Cloud

3 ways in which RackNap helps CSPs and MSPs increase profitability and go to market faster

6 Mins read

In the cloud-first and mobile-first era, selling a particular product or a service and then progressing onto selling the next advanced one is not enough, you need to maintain a recurring source of revenue to survive. Cutting-edge competition, dynamically evolving market and customer needs, and digitally transforming industry verticals, require you to be a step ahead and think differently.

Digital Transformation so far, has become the primary focus for most organizations. But, connections + intelligent actions lead to digital transformation.

Now, amidst the quest to digitally transform, companies today are spending a huge quantum of time for making intelligent investments.

Here, cloud and cloud-based products and services are playing a crucial role to drive this digital transformation wave and thus, are providing a plethora of opportunities to the managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud services providers (CSPs). See the following statistics, which shows the rise of hybrid and public IT cloud services revenue and 2X growth opportunity for cloud partners.

But CSPs and MSPs face cloud computing challenges while selling cloud services to small business and large, equally.

They need to consider cloud selling points and find answers to certain questions like how to make money selling cloud services, what are the cloud selling strategies, is there any need of integrated cloud management platform and is there any cloud based digital platform available that helps businesses automate their sales processes?

We have tried to answer some of them in this post.

What skills you need to do well in cloud computing?

The famous quote by poet John Dunne – No man is an island, holds true in business also. Better connections lead to better value creation and increased revenues.

For example, Microsoft allows MSP integration with Azure security and management services and runs Microsoft CSP (Cloud Solutions Provider) and other partnership programs to increase its customer base with the help of its partnership channels.

The symbiotic relationship helps Microsoft reach far and wide to the customers at far-flung places and provides a huge opportunity to the partners to resell Microsoft services, bundle them with their own services, develop their own intellectual property (IP), become cloud managed services providers and thus, earn good, recurring profits.

Cloud Managed Service Providers have a vast opportunity set which is growing on year-over-year basis. As per MSP Global Pricing Survey by Kaseya – a leading provider of IT management and monitoring solutions, twenty-six percent of respondents reported their average annual MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) growth over the last three years to be over 15 percent, with an additional 18 percent reporting average three-year MRR between 10 percent and 15 percent.

The report also stated that the high-growth MSPs are differentiating themselves from their low-growth peers by offering value added services like support, network monitoring, security, inventory management and more, along with the main products.

This means, for earning better revenues, CSPs and MSPs need to outpace their competitors by offering highly useful and customized services. This includes expanding their current service portfolio, bundling the right solutions, selling multi-cloud options and in addition, by optimizing and automating their business operations through business process automation tools to deliver services smoothly, manage billing at one place and manage operations in a better way.

All the above can be done by partnering with RackNap – a business process automation platform that helps MSPs and CSPs automate their business operations and help them boost their revenue. It helps CSPs meet the three important business goals – scalability, costs effectiveness and smooth customer experience with:

  1. Complete automation of business processes
  2. Frontend or marketplace management
  3. A unified and extensible tool for business management

Let’s see what are the principles of successfully selling cloud services and how RackNap empowers MSPs and CSPs to better their business processes and helps them increase their profitability, in detail:

  1. Complete automation of business processescloud management platform

RackNap empowers Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and MSPs with every capability required to run a successful business. One such important capability is – automation.

Automation is a value add to the entire offering. You can’t be different with what you sell, but you can strike a difference by how you sell.

Here, RackNap helps you improve and quicken your selling cloud technology, by managing the complete cloud service delivery throughout customer lifecycle and automation of all business processes from sales, marketing, support, billing, inventory and partner ecosystem.

Automation streamlines all processes, enabling quick responses to customer queries, product or service purchases and billing. In the fast paced cloud world, this speed of service delivery can certainly be a differentiating factor for CSPs and MSPs who wish to lead.

Discussing two, the most basic ones in quick detail here as discussing all would be beyond the scope of a single blog:

  • Support process managementcloud management platform

A smooth system of ticket generation and issue resolution is also important for CSPs and MSPs. The foundation for long term customer relationship is set after the actual sale is done. Once the customer has bought a service, the service provider needs to be proactive in identifying issues and providing quick support.

