Growing Your IT Managed Services Firm

If you’re looking to grow the revenue of your IT-managed services firm's revenue, you may have many ideas swimming around on your front burner.

The reality is that it’s very hard for a CEO or manager to focus on more than a few front-burner priorities at once.

How Can You Grow Your IT Managed Services Business?

That’s a big question. We could do a multi-day conference on just that question.

But what’s the 90-second answer?

There are two ways to grow your revenue:

1. Get more clients.
2. Do a better job of retaining your existing clients.

If you do a better job of retaining your existing clients, not only do you minimize churn, not only do you minimize clients that are going away, but you gain opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.

When you talk about any recurring revenue-based business, such as an MSP business or SaaS business, it’s absolutely critical to do everything possible to minimize client turnover.

Invest in Delight to Minimize Churn and Nurture Your Evangelists

Look at new clients. And make sure that clients leaving aren’t a significant number to watch out for.

The percentage of churn is going to vary across the board.

But at the same time, client retention is really, really important – not just from a revenue perspective, but in terms of reputational issues, but also because retention can feed more strangers into your sales funnel.

A lot of the goal for “delight” is to transform clients into promoters.

In the age of Yelp, Google reviews, Glassdoor, and all of those other kinds of review websites, negative promoters can be a big problem.

If clients are pissed off, and they leave, it’s not just that you’re losing revenue. It may take a long time to recover from the reputational damage that they can do – which is all the more reason why you don’t want to take on bad-fit clients.

If you see that someone is going to be a problem client, and that person is in the middle of your sales process, you’ve got to do some serious soul-searching as to whether you can fix that dysfunctional stuff that’s going on; that would make them a nightmare client, or whether you need to send that person packing early.

Focus on IT Managed Services Growth with Quality over Quantity

So you really need to take all of this into account. And don’t think that it’s just about closing more sales.

It’s about closing more sales with the right, great-fit clients you could see working with for many years to come – where you grow with them. Where there are opportunities to upsell over time and cross-sell. And they end up becoming your biggest evangelists and your biggest promoters.

If you’re seeing sociopathic nonsense that’s going on during the sales process, those are red flags that should not be ignored.

So your managed IT services growth plan needs to consider all of that.

How are you growing your managed services revenue? Share your thoughts in the Comments box below.