Earlier this month I was at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect Asia-Pacific conference on the Gold Coast of Australia, along with Liston Pinto and Datagate Telecom Billing – as a booth sponsor of the event. There were 550 MSPs and 30 booth sponsors in attendance, mainly from Australia and New Zealand, and we were pleased to meet up with so many Datagate customers and/or partners from that region.
The overall mood of the conference was positive and the general message was that this is a good time to be a Managed Service Provider (MSP), given the world-wide shortage of IT professionals, the global security challenges, and the fact that businesses of all sizes everywhere are outsourcing their IT Services and Communications Services to MSPs – which brings me to the subject line of this blog post.
Notwithstanding the positive headline messages of the conference, there was also an undercurrent of concern among many of the MSP attendees regarding one of Australia’s major telco’s who has started pro-actively marketing their MSP IT Support Services to their business customers by leveraging their existing voice relationships. In effect, the telco is doing in reverse, what so many MSPs have been doing so successfully for years – extending their existing MSP relationship as an IT Provider, into also becoming the voice provider. Now it’s the voice provider extending into IT!
Increasingly, businesses are choosing to buy their voice solutions and services from their MSP. MSPs who don’t provide voice services to their customers are at risk of losing those customers to another MSP or telco who does offer the full MSP service including voice.
I came away from the conference with the words of the Australian MSPs etched into my mind “Don’t leave voice on the table!“. It’s risky to not sell voice (UCaaS VoIP etc) and yet today it’s so easy (unlike it was in the past).
Other reasons to not leave voice on the table are:
- Voice services provide a stable source of recurring revenue (every business requires a phone system)
- The extra top-line recurring revenue of voice services, increases the valuation of your MSP business.
- By providing a business with IT and Voice services, the customer is more reliant on the MSP and therefore less likely to switch to another provider (ie the relationship is more “sticky”).
- Providing the whole suite of MSP services (including voice) lets you “own” the customer relationship.
- Selling voice is easy to business customers where you’re already providing IT services.
If you are an MSP interested in selling voice services, please contact my team at Datagate Telecom Billing info@datagate-i.com where we will gladly make introductions to white-label wholesale telecom partners in your region. In the United States, this includes partners that specialize in telecom tax and compliance.
Mark Loveys 
September 21, 2022 at 4:35 pm
Great strategic messaging….and I well remember how Telecom’s discounting of IT services to win corporate phone business pinched margins for my client Axon. In the end it bit Telecom hard when a new CEO came in and reviewed profitability across divisions and uncovered a slew of unprofitable service contracts that didn’t add up to any bottom line benefit…in fact the reverse. T.
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