MSP Chat Episode 03 – The MSP of Tomorrow – Sponsored By Quoter

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In this special episode of MSP Chat, sponsored by Quoter, Erick and Rich discuss a vision of the MSP of tomorrow based on Rich’s recent conversation with Janet Schijns of JS Group and how to gain competitive advantage by automating and integrating your sales quoting and payment collection platforms in response to changed buying expectations since the arrival of Covid.

Then Scott Bauer, director of marketing at Quoter, joins in to explore best practices and underleveraged opportunities for MSPs in their quoting, approval, and payment processes

And finally, one last thing. Or rather, *two*: a river of wine in Portugal to go with last week’s $32,000 wheel of cheese, and a profane road sign in Houston that invited motorists to…well, listen to the show to find out.

Discussed in this episode:

Why Stephen Jay Gould is the New Face of the Channel

Quoter home page

Distillery spill floods streets of Portuguese town with wine

Electronic construction sign displays profanity in Houston

Machine Generated Transcription

[00:00:00] And three, two, one. Blast off! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. Your weekly visit with two talking heads talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need. To make it big and manage services. This is a sponsored episode of the show. It’s sponsored by our friends at Quoter.

We’ll tell you a little bit more about Quoter a little bit later on in the program, we’ll have a visit with one of their executives as well, as a matter of fact but this I am one of your co hosts for the show. My name is Rich Freeman. I am chief content officer at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for this broadcast.

Your other co host is our chief strategist, At channel Mastered. He is also my friend of many years, my coworker, my colleague Erick Simpson. A man who knows how to catch a cold and never let it go. Erick, how you doing? Rich, I’m doing better than I was earlier this week, and hopefully by next show I’ll be completely passed.

This little cold struggle challenge that I’ve been dealing with for quite a bit now. Thanks for asking. You bet. And for folks who don’t know, actually Erick had this cold when we were recording the last episode. We didn’t talk about it at all, but that’s it. It’s been at least a week. It’s been over that basically that this lingering cold has been with you.

But yes, I am. I am confident, Erick, by the next time we record a show, this will not be an issue for you anymore. I’m not a quitter, Rich. That’s why I’m hanging on to the call. Exactly. All right, let’s dive into our story of the week here. And this was inspired by a couple of different things, Erick.

A blog post that I wrote on Channelholic, my blog, and also a an interview I did. I was a podcast guest. And this was recorded earlier this week. I was a guest on a podcast called Start, Manage, Grow for MSPs. It’s hosted by Joe Rojas and Jeff Lair. Great show by the way, go check it out.

They were talking with me about something that I wrote for them. for Channel Pro Magazine a few years back when I was over there, and it was about the attributes that the most successful, fastest growing MSPs tend to have in common. And I flagged three particular things that conveniently for me all began with the letter S.

And that was scale, specialization, and standardization. So Scale, you build the business to grow from the get go. So that’s never a barrier. Specialization, like in a vertical industry, for example, is going to differentiate you and standardization in what you sell and your workflows and so on.

It’s going to make you more efficient. And the more I was talking about this with Joe and Jeff, the more it occurred to me that it might be time to add a fourth S to that list, Erick. That S being strategy. And the thinking behind that was inspired by this blog post that I alluded to before. Which was about this giant change that’s taking place in the channel right now.

And this is not a small sort of evolution of the channel. This is a big change. change. And the essence of it is for many years, for about as long as there’s been a chat channel, you as a channel partner, as an MSP, an IT provider, you did a lot of things for your customers. But if you were to stack rank those things, particularly in the mind of the customer, top on the list is you were the person who sold them their software and their hardware.

They didn’t have a distribution relationship. Yep. Even when, Dell. com comes along and they can buy hardware on their own, they don’t know what to buy, they’re not comfortable with that. These days, this whole new generation of decision maker is coming into SMBs, way more comfortable with technology, way more comfortable, purchasing, researching and purchasing it on their own, and it’s easier than ever to do that.

There are marketplaces operated by AWS and Microsoft and many others, and we’re increasingly seeing end users do the transactional part of that I. T. Life cycle on their own. And so now your function as an I. T. Provider changes. You’re no longer that transactional partner in order to you. Add value and be relevant and continue to have a relationship with clients.

Your role increasingly becomes the strategic one of understanding their business pains, understanding the business outcomes that they’re driving for, and helping them use technology To fix the problems and accomplish those goals. That is a strategic dialogue that you need to have.

It’s no longer going to be enough to understand products and applications and hardware and so on. You’re really going to need to be a strategic [00:05:00] IT provider. And I will quickly share a few statistics with you. I stumbled across a Forrester report that came out about a year ago, but I suspect these numbers are still pretty accurate right now.

