ERP080 - MSP Insights Series 6

You know, if you look back to, you know, maybe some legacy mindsets where this is something that I have to have to keep the lights on versus something that I need to have to be successful as business. And if we see those customers that have that mindset that this is a sheer cost center that's not searching, it's just something that I have to have. That is probably one of the biggest red flags and there's going to be way better partners for them than WBM for that. Welcome to Evolved Radio, where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. The Evolved Radio podcast is brought to you by Evolved Management Consulting. It's our mission to help MSPs increase profit and decrease stress. If you're in the MSP industry and manage people, you should really check out my service manager training course. It's like the missing manual for how to run high performance service delivery teams. Most managers in the IT space have never had any formal training. If you'd like to step up your game and become a successful manager, check out the Evolved Service Manager training course. at training.evolvedmgmt.com. That's evolved with a D as in Delta. Or you can visit my homepage and scroll down to the training section. Today, we're continuing our series of interviews with MSP owners and operators. We peel back the curtain a bit to hear from the people working inside their MSP businesses. We focus on revealing the lessons learned and experiences in building a managed IT service business. Joining me on the podcast today is Keith Dazer, director of data and security with WBM Technologies. Keith came to the technology field from sales and we chat about building a funnel, why selling IT service contracts is harder than selling products and how to manage a skeptical prospect. It's a great episode with a few tips that could help you grow your business. So please enjoy my conversation with Keith. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. It really helps to spread awareness and bring more listeners to the show so we can share the message with more of the community. Now, on with the show. Keith, welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. Thanks for having me, Todd. So, Keith, we're going to be chatting quite a bit about sales and funnel development with you. Your role with WBM, which is uh director of data and security practices and focus primarily on business development, is that right? Correct. Yeah, I'm responsible for the growth and development of our managed service practice for our data and security division at WBM. And WBM is a larger company. Do you want to give us sort of a a scope of the size of WBM as a whole and then the MSP practice, which you guys call data and security within that organization? For sure. So WBM is an organization that's been around since about 1950. We started off selling typewriters and as you can probably imagine, we we don't sell any of those anymore. But really right now we're focused on selling four key things across Western Canada. So we have a data and security practice which you mentioned, we have our end user computing practice, enterprise service desk and our manage print, which is a lot of our legacy business there. With that, we have about 400 WBMers that span Western Canada. And then from a size perspective, we're in that $100 million revenue, north of the $100 million revenue range. And the size of the WBM on that number is is the full company and then the MSP practice, the data and security practice is a smaller subsection of that company, right? For sure, yeah, so from the MSP practice itself, we're around 60 individuals on that segment of the business as well as around $20 million revenue. Okay, and still a very sizable team, very sizable practice even for the the MSP group as well. All right, so a lot to learn here from you guys and I think on on multiple aspects. But I do want to focus a bit on that business development side. Because you guys have obviously had a a ton of success in in growing a relatively against industry standards, a very, very large MSP practice. So, want to get some of the insights and the ideas about how you guys have achieved that. Maybe just to kick things off, you want to give us some perspective, I'm always very curious around people that end up in a sales role. And I I kind of teased this before we started recording, but I don't know a lot of people that set out in their career and say, I'm going to be a salesperson. So I imagine there's always a story about like how someone comes into a sales role. Do you want to give us a bit of your background and your career path into that role? For sure, and I think you're right, no one kind of woke up in grade 10 or whatever, being like, you know what, I'm going to get into sales right after I graduate. I definitely fell into that camp. In university, I I went traditional business route in university and then coming out of graduating. I actually took on a job selling life insurance, believe it or not. And uh realized that I had a a little bit of a knack for understanding what people were looking for. You know, listening to them and understanding kind of how they were buying items and then turning those into successful life insurance sales. And that really quickly transitioned to me taking on a job at Xerox. And so I I kind of figured, hey, you know what, sales is uh fun, I'm really enjoying it. Xerox at that point in time was really