Understanding Your Managed IT Services Competitive Landscape

[GlennBarley]

Original post at: MSP Blog

Welcome back to our MSP Sales Success blog series, a collection of posts that dive deep into the sales journey and answer what you've been asking for some time: "How do I sell managed services?"! When we last left you, you had just started to learn more about the managed IT services sales process and its individual stages. Next up, we review one of the steps you have to take when laying the groundwork for a successful sale. Do you know who you're up against? In the following post, we'll teach you how to understand the competitive landscape in your local area.

NOTE: This series is designed to walk you through the MSP sales journey, from start to finish. Before researching your competitors, however, make sure you understand your unique selling proposition (USP) - also commonly known as your value proposition. We've already written on this subject matter and so have excluded it from the series, but please check out our explanation of how to set unique selling propositions as an MSP when you get the chance.

Now, on to the task at hand...

Learning about your local competition is a never-ending process and as such, the competitive analysis section of your business plan must continually be revisited and updated. If you haven't refreshed your competitive documentation recently, here are some tips.

Who Are We Talking About?

The Competition
These are the other MSPs serving your same area. You likely know some of these names. Maybe you have dart boards with their logos attached. Whether you're familiar with the local competition or not, don't skip over this step when researching the landscape. New competitors can easily emerge, and you may find a few names slipped under your radar.

To cover your tracks, start by opening up Google and searching any of the following terms:

"managed services [INSERT CITY NAME]"
"IT service provider [INSERT CITY NAME]"
best IT services [INSERT CITY NAME]"
You can even get more targeted and narrow the radius further by specifying the name of a suburb or town within the larger city. For example, if I wanted to find an MSP within 10 miles of my office, I could search "IT services cranberry township" instead of "IT services pittsburgh."

Then, note the companies that show up in the top organic - meaning listings that aren't ads - search results, and copy these names into an Excel spreadsheet. You'll populate that sheet with the rest of your competitive findings.

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**Their Company Size and Demographics cs

Now that you know who your competitors are, let's find out a little more about them. There are a myriad of sources to help you build comprehensive portfolios for each of these companies.

LinkedIn
I like to start with LinkedIn. For each of the competitor companies you've flagged above, search within this social networking tool. I've found that people on LinkedIn are often proud of their careers and associate themselves to the company they work for. How does this information help? Not only does it offer a window into the professional experiences and credentials of key players within that organization, it also helps reveal how big your competitors are.

Here are two takeaways you may be faced with in comparing the size of your own MSP business:

You're larger than a competitor:

Let's say you have 30 employees as opposed to one competitive company's two. In later communications with prospects who may mention this other company, you can make the argument that this competitor won't be viable enough to truly manage their IT infrastructure needs.

You're smaller than a competitor:

If you find yourself on the opposite end of the spectrum, however, you can argue that you'll be able to deliver more specialized service and support. Unlike your competitor, your prospect wouldn't just be one of many accounts. Instead, they'd be a key client for you. Remember, people like to feel special.

Manta
Once you pull your preliminary competitive research from LinkedIn, cross-check that data using Manta. Manta is like another version of Hoovers and Dun & Bradstreet. It’s a free tool, and while the information is not always 100% accurate, when combined with LinkedIn, it can help you understand the number of employees that a competitive organization may have. Additionally, Manta categorizes the business's service, indicates how long the company has been around and gives an estimate for the organization's annual revenue. This last figure especially can give you a rough idea of how healthy and how much of a threat your competitor is.

Keep reading!