And it gives you an idea of. How few IT providers to SMBs are maybe in that kind of strategic relationship with their clients right now? 58%. They went out and surveyed something on the order of 450 businesses that sell technology two SMBs, 58% of them strongly or agree or strongly agree that the retention rate for their SMB customers is lower than they would like it to be.

51 percent agreed or strongly agreed that they quote unquote have very little interaction with SMB customers after solutions are purchased. So they sell the solution, but then they drop out of the picture. Meanwhile, it’s over 60 percent of the actual SMB buyers Forrester spoke to said that development, deployment, consulting services, they want that kind of ongoing strategic interaction with their partner.

So lots of good reasons, Erick, why being a strategic IT provider is increasingly important. And some indicators that there are probably some folks in this audience here who could get better at that. Yeah, rich. I think I’ll add another S to the four S is now it’s a seismic shift, right? It’s what is expected by today’s.

More mature and I would argue post pandemic buyer that makes them more reliant on doing their homework beforehand before they make these decisions that you allude to in the article. It’s it’s it’s clear that technology has made it easier and technology is a lot simpler now for business owners and decision makers to do a little bit of research.

I think, I’ll credit Amazon with, leading the charge on the the reviews, right? I shop at Amazon all the time. And what am I looking for? I’m looking for the reviews and what people are saying in the and the and that has allowed us to make better buying decisions.

I think it’s the same. You mentioned, AWS and Microsoft, a lot of. Vendors. A lot of distributors have cloud marketplaces where these business owners are now serving themselves in a more capable way. So the MSPs and the it providers have to adjust. Their value proposition and have to adapt and shift.

And this is an operational maturity a question. No longer can we just be good at technology. We have to be much better at the people part of the equation, that customer experience our value proposition. Has to be about business outcomes and not technical outcomes. If we’re to, continue to provide that additional value, that’s strategery that allows us to sit at the table with our clients and guide their business, their technology business decisions and have a stake in that.

At the table in guiding the budget discussions. So the more operational, operationally mature, we are as it providers, the more that we are in tune with the only thing. That. We may have left as value is that human to human interaction and that guidance, because all of these other transactional elements are being handled either through an automated process by the platforms that we’re integrating ourselves or making it easy for clients to, authorize and purchase.

And that is made less painful that the value that we can deliver is that Birch V CIO VCTO. Function and guiding that business and the decision makers through their business growth by aligning services and solutions in a way that amplify or accelerate that business growth and keep them protected from threats.

And automate and improve efficiencies and workflows for that business. And it is a seismic shift in that area in that regard. And it’s imperative. For channel partners, it providers, MSPs to build that competency. And this means that they’ll have to do things that either, they’re, they don’t like to do the people part of the equation, or they’re gonna have to be really good at building sales and customer support teams [00:10:00] and functions.

And leaders that can have that interaction with these clients. And in my tip of the week, I’m going to, foreshadow a little bit rich, we’ve got to make it easier for the day to day interactions that we do with our clients. To be handled more virtually. Yeah, balance. In fact, you have done such a great job of setting up a segue from the story of the week to the tip of the week.

I was just going to send you straight there right now, because you were talking about. Customer experience and taking friction out of the purchasing process and a different set of customer expectations that exist now and in this era and with these different decision makers, and that is directly tied to your tip of the week, take it away.

So just continuing from that, that, train of thought, prospects and buyers. Expectations and experiences have evolved and, the pandemic was horrible, right? No doubt. It was horrible to go through, but it forced everyone, everyone to adjust differently and adjust their expectations as to, so to get through that experience.

And businesses, especially, and the it providers that supported those businesses, especially. So through that, we accelerated the shift to the cloud for a lot of our clients. We improved and enhanced and strengthen their cybersecurity postures to support hybrid workforces. And I’ve talked about this before on other shows that you and I have been on and other podcasts, rich, and we now are dealing Not only existing clients that have gone through that transition and are now much more cloud savvy, I’ll say, but also the next generation of business leaders that are born in the cloud, that had these expectations. So the tip of the week is to, gain competitive advantage against everyone else that is. Trying to win business from your existing clients and your competitive opportunities with new prospects by shifting more and more of your processes to make it more virtually friendly, more cloud friendly, to align with the new shift of expectations and experiences.

And I will say I’ve, I will, Rich, I’ve trained, hundreds, if not more sales. Professionals and sales teams for, IT providers, MSPs, as well as vendors. And one thing that we tend to find when we’re engaging in a sales conversation or in sales opportunity, the old days, I’ll say the before four times we used to, visit with clients in person and we would, do a needs analysis and we would.

Do assessments and things like that and driving back and forth, putting together proposals and then delivering the proposal and then overcoming objections, then maybe tweaking it and back and forth. And that sales cycle, was extended because of all of that back and forth now. These buyers are more willing to conduct these types of meetings virtually.

