How to make a Load of Cash from a Free Service

One of the best things about working at ExchangeDefender is helping partners realize that they can make great, predictable, recurring income from cloud services. It’s no secret that MSP’s and IT solution providers have been slow to adopt “The Cloud,” but things are changing.

By now you should have heard about the Migration Service that ExchangeDefender has been blogging and talking about through social media, our website, as well as webinars. This new service provides a value added solution to our partners, that no other cloud provider is offering as an included part of their Hosted Exchange platform.

What this means for you, is that the service you have been charged for by others, is now a definitive way to earn additional revenues. Let’s deep dive into exactly how you can price this solution to your customers.

Pricing

There are many ways to price an add-on service such as the ExchangeDefender migration solution. The most common pricing models are, “including the pricing in the recurring monthly fee,” “charging an upfront flat project fee,” or “charging customers hourly.”

Hourly Fee Option:

With the migration solution, adding on an hourly fee for the migration may not be the best option. Since there will be very little, if any onsite tech time, an hourly fee may be harder to justify and may create unwanted questioning by the customer after the job is complete. For this reason, we would advise against this pricing model.

Upfront Project Fee Option:

An upfront project fee has been a very common way of infusing cash into an IT business. Since the migration is included with the hosted exchange platform, there is no cost for the MSP. This means that any upfront fees for the migration are 100% revenues for the business. Many MSP’s and IT providers that currently provide Exchange migrations are just continuing with their normal fee structure. If you currently do not have a fee structure, we outline some ideas and options in the next section.

Recurring Monthly Fee Option:

Many MSP’s are beginning to offer easy payment options built into their managed or cloud services. This option allows customer to signup for services and get the work done, without having to come out of pocket for an initial project cost. The advantage for many is an easier sale to customers, and the advantage of a continuous recurring revenue stream, which continues to grow over time. In this scenario there is no real end game for the customer. Most will continue to pay the monthly fee until they no longer need the service, “and who doesn’t need email?”

Pricing is straightforward. Determine what you would normally charge for this service as a project. We generally see prices from our partners, which range from $200 to $2000+, depending on the size of the user base. ($100 per user is a good start if you are unsure of what to charge.)

Once you have determined this price, it is a matter of dividing that price over the amount of months you have signed an agreement with your customer for. For instance, if you were to charge a $1000 project fee, and the agreement length is 36 months, divide $1000 by 36 to get an add-on of $27.00mo. You can break this down even further by then dividing that number by the total users. If you have 10 users just divide $27 by 10, this means you will add an additional $2.70 to each hosted exchange mailbox for the life of the contract and beyond.

What all of this means for your business is you will make “loads of cash,” and unlike comparative solutions like Office 365 or other competitors, you are not required to handle the migration yourself, or outsource to expensive solution companies that provide services to these vendors. This gives you a major advantage over your competitors, and allows you to build and grow your business even further.

Understanding ExchangeDefender Migration and Support Services

Recently, ExchangeDefender announced its new Migration and Support for Service Providers offering. The very thought of migrating a company’s business messaging solution to another platform (i.e. a different vendor or to the cloud) can send a client over the edge—if not properly informed about process and set at ease by you, the partner. After deciding that your client’s business messaging solution isn’t up to par, it’s your duty as their technology expert to seek out a well established alternative that offers all the features that are required for a secured and compliant messaging solution—namely, ExchangeDefender! But what happens after you found ExchangeDefender and you need to migrate their existing email platform over to ExchangeDefender’s Hosted Exchange 2013 platform? That is where our new Migration and Support Services comes in!

What’s Included in the Migration and Support Service?

By developing the Migrations and Support solutions, we have essentially removed yet another large thorn from our partners’ side. Now you can offer your potential (and existing) client base a hosted exchange solution powered by ExchangeDefender with migration support as well. ExchangeDefender staff will plan and execute the migration of your client’s data and configuration on behalf of your company. This includes:

Pre-migration consulting & assessment;

Configuration check, migration scope;

Schedule migration;

Provisioning new mailboxes;

Adding existing forwarders, aliases, and distribution groups;

Provide migration collateral to end users;

Execute migration;

Provide migration support for 1 week;

Full transparency on everything we do

In essence, all you need to do from a partner standpoint is let your clients know that your Migration and Support Team will be in contact with them to start the migration process as soon as they are ready to cut over services. ExchangeDefender will take it from there!

Interacting with Your Clients

As previously mentioned, ExchangeDefender will take the lead on the migration process as a representative and extension of your company. Your clients will never know the difference. After you submit a request for migration to us, we get the ball rolling for contacting your client directly and starting the migration process. Pre-assignments will be performed and configurations checked. Our Migration and Support Team will then schedule the migration process with your client and provide them with a list of items that will be performed. The goal is to make your clients feel at ease with the entire process and ensure a safe and expedient transfer of all records, emails, contacts, calendar, etc. Again, everything we do will be transparent!

Tell Me More About The Support Service.

With the Migration and Support service, our ExchangeDefender staff will provide ongoing technical and customer service support to your clients on behalf of your company. Operating 24/7/365 and under your brand, our staff will answer any technical or customer service calls dealing with email issues or questions pertaining to their email. If we receive a call that is not related to email, we will log the call into your existing PSA/CRM infrastructure. Don’t have an existing PSA/CRM platform? Check out Shockey Monkey—it’s FREE as well!

How do you know when to kill your migration plan?

Migrations are for the most part painful, tedious, and time consuming. The aforementioned reasons to the left are why nobody likes to do them. But migrations are necessary, be it because of the software enhancements or hardware replacements. Generally, IT Departments have to “sell” migrations to business owners because they’ve made their money not spending it but saving it meticulously. However, they don’t understand that you’re seeing signs of their 5 year old server starting to die and THAT will cost them more.