known for its sales training program. And I thought what better way to start a sales career and what better way to get into the technology industry. That's brings an interesting point. Like, I've had some basic sales training in the past. And it was by no means anything really intricate, but I would say it's it was more than most get. Like I worked at Future Shop, which as a fellow Canadian, you'll recognize it was kind of like the Best Buy of of Canada before Best Buy bought them eventually. And I was out there selling computers in the retail retail store, but they had actually a pretty decent sales training program. And it it sort of maybe brings the idea that I think more people need sales training. Even if it's just like Sandler or whatever some of those sales programs are. I imagine you were doing some sales before before that training program, but I have to imagine it accelerated your skills quite a bit. Do you recognize that? 100% and I I think I'm not sure if they do it anymore, but we were essentially transplanted into uh, you know, we flew across the country to Toronto. We spent two weeks at a basic training program. And that's all you did for two weeks and there was some of the most uncomfortable situations I've been in in my life. We had to make, you know, cold calls in front of a room of your peers. Oh, wow. And uh I think a lot of that foundation of learning to, you know, hear no, learning to answer challenging questions and learning to be a little bit uncomfortable, helped to set up success longer term as well. Yeah. So you kind of teased that as a a good segue to to the next section I want to ask you about is is building a sales funnel. Right? And again, this is an area that a lot of MSPs and IT service providers, they they need to be able to do to grow their business. But uh it's not necessarily something that as you said, people are are really comfortable with. Uh you guys have built a very successful practice and what would you attribute some of that growth to? How do you guys think about the development and growth of a funnel? So what I will say is that the view at WBM of the how we develop and grow our funnel is significantly different than my first experiences in Xerox. So if I think about initially when I was starting my career, it was very activity focused, you know, you need to do 50 cold calls to generate 10 meetings and that out of those 10 meetings you get, you know, two sales. At WBM, we've really taken a different approach based around something that we kind of hold near and dear from a book called Good to Great. And that concept from Good to Great was actually so popular that Jim Collins wrote a small, I think it's called the novella around it. But it's this idea of the flywheel. And that flywheel is really inspired our whole sales framework and how we go to market. And it's not activity based, it's not about a bunch of cold calls. But ultimately, it's about finding ways to make our customers heroes and have them tell the stories of the things that they're doing. And there's a whole flywheel approach that we have adopted that gets us in position to make our customers successful and tell their own stories and tell their own successes. And that inherently has attracted a lot of customers that share those similar values that you want to achieve the same things. And a lot of our growth has been through that versus uh making infinity cold calls. What does that look like? Is that so I assume you guys are building case studies as reference points for other clients around solutions that are probably applicable in in other areas. Is that sort of sharing those case studies widely and publicly so that you attract people with similar interests? Or is that referral based? How how do you how do you then take that to the market and build build a interest with prospective clients? It's a little bit of both and it really starts off with that idea of having those right customer relationships. And then taking those customer relationships and actually getting in place solutions that are managed. And if we get in place those solutions that are managed, if we find a way to deliver value through those services themselves. And really get rock solid at delivering that foundational layer, we're going to inherently find ways to drive innovation in those customer environments. And those innovations are things that might be specific to a customer, they might be specific to our entire managed services base. But what they do is they generate these wow factor results for these customers. That we can then take and we can achieve, we can actually go out and publish them. And so it might be a outcomes document, you know, we have a lot of those on our website. It might be a social media post, it might be a conference that we're speaking alongside with one of our customers. You know, last week, we had the opportunity to have uh two of our customers from the the city of Regina and Alberta Urban Municipalities. Where they were on stage in front of a bunch of their peers at a municipality conference talking about the work that they were doing. And it's by then taking those wow factor results and using those to make our customers heroes. That it might be through their network, it might be through referrals, but that in turn finds a way to create more and great customer relationships. And that, you know, circle keeps going and going and going. And what we found is it actually speeds up the