I don’t recommend that we do all sales meetings virtually, but for the day to day stuff that doesn’t need a big conversation, clients are just ordering, additional. Laptops or this or that, or maybe even, larger projects. Once you’ve built that trust with them, we can handle those sales conversations and the sales quoting process and the approval process all digitally online.

And it makes it easier for a client. I do sales presentations today, rich, completely virtually slide presentation, do Q and a. And then deliver a quote and proposal through digital platforms. And so we, as it providers and MSPs we’re trying to simplify our processes and integrate and automate our platforms.

But when we ask MSPs, what platforms have you integrated and automated? The typical answer we hear rich are MMS, PSAs, documentation platforms. We rarely hear sales platforms, quoting platforms, payment systems, and things like that. And so You know, let’s extend that perspective. If we’re automating and making it simpler for clients to do business with us, and we’re making it simpler for us to deliver service to our clients, we should also be making it simpler to deliver quotes and proposals to our clients and get them to authorize those in a very simple manner, just like we’re doing everything else digitally, online.

And securely. Yeah. What one of the other things that the [00:15:00] pandemic accelerated was this propensity to do business online. And I’m not even talking about, I T business, right? Just me as an individual. I am way more likely to purchase things. Via Amazon say than I was before the pandemic and so my expectations of what the purchasing process, the research and purchasing process is like those expectations are being set by Amazon and other consumer oriented services like that.

And those expectations are bleeding over. To you as an MSP and the expectations that your client to bring to you. And you really do need to be investing in a new generation of tools, basically that will allow you to deliver the convenient self serve seamless end to end research and transaction process that people expect in all aspects of their life, professional as well as personal.

Yeah, rich. I remember when, I had my MSP practice before, we sold it. We had very strict timelines and that we understood that we had to deliver a proposal or a quote within because it was so competitive, think of today the service provider that makes it easy for clients to do business with them, that gets them quotes and proposals quickly that does things virtually and online, because that is where.

We are moving and you made a great analogy with Amazon people want their stuff now. I actually saw a a comedian on one of the, streaming channels, a special, and they were talking about, prime, they want, people will soon want prime before I want you to read my mind and send me the stuff that I need before I even think about it and then hand it to me in my hand.

As I’m sitting on my couch watching TV. This is where we’re going. It was a very funny skit, but clients want to make decisions quickly. And if you’re not facilitating that as a provider and guess what, if it takes you too long to provide them quotes and proposals and service, that’s how we won a lot of businesses when clients said, look, I’m tired of waiting for my provider to get me what I need.

Can you guys do it quicker? That’s exactly what we’re talking about here. And in fact, we are going to continue that conversation once again, without plotting it out too carefully, we have set things up for the next part of the show pretty well here. We’re going to take a break right now. When we come back out of that, we’re going to be joined by Scott Bauer, director of marketing at Quoter, the company that is sponsoring this episode of the show.

And we’re going to talk a little bit about these different customer expectations and satisfying them through. A quote, sell proposal, et cetera, process that is automated and online and up to speed with expectations here in the 21st century. So stick around. We’re going to be right back with Scott Bauer.

Welcome back to part two of MSP chat, our spotlight guest interview for this sponsored episode of MSP chat sponsored by quoter and our interview guests today. Thanks Is Scott Bauer, director of marketing at Quoter. Scott, welcome to the show. Hey, Rich, Erick. Happy to be here. So for folks who are new to Quoter, let’s just familiarize them a little bit with the company and what you guys offer.

Great. Yeah. So we’ve got a co founder story. Quoter started as a. Kind of a side project from like a software development company here in Vancouver, Canada. And in 2018, there was a name change and they decided to call it quoter. We got the domain quoter. com and they started to go all in on this business.

They saw some really glaring challenges and gaps that MSPs had when it came to their sales process that they thought that they could solve. And fast forward to where we are today. We’ve managed to grow to just over 1500 partners globally, but our core market is in the United States here.

And we’ve got 25, just over 25 integrations and we call our product a quote to cash solution for managed service providers. And tell folks just a little bit about you, your role over there in, in relation to MSP. Please. Yeah. So we are early stage bootstrap SAS, and I’ve been hired as the first marketing hire.

I’m got a wide role of responsibility. Started at quarter about two years ago. And prior to that, I worked for my dad’s business. It was a family run website development company turned marketing agency. Something that he founded back in the nineties. And my time at Quoter has been going by very quickly.

It’s crazy to think that it’s been two years already. And I’ve been developing and executing on our go to market strategy for Quoter. So to bring the right messaging and [00:20:00] defining what Quoter is, and who it’s for, and the problems that it solves. That’s at a high level what I do, but I’m active in our advertising activity or our organic content strategy as well as conferences and events.

I’ve been doing a lot of that this year, and we plan to do a lot more next year. Now you’re relatively new to Quoter. You’ve been there a couple of years or so but you are not, you’re not new to IT. You haven’t been an MSP yourself before, as I understand it, but the family business that you grew up in is an IT related business, right?

