MSPs: Promote YOUR Brand Whenever Possible
There are many ways to brand your business: website, business cards, brochures, social media, and more. One opportunity you may have overlooked is ON the products and services you provide. Are you driving your brand or are you allowing vendors to promote themselves to your clients?
There are plenty of white label solutions available for you to rebrand with your own logo and colors; make sure you take them into serious consideration when you are choosing the suite of solutions for your IT practice. Your clients don’t care about WHO provides the virus protection or back-ups; they just want you to provide products and services that work!
What’s so great about white label product/services?
- Your branding is in front of your clients, in more places, on systems they use every day
- You, the solution provider, hold the end user information
- You can easily move from vendor to vendor for your services with minimal change from the client’s perspective. Your only comment need be “we’ve upgraded”
What can happen if you don’t use white label? Learn from my experience, which includes attempts by some vendors to go around me and market directly to my client base (I wisely seeded my own info on these lists to monitor the vendor shenanigans) and client confusion. Answering questions about why we switched from one vendor to another is unproductive and a waste of their time and mine.
So choose channel friendly white label offerings, which allow you to build YOUR brand and protect your clients. And when you don’t see a white label option in the marketplace, ask for it. It’s our responsibility, as the IT Nation, to drive change and protect the channel.
Are you using any white label offerings? Any new white label products and services on the market?
David Bellini is president of ConnectWise. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsor program. Read all of Bellini’s guest blogs here.
Thanks David.. Just contacted my PC vendor – Seneca Data – they can Private Label PC.Server.Laptops..
David, I even recommend MSP’s go one step further, create landing pages which are hosted on different domain names on differente servers for each of their brands. Awesome for SEO and keyword domination on the search engines. When a MSP can dominate the first page of Google they squeeze out competition to the point that they don’t exist online.
Stuart Crawford
Ulistic
http://www.ulistic-opinion.com
I agree that for MSP’s and VAR’s to flourish they have to stop promoting other vendor’s brands and establish their own identity.
I agree with relabeling services and anything possible with the exception of computer hardware and network infrastructure. I really think this works against service providers as even non-tech savvy customers already have confidence in brands like Apple, Dell and HP. But still slap a big shiny sticker on there that reminds everyone Dell isn’t the company to call when this thing breaks..
@Stuart I am curious, with all the SEO posts and comments here lately, what do MSP’s target in terms of key words to pick up new business. That is, what do you think customers are searching for when they are ready to consume managed services?
Andy Myers
http://www.MyersMathis.com
David, I couldn’t agree more–branding is one of the most important things an MSP can do for their business.
For one thing, it keeps your customers stickier. For another, it signals to your client base that you offer a whole suite of services that you can recommend to your clients based on their business needs. Adding value by delivering and managing a whole IT solution gives MSPs the opportunity to significantly increase their revenue stream.
I totally agree, Sam. That’s one of the reasons that working with companies like yours that allow re-branding is a nice thing (full disclosure – Intronis is a key VirtualAdministrator.com partner).
However I think it’s also important to realize that as MSP our primary value is oursevles. Thus I would say the real branding that counts is what you call your services. As we all know, vendors sometimes grow with the market and sometimes remain stagnant, but our commitment to our customers never should. Thus, if a new tool comes along that is superior to one we have been using, our vendors may change. But what the customer sees doesn’t need to. If you’re running a managed services company and branding your services properly, the brand name should be based upon the expected result, not the product or tool used to achieve it.
Would love to hear some responses from MSP and how they have branded their services…
What do you folks think about branding your Tech’s vehicles? I’ve always let my engineers drive their own vehicles to do onsite work, but I’m interested in the pros and cons of a wrapped fleet of cars. Do you risk looking like the Geek Squad?
Thanks,
David Bellini
ConnectWise COO
I am very much in support of company vehicles. While managing a fleet of tech vehicles is expensive (and the insurance is sometimes even MORE) the ROI is VERY high on vehicle wraps and most employees appreciate not having to drive their own cars. I have always found it cheaper to lease company cars and to issue fleet gas cards then to pay standard mileage rates.
Some of the best clients I had walked right up to a wrapped vehicle to inquire about our services.
On a side note, having used several materials and vendors I would advise the 3M brand for the wrap. You can pay as much as $5,000 to $6,000 per vehicle for a 3M wrap but after years of shopping I found several companies that used the 3M brand and charged only $2,200 total. The wrong material will start peeling off within a year, the 3m product will outlast a 3 year vehicle lease.
Andy Myers
http://www.MyersMathis.com