Simplicity Basics

Anyone who has been to an MSP conference or listened to industry podcasts has probably picked up on the recommended strategy of simplicity. Make sure your customers have the same basic hardware, security stack and agreement type, and you make them easier to support. Level 1 techs can do most of the work, you can scale more easily, and you have a better chance of achieving best-in-class profitability.

Simplicity in the Sales Process

Less obvious to technical people, perhaps, is how simplicity translates into a better sales process.

The technical simplicity described above means your offering becomes less customized. If you stick to that, you also have to get used to hearing “no.” A lot of potential customers won’t be willing or able to adapt to your stack, your processes or your way of doing things, and they will say no.

If you can get your people to accept that as an expected outcome, the sales process itself becomes simpler. As Paul Dipple once put it, your process becomes getting through three no’s to get to one yes. That’s right: you should expect to hear several no’s for every yes.

Over time, you start to identify the kinds of customers who tend to like your particular special sauce. You can target your marketing toward those customers, and you can hire a less expensive salesperson because the sales process becomes less technical in nature. You start to grow with a relatively uniform base of customers. In other words, you begin to develop a niche.

The irony is that accepting more no’s can actually make growth easier. Instead of trying to convince every prospect that you can be whatever they need you to be, you get better at finding the prospects who already want what you do well.

Simplicity in Accounting and Admin

Probably least talked about of all are the benefits of simplicity in accounting and administration.

Standard processes and stacks mean fewer vendors to juggle, which makes purchasing easier to standardize. Reconciliation of security tools, backup, RMM and software licenses, a nightmare for many MSPs, becomes much more manageable.

Profitability reporting also becomes easier and more reliable. You can begin to see which customers are making you the most money, which ones are underperforming and which customers may need a price increase.

Projections become more possible and believable. The old phrase “know your numbers” starts to feel like it applies to your MSP. You start to plan for the next tech you need to hire long in advance. You start to imagine more vividly where you will be in five years, and what an exit might look like.

Collections become easier too. If you have a standard way of doing things, your collections person is much more likely to know what was agreed to, who agreed to it and where the supporting documentation can be found. When customer payments start to drift, there is less chasing the owner for documentation or fishing around at the customer to figure out who authorizes payment. Instead, all of that has already been standardized and documented, and much of it was made possible by the simplicity introduced upstream.

This is one of the things I think gets overlooked when people talk about standardization. The benefit isn’t just that your techs can support customers more efficiently. Simplicity keeps traveling through the business. Decisions made in sales eventually affect service delivery, purchasing, billing, collections and accounting.

Next Blog Topic

How reconciling recurring billing can expose the cost of complexity, and how simplicity can turn that nightmare into a competitive advantage that is obvious to your customers.