That’s right. Yeah. This was a company called Navigator and it started as like a software company and just online publishing back when the internet was very young. And over the years, it changed its service catalog and service offering into more of a marketing managed service company.

But I spent eight years there after getting out of school, and there was a lot of overlapping services. We did, domain management and renewal and email support and a lot of kind of IT consulting. But we had partnerships as well with MSPs that we would refer business to for more specific stuff like that.

Now it’s interesting we’re talking about the family business. You have direct experience with that. I was taking a look at the Quoter blog before we recorded this. And Not all that long ago there was a post that went up there about the pros and cons of running your MSP as a family business, having family members in the business with you.

So this, I don’t know if you wrote that or not, but this is certainly a topic that you have direct experience with from what you’ve seen yourself. What are the pros and cons of bringing in like a common example? A lot of MSPs would love someday to hand the business off to a child, but what are the pros and cons of running an MSP as a family business?

I think it’s very common, whether it’s an MSP or not, it’s very common for small businesses to be family run. Usually it’s, a husband and wife situation and then the kids get involved or maybe it’s passed down. Yeah. Like some sort of succession. And that’s incredibly common. And I see that a lot, even going to the conferences here at It comes with its challenges and it takes a certain type of family dynamic and relationship you think you have to be Really good at conflict resolution and make sure that what happens in the office stays in the office and you’re not talking about it around Sunday dinner.

But yeah, hiring, it’s it can be challenging and you don’t always share the same point of view. I think it can be, it should be something that isn’t taken lightly, I think is the advice there. And Yeah, I it’s always something that we’ve, I think, had really good a strong fit for with our business.

It was not just my parents that were involved but my older sister as well was the project manager and but we were a team of 12, so we had other staff as well, too, that we were collaborating with and we always had a very high standard for service. And treated everyone with respect and it was a very flat organization in terms of like management.

So I think making sure that, when you have a team of that size, it’s important to empower them as much as you can and let everyone know that their voice is heard and they can have a meaningful impact on the business. And I think that’s helped. It really helps with building a strong team.

Yeah. I love this part of the conversation, Scott and Rich, because I do work with a lot of MSPs who are family run businesses. And in fact a few years ago, I worked with a very large MSP that was a family run business. They were very large and they had actually hired another consulting organization.

I was consulting for them as well, because they had a consulting organization. That’s specialized in helping family run businesses. It didn’t matter what industry it was in, but the, and I had a the opportunity to have a lunch with the folks from that organization. And I had never before thought about the unique dynamics and they were sharing with me lift the kimono up about, just the kind of things that.

That happen within family run businesses and the different dynamics and the different challenges and the emotions and all of these other more people focused opportunities that you don’t really think about when you’re just hiring staff and things like that. So it’s a completely different a perception of how to run and grow a business when you’ve got family members and like you said, you probably going home with some of them, or if they’re, cousins or uncles or brothers or whatever, as well, or sisters you’re seeing them at different events and things like that.

What they were sharing with me made me think about, wow, there’s a lot more that goes into, running an organization. With [00:25:00] family members because, and they’ve shared, they shared some horror stories with me as well, right? How things, with some of their clients, they were brought in basically when things had gotten bad and they had to try to recover and restore these relationships.

And it’s, it seems very challenging. Yeah. It trains. It trains a certain type of grit in the power to be resilient. And in, in our type of business, the services change very often pricing changes very often. Technology changes very often. And the needs of our customers were a, always a moving target.

One of the things that would often contrast is, The younger generation that’s in the workplace has a different risk tolerance than the older generation, rightfully definitely, they’ve been in the game much longer they’ve seen the boom and bust of the dot com bubble and how the web has evolved over the years and and that can make you less, or I guess I should say more risk adverse.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it type of mentality, you can be stuck in your ways. But then you’re like, wait a minute, I’ve been running this business for almost 30 years, but there’s some parts of this business that I haven’t challenged in like 10 plus years or certain operational procedures that.

Go unchecked. And and the problems that surface from that don’t happen overnight. They happen gradually and to a point where it can start to erode, profit margin or other areas of the business that you might be misattributing to as well. So I think that if you’re running an MSP or in our case a web agency have to remain as an early adopter of technology.

Rather than a laggard, everyone sits on that adoption curve somewhere, right? At the individual level and then at the company level as well. And it’s important to ingrain that into the DNA of the company, that we’re always going to be trying new things. Sometimes it won’t work out, but we will net out.

If we’re brave and we execute and we iterate and that’s a good kind of ethos to bring into an organization. And maybe one of the challenges that we face with quota as well, too, with the market that we see using our tool and adopting our tool. Yeah, no, that’s that’s a great perspective.