more we do it. And it actually takes more effort to almost slow that process down like a flywheel than to keep it going. So it's a very organic practice then, right? Just like promoting the great work that you're doing through the voice of the customers and then that attracts people that say, that sounds great, they sound like me, maybe I should go talk to those guys. Is that sort of the the general idea? Exactly, right? And I think that it's almost part of our DNA. Like if we look at how we've hired, how we've grown our teams, that idea of having the right people on the bus that have that inherent customer focused mentality. That are genuinely motivated and interested to create these customer heroes and to see our customers and our our clients grow their careers through the work we're doing together. That fabric and their DNA is really important to even the people we bring on to our teams. Right. So, uh another piece of the sales puzzle here is. MSB sales are quite different than almost any other typical sales. I suppose your your background in in life insurance maybe was slightly applicable to this. But uh selling agreements to clients is much different and I find much trickier than selling just boxes or selling products. And I'm sure you've you've seen this experience of even taking a fairly seasoned salesperson. And dropping them into an MSP to sell value-based agreements to clients is a bit of a tricky transition even for a really good salesperson. Do you have some thoughts on sort of why that is and how you guys approach that? For sure, I first of all agree with you 100%, they're completely different, right? There's a lot of people that are really good at selling things that are tangible that you can kind of hold and you can feel and you know, you can say, okay, well, there's eight gigs of RAM on this computer or there's these real things. Versus a service, which is essentially selling trust. And so we we have seen some of those those folks, you know, struggle a bit when they make that transition, maybe from a product sale to a solution sale. But if they have those right characteristics, you know, we'll find them be successful, it just takes a little bit for them to get ramped up. Some of the differences that that I think come from a client perspective is really the fact that it's intangible. And and there's not something that you can actually point at outside of maybe some SLAs or something like that to provide some comfort, but there's no real thing that or product you can hold at the end of it. And so I think that's a huge adjustment for a lot of people. So I think that you're 100% right, like you're you're you're selling trust. That's actually a great way to sort of frame it and think about this. Like, so in that, as you're prospecting, you know, I think you're the way that you guys build the sales model actually lends to that fairly well. Because if you're having your clients speak about their experience and the success that they've had, that automatically levels up the the trust factor, I suppose. What are some of the other things that you guys try to do in that prospecting cycle or those initial sales meetings to to drive up that trust level? For sure, I think that it actually comes down to working with the right people. One of the things that we did early on, especially kind of before we really started growing, was identifying who our right customer is. And even before we can get trust, it's really important to understand, okay, who do we actually want to be working with, where are we going to be successful, what's going to be fun for our teams, what's going to be fun for our customers? And so we got really granular in terms of what is that right customer for us. And early on in that sales cycle, I think that one of the the biggest things we do is almost try to qualify out people. And look for those, you know, alignments, but also look for those red flags for people that might not be the best fit for the way that we're looking to deliver our services. Mhm. That's a really important factor that I think a lot of people miss. Early on in the sales funnel, I suggest to people like, be very transparent about pricing because if you can scare a person off with pricing, in a lot of ways, that's actually a good thing because maybe they weren't a fit to begin with. I think that that qualification component is is something that that is not leveraged as much as I think people should. Because there's often, you know, in your sales funnel, there's a lot of there's a lot of noise and garbage and uh as people are sort of desperately trying to win all the business that they can, they they tend to drag home a lot of trash with them. You know, you talked about having a reference client of what an ideal client looks like. Are there some other factors or maybe red flags that you would see in the sales cycle that that would potentially sort of earmark someone as not a a client that you you want to continue working with or or want to bring into the fold? For sure. The largest thing that we'll typically find is that there's two camps of clients. And we've seen this over and over again and maybe it's not quite as black and white as this. But really there's a subset of organizations that say, hey, you know what, technology is something that is going to be a tool in my tool belt to be able to propel our organization forward. It's strategic, it is important to our business, we need to invest