How to Measure Your Managed Services Progress
When I visited mindSHIFT (a prominent managed service provider) on August 14, I quickly discovered the company measures everything. Pushing far beyond revenues, operating income and net income, mindSHIFT offered me a range of statistics culled from the company’s business operations. Here’s a look at some key performance milestones at mindSHIFT, and the bigger-picture implications for rival MSPs.
Let’s start with that bigger picture: J. Michael Drake, chairman and CEO of masterIT, an MSP in Bartlett, Tenn., often tells me that his company competes against itself — measuring a range of data points and then striving to beat those data points at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.).
The folks at mindSHIFT, the top-ranked company in our MSPmentor 100 report (2008-2009 edition), take similar steps to gather and promote their business metrics — including (but not limited to) the following statistics:
(graphic courtesy of mindSHIFT)
Turning Numbers Into New Business
Now imagine walking into a client meeting armed with those facts and figures. On the one hand, you want to be careful not to overwhelm your prospective customers with tech stats. But on the other hand, the data points above communicate mindSHIFT’s strong track record managing customer systems.
I wonder: Do you have similar data points at your finger tip for sales calls and presentations?
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A couple other key measurements that I have seen the most successful MSP use are:
# of managed devices per engineer.
Average Hold time at Service Desk/help desk
Average length of time a ticket is open. Speed of resolution.
% of calls resolved first Call.
% of tickets resolved by Level 1 engineer.
% of tickets resolved by Level 2 or 3 engineer
% of tickets the met SLA
% of tickets that exceeded SLA
% of how calls are resolved (remote, onsite, automated, third party)
The goal is to make sure that the team is doing more over the same given period of time.
These are all great measurements and likely needed to back up a discussion with a potential client.
It would be interesting to hear what you think are the typical questions a prospect might ask in order to need to let their prospect know about these stats. When (in the discussion with the prospect) is the right time to bring these kinds of things up?
What are the tools currently being used by MindShift for PSA/RMM etc.?
Hi Mike: I’m not sure they publicly disclose the tools they’re leveraging. But I can ask them about it. I’m speaking with their CEO in a week or so.
-jp