And, you touched several times in that last response about, the evolution of technology. And, staying, abreast of the technology, being early adopters to try to, maintain that competitive advantage. How have you seen the landscape change for small IT businesses like, your family business?

Since you’ve worked there, like what have you seen, how have you seen the landscape change since you were there for those eight years? What’s different? What do you see? Oh my that’s a big question. So we are in the ever expanding internet. And it seems to be accelerating, there’s an incredible amount of tools out there for use cases that we didn’t think were possible, 10 years ago or five years ago.

I think. One of the things that we were always running from, when a new tool or a new process or new technology came out, not many people knew how to do it, and then very few knew how to do it well. And that’s the gap that we were able to fill. And then over time, as that tool or that technology was adopted It would become more of a DIY type of a use case for the small business owner that we were serving.

We’re like we can do this in house. Or, I think I can handle this with my own internal team and it could erode, our value proposition. And I think that as the internet expands that’s very natural kind of how things mature, very complicated things that are new.

Fill that gap first and then as it matures out and it’s adopted by the wider internet and business owners and end users can start to DIY it a bit more that can in turn become a bit of a threat for the services that we were offering. So we always had to stay on the bleeding edge of change and Yeah, that’s one thing that I don’t expect to change either.

Yeah. And let’s apply that, let’s apply that lens to the state of quoting for MSPs today. What kind of tools do these MSPs use? What challenges do they face? And then how does Quoter stay ahead of that and, help improve that, that, that process? Sure. The quoting software, quoting and proposal software category has been around for a while and there’s a ton of tools that do it.[00:30:00]

You could take a cohort of that because there’s going to be some nuances that are specific to managed service providers. Selling managed services has its nuances that maybe a mass marketed tool or a more general quoting tool can’t quite fit. And I can go in detail on what those things are.

But there’s also another element of like integration compatibility. So what other tools do you use in your tech stack that can tie into this tool so that integration, like information is being synced across different tools and you can set up automations to eliminate some of the mundane, repetitive tasks in that sales process.

And then lastly, the other point I would bring. To the table is the recent change of going hybrid and remote. There’s been some like pretty significant operational challenges and management challenges of how teams work, how teams collaborate how teams, do business with other teams and interact with each other.

Slack hasn’t been around that long. Microsoft teams. So the way people get information and get information that they trust online, and the way businesses do transactions between each other has changed quite a bit since The recent pandemic that I think some small businesses are still trying to iron out.

We’re talking about quotes and proposals and people are going to see or hear the name Quoter and think this is quoting software. But as I understand it, I mean that the Quoter platform is a quote unquote, quote to cash platform. It’s not just for the quote and the proposal.

It’s actually for managing that entire. Workflow. So talk a little bit about having an integrated, defined workflow all the way from quote to cash can help an MSP with their win rate, help them close more deals. Okay, so

if an MSP can turn around a quote in a fraction of the time, show up in the prospects inbox before anyone else is bidding on a project, that parameter alone. Okay. It puts the odds in their favor. So speed is incredibly important and the speed problem is twofold. You should not be spending hours on that proposal to create it.

And even for quick quotes that you need to put together it should be done in minutes. We strongly believe that and. When you’re running a small business, the time that you spend is incredibly valuable and there’s opportunity costs. So if you’re spending four hours putting together, a proposal for an RFP and you have to do a few of those a week, meanwhile, you’re juggling a few other quotes that you should do, but you’ve it’s triaged.

It’s a little bit further down on the priority list. And now it’s taking you five days to, to respond to that inquiry. The probability of win rate or success off of that is much lower. And so we really want to tighten that up. If you can deliver the quote and turn it around much faster, you look more professional, you’re sending a positive first impression and the probability that you get selected and closed while the information is still fresh goes up significantly.

So that part’s very important. And the way that the information is presented on the quote to needs to look modern, organized, structured the proposal cover template needs to look really clean and branded. It shouldn’t be like, we can still do it, attach the proposal as a PDF. But we prefer a web view, so the user can interact with the product as well, too.

And we do have some CPQ functionality there, too, where they can add optional items, editable quantities and more recently, radio buttons are single select. Dynamic functionality that you wouldn’t be able to present in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Doc. Is incredibly important and then, of course, collecting an e signature integrated payments so that prospect or customer can sign, accept pay all in 1 session in 1 place.

And it just expedites the process, it. In hours and in days so that you can get going on that project even sooner, you’ve implied an answer to this question to already talking about the value of time to an MSP about having the right tool can expedite the process, allow you to move forward.

faster. Setting aside the whole question of closing deals. What kind of an impact have you seen? Quote to cash workflows have on an M. S. P. S. Operational efficiency and therefore profitability. Can track what services are their cash cows and what ones they’re selling a lot of. And [00:35:00] this is especially true when they are hiring new staff.

