Global Helps MSPs Grow

The Managed Service Provider (MSP) market is poised for growth.

According to Canalys, an independent analyst company, the three primary challenges to MSPs capitalizing on this growth in 2024 are:

• New customer acquisition
• Upskilling existing staff
• Transitioning their business model to enable growth

In this post, we’ll examine these challenges and cover strategies that MSPs can apply to overcome these challenges.

Challenge One – New Customer Acquisition

To acquire new customers without competing on price alone, differentiate your service. The easiest way to do that is to select and target one or two niches, business verticals, or industries where your business already shines and where you have referenceable customers.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but narrowing your focus allows you to “go deep” on what makes your organization a perfect match for businesses in your chosen niche—and it makes your company and services more attractive for those buyers. Additionally, buyers are willing to pay more for a service provider that’s an expert in their business and delivers services that are well-aligned with their business and technical needs.

First, look at your existing customer base and identify each customer’s industry or business vertical. From which industries/verticals/niches do most of your customers come from? Does your region have a significant number of companies in the same vertical on which you can focus marketing and sales efforts?

If the answer is yes, why did your current customers select your company to be their MSP? Do you have expertise in their industry? Do your infrastructure or service offerings align well with that vertical’s needs? For example, do your security offerings and practices meet the regulatory requirements for those verticals? Can you easily enhance your security offerings to further differentiate yourself? If so, you already have a strong value proposition for that vertical plus the potential to make your services even more compelling to those buyers.

An alternative approach is to look at business niches rather than vertical markets. One example of a niche served by many GO-Global® MSP customers is small professional offices, like doctors, dentists, accountants, and attorneys. These companies use MSPs because they lack the technical expertise or staff to support their computing needs but heavily rely on specialized Windows software to serve their clients.

MSPs serving this niche market promote GO-Global’s capability to securely deliver Windows applications that are easy to access from anywhere, or any device, run like a local application, and deliver a great user experience, even over low-bandwidth connections.

NOTE: “Niche market” may sound small—but it isn’t! For example, according to IBISWorld, there are 181,461 dentist businesses in the U.S., with a market value of $145B in 2022. Also according to IBISWorld, there are over 138,000 accounting firms in the U.S., and around 46,000 public accounting firms. Small firms outnumber large firms 91 to 1. The 500th largest firm has about 20 people and $3 million in revenue.

Another niche market with great potential for MSPs is Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), specifically those providing Microsoft® Windows® applications. Many Windows ISVs prefer to apply their technical expertise to adding features and functionality to their applications rather than maintaining an infrastructure to deliver those apps as SaaS to their customers.

Like the dentist and accounting offices noted above, the Windows ISV niche is bigger than you might think. Since Windows and SaaS ISVs are grouped together when reporting industry numbers, it’s difficult to get stats on Windows ISVs only. However, a Microsoft blog post in November 2018 stated that there were 35 million application titles running on Windows 10, not including mobile apps and games, so it’s safe to assume that tens or even hundreds of thousands of Windows ISVs are in business worldwide. A substantial percentage of GO-Global MSP customers tell us that Windows ISVs make up a significant percentage of their customer base.

If you don’t have a significant subset of customers in a specific niche or vertical, simply start from scratch and define your best customer type. What are the primary vertical industries in your region? Examples include hospitality, healthcare, education, finance, and retail. What about a niche industry, like small manufacturing facilities? When you identify likely targets, determine what services are most attractive to these targets, and look critically at your organization to see where you align with your targets’ needs, and where you need to add or enhance the offerings that will make your managed service essential to them.

For an example of a company that started a successful MSP business from scratch by leveraging GO-Global’s ease of management, licensing structure, efficient use of computing resources, and ability to deliver a great user experience, read the case study.

When you identify the best niche or vertical market targets for your company, you’re ready to see how your current services and staff align with your targets’ expectations for their managed service.

Challenge Two – Upskilling Existing Staff

Organizations utilizing an MSP have a similar set of expectations from their MSP’s staff. For example, if the service goes down, they expect your team to get the service back online quickly; they expect consistent high-performance service delivery to every user; they expect responses to their security or regulatory concerns to be immediate, accurate, and highly effective; they expect their service to expand or contract in response to changes in user count at a moment’s notice; they expect an invoice they can understand and prompt and courteous answers to billing questions.

While the expectations listed above are consistent between niche markets, their priority will shift depending on the market. For example, an ISV selling a trading application to brokerages is going to rank security, uptime, and performance as their top priorities, while a school district will value security and uptime over performance. For an ISV with a seasonal business, the ability to quickly add new users is going to take precedence.

To define what’s important to your target market, ask your customers in that market to identify their 10 most important expectations for their managed services provider in order by priority (if they can’t think of 10 items, shoot for at least 5). Ask your prospects, too—they will appreciate the opportunity to tell you what they think is most important to them. Try to get input from 20-30 organizations. The more data you can collect, the better your understanding of how you need to structure your organization and the skillsets your employees will need to brilliantly support your customers.

For complex areas like security, which can cover a lot of ground, ask the customer to be specific about their concern. Is protecting their user data their biggest concern? Is it securing application data in your data center? Is it enabling secure access to an application? Is it compliance with a specific regulation?

Take the expectation data you’ve gathered in order by priority and see how those needs translate into employee skillsets, keeping in mind that customer expectations may align with multiple skillsets. For example, the task of securing application data may be best served by a security expert focused on application access working with a data center security expert. Then look closely at your existing team. Does your team have any experience or expertise gaps? Can you fill those gaps with training? Do you need to add an employee to your team that has specific experience and expertise? Do you need to shift an employee into a new role for which he is better prepared?

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For technical training, turn to the vendors from which you’ve purchased the hardware and software to build out your managed service. Most (if not all) of the technical training they offer is provided in a variety of media and is either free or offered at a reduced cost to customers or partners.

GO-Global provides its customers with detailed documentation, an extensive online knowledge base. technical notes, videos, and email guidance from Support to enable customers to become experts in installing, configuring, deploying, and managing GO-Global. Additionally, because GO-Global is cloud-neutral, and leverages your existing cloud service’s infrastructure and security and scalability features, your team’s learning curve when utilizing GO-Global is considerably shorter versus many other application delivery solutions.

For expertise that you can promote to customers and prospects, you can also take advantage of product certification programs offered by your vendors, which confer expert status on your team and making your customers more confident in your service.

Another area to consider is training in the industry or niche you’ve chosen to focus on. How do businesses in this industry operate? What are its best practices? What’s important to the industry’s customers? Employees who understand the industry they support can better troubleshoot issues because they know how businesses in that industry are run. For customer-facing employees, understanding their customers’ business and vocabulary allows them to better communicate with the customer—which can turn a potentially disastrous customer service call into a positive learning experience for both MSP and the customer.

For industry training, consider asking a customer (or several customers) in your chosen niche to hold an informational session with your team. It’s a great way to let them know that you’re committed to providing them with exemplary service.

Challenge Three – Transitioning Your Business Model

After identifying your target niche market or vertical, take a long look at your business model. Do your services, policies, and pricing align with the niche(s) or vertical industry(s) you’ve decided to target?

Let’s go back to the customer expectations list you compiled to address Challenge Two and look at a few items that could be on your customers’ must-have list. For example, if uptime is a high-ranking concern for your target audience, do you have the infrastructure to confidently guarantee 99.99% uptime? What service uptime KPIs are you comfortable being measured on? For customers that prioritize the ability to build out additional infrastructure, how quickly can you spin up a new server for a customer? What KPIs are you willing to support for adding new servers to your infrastructure?

If security and ability to comply with regulatory requirements is considered essential, will your managed service allow (for example) your medical practice customers to comply with all HIPAA requirements? Can you provide ISV customers with tools that secure their customers’ remote access, like support for Single Sign-On and Two-Factor Authentication? If user experience is important, can you offer a consistently great user experience on any device over any internet connection?

For customers that prioritize 24x7x365 support, do you have the staff and tools in place to speedily troubleshoot and fix any issues, no matter the day and time? If a critical segment of your market wants billing to be simple and straightforward, do you need to streamline your pricing strategy?

Do your customer-facing personnel understand best practice for the companies in your market niche? Can they “speak the same language” as your customers? Can your website and sales team address the challenges the companies in your niche market face and effortlessly position your services as the best solution for those challenges?

As pointed out in Challenge One, MSPs who provide services tailored for the needs of a target market and can demonstrate expertise in that market will find that buyers are willing to pay more for a service that’s aligned with their needs.

How Can GO-Global Help MSPs to Succeed?

Cloud-neutral: GO-Global works with any public, private, or hybrid cloud, so whatever cloud computing platform you use, GO-Global will work for you.

Use what you already have: GO-Global leverages your existing cloud service’s infrastructure and security and scalability features, so you don’t have to buy additional components and tools to deliver Windows applications.

Easy to install: GO-Global can be installed and configured in as little as 15 minutes.

One-of-a-kind security: GO-Global is the only application publishing solution that supports Single Sign-on for Windows applications without the need to purchase expensive, complex, and unwieldy solutions (we also enable two-factor authentication).

Users love it: Applications delivered using GO-Global are easy to access, run like a local application, and deliver a great user experience, even over low-bandwidth connections.

Technical support: GO-Global provides detailed documentation and an extensive online knowledge base, technical notes, videos, and email guidance from Support.

Cut the cost of delivering Windows apps: GO-Global’s concurrent pricing model means that you don’t pay for every user—only those who are accessing the app. And GO-Global fully replaces Microsoft’s multi-session capability and its Remote Desktop clients, display driver, protocol, internet gateway, and management tools.

Want to learn more about GO-Global? Request a demo here, or download a free 30-day trial here.

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