The Four Rs of MSP QBR Success: A Handbook
Building successful sales and marketing strategies in managed services hinges on the strength of the relationships between MSPs and your SMB clients. Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are essential for maintaining these connections, which can often fade due to infrequent interactions.
SMBs might overlook MSPs’ critical role in business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) when there are no immediate security issues. QBRs are a regular touchpoint, allowing MSPs to showcase service value and reinforce importance, discussing cybersecurity, backup health, disaster recovery, and new product features. This engagement is crucial for building client relationships to ensure retention year after year, significantly boosting MSP profitability.
Unfortunately, sales and marketing have traditionally been a sticking point for SMBs, including MSPs – which is why QBRs are so important. Using mutually beneficial QBR strategies, MSPs can drive monthly revenue while protecting and securing client environments. Read on to learn how or download Axcient’s QBR Handbook for MSPs: The Four Rs of QBR Success for an in-depth guide.
Table of Contents
MSP QBR “R” #1: Relationships
QBRs give MSPs a regular platform for strategic discussions with clients beyond mere transactions like equipment purchases and technician training. Conversely, these sessions should focus on understanding and contributing to your client’s ultimate business goals.
Quality analytics over meaningless metrics
Traditionally, QBRs have been extended, tedious, report-heavy meetings that added little value to your client’s business objectives. However, there’s a growing shift towards making these interactions more conversational and collaborative to foster a team-oriented approach toward BCDR solutions and cybersecurity. By emphasizing strategic perspectives during QBRs, MSPs can evolve from being vendors to becoming trusted advisors. Adjusting the approach from “Here are your metrics” to “Here’s what these metrics mean for your business” demonstrates a genuine interest in client success while underscoring your MSP’s commitment to supporting and safeguarding their business.
ABTL: Always be thinking long-term
The relationship between MSPs and clients must be nurtured from engagement through growth to foster client loyalty, retention, and satisfaction. QBRs offer a standardized and customizable framework for MSPs to establish lasting client relationships. For MSPs who have already cultivated that initial connection, these reviews provide an opportunity to strengthen individual engagements, even as your client base multiplies. By highlighting the ROI of a client’s experience, services, and support, QBRs reinforce your MSP’s value, solidifying your role as a capable partner with a proven track record.
Get beyond just BCDR
Open and honest discussions during your MSP’s QBRs cultivate a deeper understanding of the client’s overall business health, future aspirations, and past achievements. This knowledge enables MSPs to tailor strategies and services for individual client goals, even if they don’t think it has anything to do with BCDR. Whether it’s scaling employees or clients, operating in diverse environments, or meeting insurance requirements, industry standards, or compliance regulations, MSPs can help. These regularly scheduled reviews remind clients of your MSP’s exceptional service capacity and genuine focus on their business success. Establishing your MSP as an essential partner for the client’s future increases the likelihood of contract renewals and long-term loyalty.
Stay ahead of potential disruptions
QBRs are an opportunity to proactively address potential issues within the service level agreement (SLA) or identify situations where the client may not be an ideal fit for your services. Maybe they refuse a standard backup and disaster recovery (BDR) service that puts the client and the MSP in danger of a breach. Or they don’t understand the evolving threat vectors targeting SMBs and think you’re reaching for money rather than uninterrupted business continuity. Taking a proactive vs. reactive approach lets MSPs address concerns, make informed decisions, and adjust or select client relationships for mutually beneficial outcomes.
MSP QBR “R” #2: Retention
While relationship building is essential, SMBs won’t stay with an MSP that can’t provide peace of mind. For MSPs, fostering client retention requires a forward-thinking approach, prioritizing adaptability and continuous improvement.
Align roadmaps with SMB goals
Technology roadmaps should remain fluid to meet SMBs’ changing cybersecurity threats and environments. By consistently updating and aligning MSP strategies with client goals, MSPs can strengthen partnerships and promote lasting relationships. Regularly revisiting and aligning the technology roadmap with client objectives during QBRs enables MSPs to stay relevant and proactive. Understanding client business goals and growth projections allows MSPs to tailor strategies effectively, removing pain points and introducing new capabilities that support client expansion.
Highlight the wins
As clients experience successes – whether through effective recovery, reliable support, cost savings, or scalability – they develop greater confidence in your MSP’s capabilities. Highlighting these successes during QBRs while focusing on future opportunities can solidify trust. Discuss new solutions, customizations for client-specific challenges, and clear timelines to help clients trust your BCDR services.
Provide evidence of your MSP’s conscientious work on your client’s behalf. Robust reporting and clear executive summaries enhance transparency and trust by illustrating how your MSP protects each client’s infrastructure and data. Even non-technical business leaders can appreciate the value provided in this format. Simple, clear, and easily digestible reports – tailored to client priorities – best represent the benefits of your MSP’s services.
Pre-plan for IT refreshes
Assessing the lifespan of servers, storage, and network equipment during QBRs leads to timely recommendations for infrastructure updates, such as embracing cloud technologies and consolidating IT stacks. This proactive approach prevents unexpected costs and disruptions, ensuring smooth operations while keeping clients competitive.