They can add them to quota. We have unlimited user pricing, so it’s not going to affect their monthly plan with us. Assign 1 for 5 user levels and they can have instant visibility and self serve. They’re onboarding so they can see the sales history and pipeline. They can see what services and hardware is being sold and to what degree, at what percent does it make up of that business revenue things that the business owner could, remove from that user if they don’t want to share that level of insight or they can show the whole thing, but it gives a good environment for them to.

Get a better understanding of the business and what clients are important. And what ones need to be nurtured without giving like access to QuickBooks online or something. Scott, you’ve talked a lot about, the importance of integration and, e signature creating a platform that allows the end user a little bit more interactivity.

I think these are very important aspects of providing today’s buyers. An experience that, we were not able to execute as easily in the past because, it’s now it’s more accepted. To do sales meetings online and do zoom meetings online. I think, that has the, since the post pandemic era has really fostered this.

New way of doing business, interacting with clients and distributed team members like, MSPs have hybrid workforces as well. And we’re always talking about, integrating our platforms together as MSPs and automating these things. Can you speak to. The opportunities for MSPs to, take that same perspective and, they’re quoting approval and payment processes through quota, that automation we’re always talking about, how long it, we just touched on efficiency, right?

It takes a long time to get these quotes done and things like that. And, not to mention, like you said, some of these quotes, we triage them, but, It’s happened to me in my MSP, and I’m sure it’s happened to many other MSPs where you’ve got your list of things and you’re trying to prioritize, but all of a sudden, something happens that takes you out of the out of operation for a bit, right?

It could be illness. It could be, some something you have to react to. Quickly to go rescue another client, for instance, and so that efficiency and the ability to turn these quotes around is really important. But, can you touch on just the value of that automation for that entire voting approval and payment receiving process and what you’ve seen?

Your partners benefit from just having that component automated, just like all of their other processes. Yeah. Yeah. And to your point, Erick, how things can get deprioritized or life gets in the way and you’re not feeling well at work that day. And then you get backed up on higher, more urgent things if you had drafted that quote, yeah. Yeah. Or say you had published it, but you hadn’t sent it that activity would live in quoter and you’d be able to action it and you could still slack or send a team’s message to another colleague and say, Hey, this is what I have left on this proposal here. Do you think you can button it up and send it off to the client or all of that quote activity being archived.

And present in one centralized place. huge. I’ve spoken to a lot of MSPs in the past that are quoting off of a tool, but they send it out through email. So you don’t see that information is very siloed with that individual. And when that individual, if they do end up moving on or they no longer work at that company, a lot of that quoting activity gets lost right in their inbox when they leave.

And having quotes sent within Quoter, where there’s email tracking, any revisions made to a quote are saved within Quoter, and you can see the breadcrumb and history, and you can roll quotes back you can see it at the client level too, all quotes that were sent to a given client and user attribution as well too, so you can see the history of who sent what quote, and where things have been left off, Is like that in itself is a huge game changer and a huge upgrade for a lot of MSPs.

Yeah. I like the ability to standardize on how the platform allows, everyone to work in it the same way. And so that way, like you say, if someone else has to, pinch hit and get finish up some quotes and things like that it’s all centrally located. The data is [00:40:00] there.

It’s man manageable, one thing that, that I, I know from, working in training, lots and lots of sales teams for MSPs and vendors alike is, the sales professionals, let’s just say they don’t really like working in, platforms, it’s they’re very people oriented.

They’re not very data and checklist and process oriented. Can you speak to. The difference that keeping the interface very simple and intuitive has in getting the sales professionals and, technicians and engineers as well to actually participate in the process and do what’s necessary.

So that we can standardize on the sales process from. From quote to close to payment collection. Yeah. Okay. So if you’re using a quoting tool that isn’t connected to other tools, or the UI is very dated, or it’s difficult to use all of these things can make the quoting experience whether you’re scoping out a project or following up on quotes or the quoting experience can be very unpleasant and a pain in the butt.

It can be a point of frustration. And that is a, that’s very bad because this is the revenue center of the business, and it’s very important that, that process is something that’s enjoyable. If you like it, you’ll spend more time in the product, you’ll learn the products to a higher level and you’ll get more value out of the product.

So the user experience and usability of the software is like top tier level of importance. And it’s something that we hold to a really high standard in our product. And I think that, that’s one of the things that can be challenging for the MSP for change management as well. They don’t like their quoting tool, but the thought of switching into a different process is risky.

It sounds like a lot of work. They’re already up to their eyeballs in work. But yeah, I think Quoter, for one, has, a success team that really offloads a lot of that workload we help with service implementation and making sure the Quoter integrations are set up properly and we’ll bring in your templates and your proposal covers and design them for you and So we tried to make the migration as easy as possible.

