Analysis of Datto’s 2019 State of the MSP
Datto recently released their 2019 State of the MSP, which surveyed over 1600 MSPs around the globe to learn about their business and to see what, if anything has changed since last year’s State of the MSP. This year’s report provided a wealth of information that we thought would be beneficial to touch on and also show how CompleteCloud specifically helps alleviate almost every problem for our MSP partners that were expressed in this year’s report. You can download the full report here, but we’ll touch on some of the main issues and pain points throughout.
We’ll briefly touch on average MSP size, annual revenues, and their growth plans, to find common trends and patterns, but the bulk of this article will be focused on the most common concerns that were expressed: work/life balance, marketing and sales struggles, revenue growth, and cyber security issues.
MSPs By the Numbers:
Now that we have a little background what the average MSP looks like today, let’s get into the important issues. We always say a customer won’t buy unless they have at least one of these three problems: pain, purchase, or a productivity problem. Now most MSPs may not have a purchasing problem, but many have some type of pain and productivity issue. Our solution, CompleteCloud, provides numerous benefits to our end clients, but our partners also get a number of benefits, most directly impacting the 4 common issues expressed in the State of the MSP. Let’s look at them.
The Pain Points:
Work / Life Balance
38% of MSPs reported that work/life balance being their biggest pain point behind marketing/sales. The nature of being in a service industry is MSPs must deal with problems when they come up, and since many people work outside of normal business hours, that means so do MSPs. A server may go down at 11pm, but the MSP doesn’t get to wait to handle the problem till 9am the next morning. The vast majority of work/life balance problems come from the day to day support and after hour work that is necessary to keep their client’s business up and running.
With Avatara’s CompleteCloud solution your clients get 24x7x365 U.S. based support. You don’t have to worry about clients calling you at 9pm with a simple login issue or an end user getting frustrated that you didn’t answer their support ticket fast enough at 2am. Our data center engineers handle all server management and issues as well. Some MSPs struggle with letting go of the day to day support because they feel they don’t have insight into how their customers are being supported, but that’s not the case with Avatara.
We have a custom-built portal that allows each partner to see valuable insight into tickets, cases, call volume, queue times, new orders, network and system performance, and more. Everything that we see, you have visibility into as well. In addition to our portal, we have a rating and survey system for our support staff that enables end users to rate the support they received. Since launching this new feature, our support team has maintained 94% “extremely satisfied” across our thousands of users. This shows how satisfied end users are with their support, which allows you to rest assured they’re in good hands.
Marketing and Sales Struggles
This is a common theme amongst almost every MSP. Robin Robins has built a very successfully business of teaching and training MSPs and VARs how to market their business and solutions. There are numerous peer groups and accountability groups that simply exist to encourage and hold peers accountable for growing their businesses.
According to Datto’s report, the largest category of annual revenue was the $1M-$5M range at 27%, but 51% were under $1 million in revenue. Getting to the $1 million in revenue is a landmark in any business and every business owner wants to reach it. But with so many different types of solutions out there it can be hard for MSPs to determine on which to sell, find the time to actually start marketing and then be able to walk them through a sales process to convert them to a new customer. That is three very different and challenging issues.
When we launched our partner program six years ago we knew that marketing and sales was a challenging issue for MSPs so we built our Partner Program around being able to support each partner in these specific areas.
We also host quarterly training’s at our headquarters in St. Louis where we talk about the solution, go through sales training, marketing tips and tricks, and then get to discuss with other partners what has been successful in their area and what they’re doing to close deals.
Revenue Growth
Closely tied to marketing and sales concerns is revenue growth. The MSP model is shifting, even more than previous years, to relying on monthly reoccurring revenue. It’s more predictable and substantially easier to grow than the previous break fix model.
CompleteCloud enables our Partners to earn healthy margins every month on every deal. One of the biggest factors that has impacted our partner’s growth is the ability to pursue and target new industries and larger businesses. Most MSPs target the 5-30 user range, but with CompleteCloud you can target businesses with 30-300 users and well beyond. Large deals mean more revenue for you.
See how Centrality was able to get their largest client to date with CompleteCloud.
Cyber Security Concerns
Cyber threats haven’t slowed down and are only becoming more and more of an issue. CompleteCloud is the most secure private cloud environment in the country and protects your clients from any type of cyber threat. Our robust Managed Security platform will keep your client’s data protected and your mind at ease.
If you’re interested in learning more about our Partner Program, sign up for a time below and the rep you will work with will reach out and provide more details and answer any question you may already have.