Remember that positive service feedback will directly dictate your profitability and thus, ROI.

RackNap not only helps you sell services to your end customers, but also helps to ensure customer satisfaction with support management.

The intelligent ticket management system for creation and distribution of user queries ensures that the ticket reaches the right support representative at the right time for prompt issue resolution.

The self-service module of RackNap automatically suggests answers to the customer queries for quick issue resolution through rich knowledgebase integration that you can keep on customizing per your needs.

You can also keep your clients updated about the ongoing maintenance issues through announcements visible in their respective member panels

  • Sales and marketing automation

Cloud changes your business model. Buyers today tend to research a lot before they make a buying decision. Like a buyer today researches about different car models, features and reviews online, so that when he actually goes to buy a car, he knows what he wants and how much is he willing to pay.

cloud management platform

This poses a challenge for the sellers. You need to get engaged with the customer during their buying journey and act fast.

That will happen when your sales and marketing are completely synchronized. Such that, the process from collecting leads from a marketing campaign to taking follow-ups till lead conversion to potential and to eventually making a customer, is streamlined.

Your teams should have visibility into which stage your prospect is, so that you can follow him accordingly and provide him with services he needs, before your competitor does.

Also, selling cloud or any other subscription services generate recurring revenue streams. The recurring revenues are much smaller on a per transaction basis as compared to fresh sales. Thus, you need to balance this out by making more and more transactions, upselling, cross-selling and focusing on more high-quality leads.

RackNap helps you do just that as its marketing and sales module pitches in the right services a customer can go for in the member panel itself, depending upon the services he has. Moreover, it completely manages and automates the sales and marketing processes, including both fresh sales and recurring renewals.

2. Frontend or marketplace management

For any service provider, the most important part of their business is to sell. For selling different cloud solutions, bundled services, or any subscription services, they need a marketplace where their services or products are displayed and where the customers can place their orders.

RackNap as a CSP management solution helps them run their business frontend with complete flexibility, scalability, cost efficiency and automation.

RackNap provides a marketplace that allows service providers to:

  • Sell cloud with end-to-end automation, including public cloud services either from providers like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM-SoftLayer etc. or on your own infrastructure.
  • Update plans and pricing configuration from backend which will be updated on the website with a single click with complete automation.
  • Sell bundled services and set multiple discount options.

RackNap supports both Tier-1 and Tier-2 models of selling, wherein the RackNap customers can sell services directly to the end customers or even create more partners who will then sell services to their end customers.

RackNap, with its state-of-the-art automation and customization capabilities, help you sell services to your customers in a way that they will remember.

3. A unified and extensible tool for business management

RackNap is a vendor- agnostic and highly extensible platform that acts as a unified tool for the cloud and managed services providers to offer a full stack of services by combining their legacy products with the new advanced, cloud solutions.

With it, you don’t have to leverage multiple software to manage different facets of your business, without any automation. RackNap’s diverse modules and functionalities can help you get rid of the mismanagement and manual processing that stem from dependency on different management software.

Bottom Line:

RackNap, by reshaping the way you sell services, helps you earn more customers and build a recurring revenue base. It helps you:

  • Sell traditional services combined with modern age cloud services.
  • Acts as a true multi-cloud service provider platform with vendor agnostic framework, allowing you to sell and manage a plethora of services.
  • Single dashboard support and integration support that help you sell everything under one umbrella.
  • Sell support, professional and managed services seamlessly.
  • Multiple module support to meet all your business needs.

Take a demo of RackNap to experience the functionalities of the platform first-hand. Do let us know your feedback in the comments section.

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About author
Sabarinathan, SVP of RackNap heads product and technical delivery functions. He has over 18 years of experience in the IT industry with specialization in cloud services delivery. He believes that to be successful, cloud service providers need – right business strategy, right automation platform along with skilled manpower.
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