But yeah, I think that’s, it’s incredibly important for like the tools that you use. And if you think about the software tools that you use today, you could probably list a couple that you really don’t like, and then there’s a couple that you, you really do and then if you look at your day and where you spend your time, it will bias to the tools that you enjoy spending your time in.

Yeah, we all know that to be true. Again, in I will say in the before four times right before automation and everybody getting comfortable with platforms and cloud and. And virtual interactions and things like that, we used to deliver our quotes and proposals to our prospects and clients, either on paper or, email them a PDF or a word doc.

Today’s buyers have now different expectations. They are now more. Into the online experience. Like we just chatted about a few seconds ago, what challenges do MSPs face if they don’t start adapting to more of this online virtual experience, giving the, their prospects and clients this new way of not only, creating quotes quickly and turning them around, but giving that buyer.

The opportunity to quickly review, maybe comment, mark up and ask for changes or authorizing it without having to, like I say in the before four times, maybe three or four meetings we’re driving out, to negotiate these things back and forth. What are the risks to MSPs that don’t move in this direction and adopt a solution like quarter?

I think it gets to a point where it can start to compromise one’s ability to maintain. A strong relationship. And I think it’s important to consider the I guess keeping the customer at the center, have a, like a customer centric approach to it and think about what’s their experience like, if I’m the client and I know that when I make a request or I’m asking for something of my MSP and they respond same day with a quote and I can sign off on it and approve it right away.

I’m going to be far more likely to contact more frequently. Whereas if it takes a week or even a few days to get back to me I might try and DIY it or try [00:45:00] and find a solution on my own. So it just, by removing the friction that old processes present between the buyer and the seller it just.

opens up a stronger relationship and it lets the MSP free up time so that they can be a bit more proactive with how they can nurture relationships. We don’t want to take away the human element for sure. If you’re selling any kind of professional service, it doesn’t matter if you’re an MSP or not.

The relationship is what drives retention, lifetime value referrals. You lifeblood. So optimize everything you can in the back office so that you can scale the front, just a follow on question or maybe a comment or realization to that, you mentioned if it takes us too long to get back to our clients, a client will then try to find another solution.

We know that from our own experience, my own experience being an MSP, it’s we won so much business. from prospects who were just tired of the time it took for their existing provider to get back to them and support them, right? So I would say another risk of MSPs, not moving in this direction is, when that, when they’re good client, decides to meet with a competitor and they’re using this type of technology and process to get them what they need quickly, that’s a competitive advantage that they have.

on, against their other competitors, I would say. Yeah. Cause it’s, like I said it’s twofold, it’s the opportunity costs too, so you can go on offense more with fewer human resources. So it’s just about internally asking, how can I run this business more efficiently and then how can I look more professional to my clients?

And that’s what we are always in pursuit of at Quoter here. Yeah. And we’re circling around one of my favorite topics in managed services these days, which is customer experience. That really is critical to success in managed services these days, that every aspect of working with the company from the first interaction to the, the onboarding process and beyond is a great experience for the customer.

And a big part of that is having very. Easy, functional convenient tools and that don’t keep people waiting, et cetera, but we are just about out of time, Scott, thank you so much for joining us. Really interesting conversation. Glad we were able to get you on the show here before we move on.

Tell folks a little bit about how they can get in touch with you and learn more about Quoter. Sure. Yeah. I encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s where I’m most active. And you can just search me up there, Scott Bauer, and follow our Quoter company page as well, of course. If you are interested in the software, we’d be happy to show you a tour of it.

Go to Quoter. com forward slash demo. And in 30 minutes, we can find out one way or the other if Quoter can make some meaningful change in your business. Okay. Sounds great. Thank you again. Scott Bauer from Quoter. Folks, we are going to take a break now. When we come back on the other side, we’ll wrap up the show, maybe have a laugh or two, and send you on back through the rest of your day.

Stick around. We will be right back.

And we are back with part three of this week’s episode of the MSP chat. Sponsored by Quoter. We just had a chance, obviously Erick to speak with Scott Bauer from Quoter. Right at the end there we, we touched on that customer experience theme again. It came up before the interview.

It came up in various ways within the interview as well. And as I said it’s become this really important theme to me essentially, and one of the sort of differentiators for MSPs it’s not just, customer service or the services that you provide and and the support that you provide is essential as all of that is.

But this idea of, again, Amazon inspired customer experience, that it’s easy to do business with me, that it feels good. You come away from every interaction feeling good about the fact that, I, as your MSP or IT provider, it really does feel more and more. Important. And that even really almost a differentiator, Erick it’s almost more like table stakes, increasingly well rich.

There, there’s no denying that, the right clients will pay more for a better experience. Everybody wants. A great experience. And, I remember back in the days when, we had our MSP, we had our A, B and A and B clients and our C customers, right before we were making the transition to become we called it flat rate it services back then before MSP came along, [00:50:00] but.