MSP QBR “R” #3: Revenue
For many MSPs, limited resources make dedicated sales and marketing efforts challenging. However, regular business reviews offer a prime opportunity to initiate cross-selling and upselling.
Protect clients to protect your MSP
In the current cybersecurity landscape, sophisticated and frequent attacks pose significant risks to clients and MSPs. Some MSPs, aiming to meet various client budgets, offer essential security measures as optional. While this approach might attract budget-conscious clients and create cross-selling opportunities, it also lets clients neglect crucial data protections. This can jeopardize their business and, by extension, your MSP’s reputation and liability.
Increasing regulations and public scrutiny hold service providers accountable for data breaches. As cybersecurity experts, MSPs must advocate for comprehensive, layered security approaches to thwart attacks, prevent data loss, and ensure recovery. A data loss incident can result in more than just recovery challenges – it can lead to severe breach fines, out-of-compliance penalties, and a tarnished reputation that deters SMBs from your MSP.
Teaching over selling
Educating clients about the necessity of comprehensive protection is crucial, especially for those with budget concerns. Some MSPs refuse to partner with clients unwilling to accept their standard BCDR services. Other MSPs require clients to sign a waiver acknowledging the risks and responsibilities of opting out of recommended protections. This often helps clients recognize the benefits of bundled services, ensuring their data is safeguarded against common threats. Of course, if they don’t share your security-first approach, they might not be the right client for MSP growth.
Bundled services security
Transitioning from à la carte cybersecurity to an all-in-one BCDR solution boosts sales and prioritizes client protection. Highlighting bundled services during MSP QBRs supports revenue growth by reminding clients of all the services you provide that they may not be aware of. Bundling comprehensive protection creates a win-win-win scenario: clients enjoy uninterrupted business continuity, and MSPs secure data recovery capabilities while contributing to profit growth via higher monthly recurring revenue (MRR). This strategy draws a robust security-based bottom line that strengthens competitive SLAs and protects your MSP from breach culpability.
>> Read more about bundling: An MSP Blueprint for Profitably Selling Bundled Services
MSP QBR “R” #4: Reporting
For productive and efficient business reviews, MSPs must demonstrate the BCDR strategies clients pay for. Purposeful and easy-to-understand reporting outlines the measures necessary to protect client infrastructure, data, and business continuity.
Modernize reporting
Utilize data security automation to eliminate error-prone manual reporting, which can compromise your guidance and relationships with clients. Automated reporting simplifies the process, reducing technical debt while increasing the frequency and depth of insights into protected BCDR systems, vulnerabilities, and client needs.
Customize Reports
Personalize QBR materials with your MSP’s logo and your client’s logo to spotlight the collaborative nature of your relationship. (There are some valuable MSP QBR templates such as this one from BrightGuage you can use as guidance on creating your own.) Use jargon familiar to both parties within a modern reporting structure that visually emphasizes critical points for discussion. Summarize the services your MSP is providing with a clear and complete presentation of everything included in the client’s contract. This reminds clients of the behind-the-scenes efforts protecting their data, which MSP owners and non-technical leaders often overlook. Connect these points during QBRs alongside your roadmap for future improvements to solidify that lasting partnership.
Prove automation performance
MSPs must present tangible evidence to prove automated BCDR features satisfy cyber insurance requirements, cybersecurity compliance demands, and industry standards. Automation with regular performance reporting builds trust and reliance while eliminating the risk of human error for security, efficiency, and savings. Demonstrating your use and automation results underscores the value of your high protection level, providing clients peace of mind.
Using self-service dashboards, MSPs can streamline client-facing reports to reinforce services and consistently provide new insights to clients. Leveraging high client visibility into their systems and hands-free reporting via automation, MSPs can deliver efficient and straightforward reporting, giving clients the information they need in a format they can utilize.
>> Vendor not automating? Time to upgrade! Download the BCDR Buyer’s Guide
Reimagine the Power of MSP QBRs
As a 100% MSP-focused solutions provider, Axcient continually advances automation and insights to enable new capabilities and higher levels of protection for MSPs. For example, Axcient’s Client Executive Summary Report is an in-depth, weekly overview of your MSP’s BCDR services with custom and white-label options. To demonstrate cybersecurity best practices to external stakeholders, leveraging modern reporting and automation, MSPs can provide proof of daily backup integrity checks, DR testing results, and runbook performance. Not only that, but it’s exactly what you need for successful QBRs.
Download The QBR Handbook for MSPs: The Four Rs of QBR Success to energize your QBRs with a long-term strategy that builds revenue. Get the win-win-win approach to upselling and cross-selling, realize the importance of bundled services, and see how easy in-depth reporting can be.
Author
Related posts
How well could you sleep with reliable cloud-based backups and recovery?
Take a deep dive into Axcient’s proprietary, automated security features to see how we’re ensuring uninterrupted business continuity — no matter what:
