Managed Services Marketing Has Nothing To Do With You

And by “you” I mean you the service provider

In one way or another I’ve been marketing, or offering, managed services for well over a decade. Whether I’m managing your web presence or writing for your blog or, as I’ve been doing recently for Microserve, working on the marketing plans for managed IT services, I’ve been neck deep in managed services. But it wasn’t until recently that it hit me: marketing managed services has nothing do to with me, but everything to do with the person I’m helping.

The approach “I’m really awesome at what I do, so you should hire me” misses the point in managed services. People assume you know what you’re doing, what people are looking for is “Here’s how what I know/do will help you get where you want to go.” So how do you get there? How do you highlight your value and skills to potential clients? It’s all in how you approach value and your own unique qualities.

Don’t forget to be awesome

You have to be awesome at your craft. There is no getting around that. A crucial part of being awesome is knowing how you help people and their businesses. It’s about understanding your real value proposition. Creating a content marketing strategy that is elegant and brilliant is worthless if it doesn’t drive real business. The value in a content marketing strategy that works is that it drives business not how great the content is. Manage the desktops, help desk, that the rest of the tech a company needs? Cool, but unless it saves money, time, and helps people do their jobs better, it ain’t all that cool. Writing good content, answering calls to the help desk, those are table stakes. They get you into the game, it’s your skill, talent, and value that keeps you there.

This is why you need to remove yourself from the marketing equation. You cover the basics of what you offer. You talk about the services and the technologies, then you have all about value, but remember your services, technologies are table stakes. That’s what gets you into the game, now let’s figure out the magic that makes you better than the everyone else.

Here’s how to start

I’m a big believer in the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas approach. I’ve used it successfully at Microserve and at other startups to help solidify and document business models and value propositions. These are two simple tools (and great books by the way), that help you articulate you business and the value you create for your customers. The folks at Strategizer have downloadable templates of both canvases you can print out to work though as a team (I like the online version of the tool myself).

This post isn’t intended as a lesson on using the BMC for your company, so I’m not going to dive deep into that here (I suggest buying the books). What is essential to get out of this post how important it is to challenge your assumptions about your business model and value propositions. Challenging your preconceived notions will help both your business and value propositions grow and mature.

One of the reasons I love the online version of the tool is the interactive descriptions and questions for each space are a click away. Think of those as argument settlers for “I think a resource is…” conflicts that come up in the process of completing both canvases. When I start working on value propositions I always work through the BMC first, even if we’ve think we have a handle on the business model. Going through filling out the business model creates a solid foundation to build value propositions and gives you fresh eyes on something that you’re probably taking for granted right now.

With the business model canvas completed to at least some degree, you move onto the value proposition canvas and this is where I’ve had the biggest breakthroughs in managed services. Digging into customer segments and value propositions helped us define messaging for technical versus non-technical customers. Are we talking with IT managers who would like to get help desk calls off their plates so they can finish bigger IT projects or the office manager would like to have a single person to call to get new equipment and fix things when they break? Very similar service offerings (help desk and support), but different value propositions (even if only slightly). Each segment needs different messaging and has different reasons for buying if you want to succeed in closing the deal.

When you start looking at your value propositions, you must exclude table stakes. Everyone has certifications, vendor relationships, and core software. What people might not have are things like experience, specialized software, or advanced facilities. What we’re talking about as value propositions are the things that make us different and what solve real problems/pains for customers. Value propositions can be subtle too. Microserve’s Cloud services are in a Tier 3/4 data center (table stakes) in Kelowna, BC (value proposition for the public sector that must keep data in Canada). Microserve’s cloud customers expect we’d use a world-class data center, but what’s valuable to them is that the data center is in Canada. The fact that it’s also within a day’s drive of most of our clients is also a value proposition (for worst case scenarios of driving to the facility to get data onto a drive and bring it back the office), but maybe not critical for many customer segments.

I work on value propositions and customer segments separately. Yes, value propositions match to segments, but when I’ve had groups work through value propositions and had the whole Value Proposition Canvas on screen, people got too focused on how that value prop matched with that segment (and vice versa). Value propositions can match different segments in different ways. While the CFO or CIO might really like to save money, it’s still important to a senior IT manager. Senior managers need to show that they can save money and they are fiscally responsible. Maybe cost savings isn’t the most important value proposition to managers, but it will be important nonetheless. Value props aren’t black and white things either; there are lots of gray areas and overlaps. It takes time to work through the services, gains, and pain relievers for each value proposition. As you work through the process though, getting through all your value propositions, it start to understand what your real value is. And real value is what gets marketed to customer segments.

Think of your customer as a whole person

Working through customer segments with the managed services team, it was very easy to only think about a person’s technology-related jobs, but what about all the other stuff? When we started thinking about all the things an office manager might need to do, value props for saving time and stress started to bubble up. Just taking things off someone’s plate became a value proposition itself. To get their you have to look at everything a customer does, even outside of your product offering. You might get push back at going into this level of depth, but remind people that when we sell and market to a segment, we’re marketing to people and people are more than just how they interact with your product or service.

The best part is the discussion

When I did this exercise most recently at Microserve with our three core teams, the discussion we had was where the breakthroughs came. Debating how one customer segment was different than another; how each product contributed to a value proposition; these helped me write the content for the website and other material. The canvases helped the sales team focus on the right companies and the right roles to get more sales. Most importantly, the exercise forced the services sign to fully define what we offered, to whom, why, and for how much. It was ground breaking stuff for us.

The work isn’t done, of course. I look back on the value props from time to time and gut check my messaging with the sales team to make sure it’s working. These aren’t documents set in stone, but living pieces that grow and evolve with your company and its offerings.

You can’t start with yourself, you have to look outside

Getting people to understand how we position ourselves, getting into the heads of our target customer segments, has been a huge step forward. The process helped me understand how to marketing to people in general better and honed my BMC and VPC skills. Most of all it got us on track. It got us to look outside and not inside for the value we offer to customers.

You can follow me here on Medium and the Microserve blog and learn more about my on my website and LinkedIn.