What Your Brand Should Mean to You

By Shael Risman 1

An all-too-familiar experience: walking through the vendor pavilion at an industry event and getting aggressively barraged with countless products telling you why they will redefine your business. Most of them are indeed effective, but really, are they going to make or break your service offering?

The short answer is — no way. If you want to be a successful MSP, you quickly need to realize that your brand is far more important than any product you use. Certainly you need an RMM tool, a PSA tool and vendors for whatever services you include — backups, AV, etc. They are critical to your efficiency — internally. There is a very big difference. The vast majority of SMB clients do not even know these products (let alone have an opinion or preference). They just want their technology to work. That is what your brand does — it delivers the right result regardless of what’s behind the curtain.

In our many years delivering managed IT services at PACE, we have seen a parade of products come and go. Technology keeps moving forward; some solutions get better and some don’t. We carefully R&D everything we add to our service offering and we build the right processes behind them to ensure that we are always delivering the best result with whatever it is that we are using. It’s those processes that makes the offering unique to your brand.

The bottom line is — as our industry becomes increasingly commoditized, your brand and offering are the only things that can’t. But only if you do it right.

How do you make your brand stand out from the rest of the group? How closely do you align your brand with your products? What does your brand mean to you?