TekDoc

Despite managed service providers’ best efforts to add value to their IT solutions and services, price objections are a reality many have to dealwith, and IT solution provider TekDoc’s customers were no exception. Founded in 2005, TekDoc, the complete outsourced IT Department for growing businesses, made the transition to selling managed services in 2011 and started selling its IT health kit, a bundled offering that includes disaster recovery, compliance, standardized antivirus, VoIP phone services, hosted Exchange email services, and 24/7 monitoring of its customers’ IT assets.

Initially, the MSP charged extra for onsite support, but it quickly realized customers wanted predictable monthly fees. “Before moving to the unlimited support model, we’d regularly be questioned by customers about why their bill was higher during a month where we had to deal with more issues,” says Jason Clucas, director of sales and account management at TekDoc. “Not only was it time consuming to investigate each situation, it created trust issues with some of our clients.”

After moving to flat-rate managed services, the MSP realized it needed to validate the health of its customers’ networks before quoting a price. “We learned to become proficient at conducting strategic IT benchmarking,” says Clucas. “This entailed conducting a full technology assessment of the prospect’s infrastructure, followed by meeting with key decision makers to get a deeper understanding of their day-to-day IT usage. This process also included looking at prospects’ servers, work stations, wireless access points, phone systems, and any tech-related services.”

After completing the assessment, TekDoc would compare the prospect’s environment to other clients in the same industry, and then it would list any updates required before signing an agreement. “This reduced a significant number of billing questions from our customers, but there was still one areawe did not have control over, and that was cloud storage,” says Clucas. “At the time we paid per-gigabyte fees to a cloud service provider, and it was difficult to project customers’ storage growth. In fact, it was common for customers to pay $200 in overage fees for the month, which meant we had to re-audit their storage needs and adjust their monthly fees.”

Barracuda MSP flat-fee cloud storage leads to record revenue growth

Clucas recalls one law firm that was with another IT provider that was not only inefficient, they were nickel and diming them on overages. “Their monthly costs were going through the roof, and the only way we could stop that trend was to work with the client to help them prioritize which data should be left in paper format and which should be digitized,” he says. “This was far from ideal, as it made the document retrieval process very disjointed and inefficient.”

Fortunately for TekDoc, it discovered Barracuda MSP and was able to escape the per-gigabyte storage debacle. “After migrating our law firm customer to Barracuda MSP, we were able to cut their monthly cloud backup spend in half, and we were able to help them convert all of their paper documents to digital and back up everything,” says Clucas.

In addition to improving the customer’s satisfaction, TekDoc was able to repeat the same experience with several other customers in highly regulated industries. “Today, two-thirds of our customers are on a flat-rate managed services program with us, and last year we saw a record 67 percent revenue increase over the previous year,” says Clucas. “Working with the Barracuda MSP team has helped us run our business leaner, and we have a three year growth plan that includes doubling our customer base with focus on specific industries while growing our team to adequately service those new clients.”

MSP Partner resources help win new managed service business

Clucas says Barracuda MSP’s value goes beyond its fixed-price on-premise and cloud backup and disaster recovery offering. “The Barracuda MSP partner portal is another valuable resource we use to find marketing materials, data sheets, and other resources, which we can then rebrand and share with our customers. Each of these resources helps our company articulate the value of Barracuda MSP’s comprehensive business continuity offering and overcome potential objections. For example, since many of our customers are in highly regulated industries, it’s common to receive objections about storing data in the cloud. Once a prospect understands Barracuda MSP’s data encryption processes, the high levels of security they use in their cloud data centers, and other ways Barracuda MSP complies with industry regulations, the objections go away.”

Barracuda MSP played a key role in enabling TekDoc to increase customer trust, says Clucas. “Through the Barracuda ECHOplatform’s ability to backup files and virtual machines, we are able to provide customers with fast restoration times following accidentally deleted files or server crashes,” he explains. “And when these situations occur, our technicians look like heroes to our customers.”