It was the A and B clients were the ones that spent more with us. We spent more time with them, giving them a better experience. The C customers were more of the transactional customers that wanted things, as cheaply as possible and as quickly as possible. In sales, we always ask would you like the best quality?

Would you like it? The fastest, or would you like it at the least costs? You can’t have all three, right? So you’ve got to decide what you want. And it’s the reason why we have. Luxury cars, folks will pay and be loyal to a brand, Mercedes Benz comes to mind, right? You, that experience when you go in to get your, your car serviced, in many cases, the highest price cars have all of that.

Included and the experience of being in that showroom where they, have all different types of beverages and things for you to eat. And they pamper you give you a, a very nice rental car, if they need to keep your car for a few days, that’s an experience that people are willing to pay for.

And in fact, I was reading something online a few weeks ago. was talking about the richest of the rich, right? That have, more money than we can even imagine. Even, richer than the 1%, right? We’re talking here. They now they’re not concerned with material things. They’re concerned with experiences and that’s where they spend their money trying to have these experiences.

I think it’s something that every one of us as human beings craves, even subconsciously is think about it. If you go to a restaurant and have a bad experience, I’m not coming back. But if you go and consistently have a great experience. You keep coming back and the one time where, Hey, that experience wasn’t too great.

Is it going to stop you from going back? No, they probably had an off day. I’m going to give them an opportunity to, to overcome that and come back. And that was the experience that I had with our clients. It’s they understand that we’re going to make mistakes, but if we give them the best experience consistently, and we make a mistake here or there, they’ll give us the opportunity to fix that.

And move forward. So that’s what we’re really talking about here. And the platforms that we’re using and this new, shift towards a different type of buying experience and repositioning the value of our services to our clients in a way that serves that need and makes it easy, reduces friction, gives them what they need quickly, allows us to be much more strategic and thereby raise our rates accordingly because of that experience that we’re giving them.

That’s what it’s all about. Very important topic. I encourage everyone in the audience to think about this in relation to how they’re doing business. Now, look at every aspect of how you work, interact with your customers, deliver services, et cetera, and evaluate the experience, see what you can do to streamline it.

So we thank Scott Bauer again for joining us on the podcast. This leaves us with time for one last thing, Erick, and I’m forgive me I’m indulging myself, I’m actually gonna do two last things because I saw two things I couldn’t resist. First of all our one last thing on the last episode of the show was about a very expensive wheel of cheese, a very big, very expensive wheel of cheese somebody had bought at auction.

What goes better? with a giant, very expensive wheel of cheese than wine, as in 600, 000 gallons of wine, which is what ran down a narrow street in a Portuguese town when a distillery there burst, took about an hour, for an hour 600, 000 gallons of wine running out of this distillery down the street.

I don’t even actually know where it wound up but you can only imagine how big a reservoir you would need to to capture all that wine.

So that’s item number one. Item number two that I enjoy comes to us from the city of Houston, Texas, where drivers recently noticed a a road sign. It was one of those signs that they cart over when roadwork is happening sometimes. And they’ll flash messages at you. And this particular one was flashing back and forth between two messages.

And because this is a family show, Erick I’ll censor the second part of this a little bit But the first message the sign displayed was due to weather, and then it would flash the second part. Go F yourself, except it was not actually F, if now the city of Houston got complaints about this pretty quickly.

They sent somebody out there and fixed it. They were quick to say, this is not our sign. We contracted with someone for this. No word yet on who that contractor is or what inspired them to deliver that message to motorists in Houston. But there’s a little something to cheer up your commute into the office, Erick.

Yeah, not the not the experience you’d like to share with your commuters out there. And yes, the, I saw that article as well with the massive amounts of wine that, accidentally were spilling out of this, distillery or whatever it is. [00:55:00] That’s we did the big Wheel of cheese story on the last show, right?

But I think you need a lot more cheese than, the record breaking wheel of cheese we covered last episode to cover all of this wine. There you go. Folks, you’re gonna have to think creatively about what to do with 600,000 gallons of of wine. There’s gotta be an answer to that question.

Maybe we’ll talk about that with you next week because we are out of time. For this week’s episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, sponsored by Quoter this week thank you to them. Thank you to you for joining us. We’re going to be back again with another episode for you a week from now. Until then, you can check this show out on YouTube.

If you want to check out the audio only version, you will find that on Google and Apple and Spotify and Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re there checking us out, listening to us, please take the time to rate and review. It really does help us get the word out to other folks like you so they can enjoy the program as well.

The producer of this program this podcast is the great Russ Johns who Also a member of the channel master team, you can learn about Russ at Russ johns. com. You can learn more about channel mastered at www. channelmastered. com. And if you want to check out my blog channel hog, you will find that At channelholic.

news Once again, we thank you very much for joining us. We’re going to be back again in another week with another episode for you Until then folks remember you can’t spell channel without msp