in it. And there's still and I think it's a a growing camp, a shrinking camp. But there's a small subset of organizations that say, I still see this as a cost center. You know, if you look back to, you know, maybe some legacy mindsets where this is something that I have to have to keep the lights on versus something that I need to have to be successful as business. And if we see those customers that have that mindset that this is a sheer cost center that's not searching, it's just something that I have to have. That is probably one of the biggest red flags and there's going to be way better partners for them than WBM for that. Right. On the flip side of there's an organization that fundamentally believes that technology can be a strategic advantage for them. We get super excited to work with them because we believe our role is to accelerate that. And not just have technology be the thing that allows them to grow or allows them to succeed, but the thing that actually accelerates that. Yeah. More the uh sort of business consulting of like, hey, what could we do here in order to leverage technology? Versus, you know, how much do you guys cost and are you going to be able to close my tickets? Like that what people focus on is is a great indicator as to whether or not they're going to be able to to recognize the value of the services that you're providing, right? For sure, and I think that also, you know, that initial service delivery part has to be there in order to do anything else. You know, we had an interesting journey in our growth where, you know, a couple years ago, we really had kind of a glass ceiling. And we had a a revenue number for recurring number that would go up and down and up and down, but it kind of remained flat. And and one of the most important things to growth, and this might be counterintuitive to a lot of the sales side of things, is actually operations. Yay. Yeah, I know. And you didn't you didn't bribe me to say that. No, operations guy, love it. Yeah, but but but without solid operations, you can win all the customers in the world, but if you have a hole in the bucket, you're just going to keep refilling the bucket. Right. And and so I think that one of the biggest factors to our growth is actually our operations team. Being able to deliver awesome service, being able to keep our customers and then also put in place that foundation so they can actually focus on those transformative things. Because I can tell you from experience, if you don't, if your conversations with someone are around the tickets you're solving and you can never move past that. You're never going to focus on the cool transformational stuff. Right. Yeah, it's that's a really, really important factor. You know, I often say, my expression is is if you can't you can't get service right, the customer will never listen to anything else you have to say. Right, that just monopolizes all of the conversations, they're just so fixated on those things. So I I think that's a really, really important factor. But it also, I think, maybe calling back to your flywheel, the success of a sales and Bizdev team is contingent on the delivery of what they're selling. And this is something that I've seen historically in my work with with sales people is that their level of confidence in the service that they're selling is almost a one to one correlation in their success in selling. Do you find that as well? 100%. And if we look at that, you know, the idea of the flywheel is if any one of those cogs along the flywheel isn't working, then it stops dead in its tracks. And so, you know, I mentioned that area of services being the value and having that in place is one of the first steps in the flywheel. And if that doesn't exist, there's no possible way to deliver innovation or to deliver wow factor results. And so, you know, it's really cool when you start to see in practice where each team contributes along the way. But I once again haven't been bribed to say this, but the operations team is really right at the heart of being able to turn that flywheel. Right. So, maybe an MSP listening to this and and wanting to invest a bit more in your in your sales and business development or, you know, you have a a small team that you're looking to grow. You've started to bring on some some sales people into your team and and I'm curious about sort of what your what you've learned both historically and more recently on enablement of those those sales people. We talked about, you know, it could be someone that doesn't necessarily have a history in sales, maybe some level of exposure. Or, you know, someone who has a great track record selling product, but the transition to value-based agreements is different. What are you guys focusing on or what would you advise other people to think about in enablement of sales and business development for an MSP? I think the biggest thing is finding the right people. And and I mean that in a couple of different ways. The first thing is actually finding people that share those values before anything else. You can teach experience, you can teach technology, you can't teach inherent cultural values. How are they going to mesh with the organization, are they going to align with their customers? Are they going to want to do the right thing? And we've across the whole organization really had a foundation of getting the right people on the bus first. And then finding that spot for them as they kind of grow into those things. When we started building out our go-to market strategy and started to add people to that team, there was this initial instinct to try and organize everything first. And to try and have this giant or chart and plan 15 years in the future and all of a sudden when it's 300 people, here's what it's going to look like. And I got some really good coaching from Brent and Joan, the two the owners of WBM. That really said, focus on the people. And if you focus on the people and bring on the right people, those roles and those opportunities will start to create themselves. And I can 100% say that that is the exact way that it's starting to evolve. We're starting to see these people grow already, we're starting to see them contribute and lean towards different things. But it starting with the right people is really the the foundation of of building that out. Okay. And maybe a final question potentially, unless we sort of drift on to something else. But I'm curious your thoughts on this. That sales and and sort of Bizdev as a as a practice is a bit of science and art. And I think people lean a bit too far to to the idea of like it's personality based and there it's more art than science. What's what's sort of your feeling on on sort of the practicality of that is is sales a system or is it is it leveraged on personality? Like, how do you view that? I think that there needs to be systems around sales, but people buy from people, right? Right. And you know, I think that the idea of this kind of smooth talking salesperson probably isn't who people buy from anymore. Right. People buy from people that they like and that they want to work with. You know, we have a huge focus on really facilitating that customer buying journey. Because the fact is with the internet, with all the posts out there, with the referrals, people kind of know what they want to do before they're even buying something. Mhm. And our role is really to be a custodian of that experience and make it as awesome for them as possible through that process. And if we can do that, it sets our operations team up for success when they're going live, it helps to get those initial flywheel teams going and it's way more fun. And that's the other thing that we, you know, as a team, we really focus on is. If it's not fun, then we probably shouldn't be doing it. There's a a really big difference between growth that stresses everyone out and, you know, no one's sleeping at night and everyone's kind of pulling their hair out and frantically. And then also growth that feels good and produces energy and energizes the team and everyone's kind of excited about the next customer that we're bringing on. And that feels way better. 100% agree. That that does lead to another question. There's sort of this age old tension between the operations team and the sales team. And you know, you're you're heaping praise on to the operations team and in their ability to enable what you guys do. What are your thoughts around sort of that that tension, that historical tension and that relationship between the sales team and the technical team? I think that when you focus on bringing on the right customer, that a lot of that dissipates. Because a lot of the the tension if you think about the historical tension that might exist between those two sides of an organization is the sales team wants to sell a whole bunch of stuff, so you know, you mentioned they bring a whole bunch of garbage along with it. And then the operations team has to support it somehow and they're they're left kind of holding this weird mix of customers, some which are awesome, some which maybe are a lot more of a struggle to support. And so if you can hone in on that ideal customer that you want to support, and it's going to be different for every organization. And that belief is shared between both the operations and the sales team and you really stick true to making sure that you keep that going. That's going to be a really a thing that really reduces that friction between the groups and in fact aligns them completely in moving forward together. Awesome. Yeah, that's great. Anything that we haven't covered that you you think would be interesting to touch on or helpful for for people either growing their practice or starting their practice? No, I I think that this has just been awesome. I I in terms of any last words, maybe the the idea of really bringing the right people on the bus is is probably one of the most important things. And then focusing on the customer and having fun. So if you're, you know, we have a blast with all of our customers, a lot of our customers have become our friends and I would have it no other way. And and I think that if we can continue to do that, if we can continue to have fun with our customers, be part of their careers, be part of their successes and inherently have them be part of our own successes. That seems like a really fun path forward. Awesome. Well, if you've not read good to great, it is certainly one of the business Bibles out there. That's certainly a good one and uh gives you the idea of the the right people on the bus and the flywheel and a lot of these methodologies that you guys are using with great success. So, thanks for coming on, Keith and sharing your your thoughts and and uh experience on on developing and growing a managed service practice. Awesome, and thank you so much, Todd, it's been a lot of fun to be on here.