The most important aspect of migrations becomes communication and to extend beyond that, the communication of expectations. Because if you don’t establish any or incorrect ones, as the service provider, you’ve now effectively under delivered, regardless of what you did. And what’s worse, that under-delivery may cost you a client. The biggest mistake people make during a migration is based around timing. In order to win a bid you claim to be able to do it faster, which you may be able to do, but at that point you’ve likely cut your error window.

By personal policy, I always err on the side of caution; I make sure my migrations take as long as needed to be as smooth as possible. And even then, they’re never smooth. You can come up with the world’s longest checklist and something unexpected will happen. But that in itself is the reason to still come up with that long list, because it’ll still limit the unexpected events.

Now that we have covered the aspect of planning for the unexpected, how do you handle the unexpected when it does happen? The first thing you do is a best effort quantification of its effect of your timelines. Regardless of the outcome of that you let your customers know what happened, what you’re doing, and most importantly what it means to them/their data/their email and how it affects their timeline if any.

The hardest decision to make during a project is when to cancel and regroup. This is tough because of two aspects, you’ll be doubling your work cost and primarily because it’s not really your call as much as you’d like it to be. Our rule of thumb is, if the alternate is NOT guaranteed to be successful we don’t do it. If it causes an outage during primetime for that company, we won’t do it. But ultimately, you must involve the business owner if think you’re going to cut it close and come up with a plan. Luckily on our platform, we have business continuity embedded into all of email solutions so any migration involving our email service will always come with a built in plan B.

Carlos Lascano

What to do when you don’t have to worry about a Migration?

CEO Preface: While discussing and planning the migration and support services you found out during our last webinar, many of our partners were at the same time concerned and excited about what they could do with the time that would be freed up with someone else taking care of support and migration. Aside from the fact that the migration project is done on your behalf and you can (and should and will!) still bill for it, here are some things to think about as we get suggestions from our partners that are on board with this project already.

For many MSP’s and IT solution providers, Exchange migrations have been a long, sometimes frustrating, and tedious task. At times, when things go awry, the migration can lead to upset customers and cause rifts in a fragile relationship, leaving little opportunity to pursue additional sales. This has some IT companies instead, cleaning up, apologizing, and heading for the hills. But, what if you didn’t have to worry about doing a migration? Then what?

ExchangeDefender recently announced a new migration service for partners selling the XD Hosted Exchange platform. This exciting new service will free up tech time and sales cleanup by handling all aspects of the migration from beginning to end, providing immediate revenues and additional opportunities.

It should be no surprise that happy customers buy more. Keeping customers happy through the initial phases of a transition, cutover, installation, or rip and rebuild can be difficult. But, when you don’t have a migration project to worry about, the focus can shift to the customer and less on the work.

This is important, especially for new customers, but even for long time customers where you have built trust. The reason is that often time’s customers can feel uninformed or left out of the process when a project is underway. This is not, by any means on purpose by the provider; instead it is the byproduct of the need to stay within the job-costing model without eating into to revenues when a project goes beyond its initial scope.

So some things to do when you don’t have to worry about a migration are:

1. Focus on The Customer – This can be things like providing regular updates, visiting the site, bringing by lunch or donuts for the office, or just giving that extra bit of attention you may not have otherwise been able to provide.

2. Provide Additional Recommendations- When you aren’t focused on the project at hand, you can take more time to look around and see what else needs attention. Revisit your initial walkthrough and discuss any further products or services the customer may require.

3. Talk with Individual Employees- If there is one surefire way to learn and understand what is really going on with the network, it is to ask an employee. Spend some time talking to employees and asking questions regarding the computers and network to get a better idea of what types of solutions may be needed.

4. Find your next Customer- With all of the time saved not having to deal with a migration project; you surely have time to go find your next cloud customer. Work on your marketing plan, cold calling, or revisit previous customers that couldn’t afford server options.

The one thing that all of these examples have in common is the fact that they all revolve around creating additional revenues. Far too often, IT companies get beat up during a project, leaving little opportunity to drive more sales. One of the many advantages to having the migration process handled by the vendor is that there will be more time for the customer. Beyond this, most IT companies charge for the migration, which creates immediate revenue for the provider.

Building a good relationship foundation with the customer is the key to selling additional services. When projects are handled with a concise, thought out, and well executed process; they are more likely to leave the customer with a desire to continue improvement.

Frank Gurnee

Data Retention: Are Your Customer’s in Compliance?

Data retention and compliance archiving requirements can be a frustrating and easily misunderstood topic, especially when discussing these requirements with customers. What should be understood is that almost every business and organization falls into some type of retention requirement. Whether it is a business that accepts credit cards, or an organization that has employees, a company that deals with financials, or a shop that collects customer information; all are required to maintain records for a certain amount of time to stay in compliance with local, state, and federal laws.

Email, being a significant form of communication and means of transferring data, falls into the retention policy of most laws that require retention of “records.” This makes email compliance archiving a required solution for most businesses.

Beyond regulatory requirements, e-discovery and legal discovery rules mandated by the federal courts, requires compliance with these rules and provides specific limited time to obtain requested records. The cost of e-discovery without a proper archiving and retention policy can be astronomical, considering time and forensic requirements.

Certain industries as well as local, state, and federal governments are highly regulated through legal compliance such as HIPAA for health and patient records, FINRA for financial information, IRS, SOX, SEC, The US Patriot Act, and thousands more. Though other industries are not as heavily regulated, with the vast amount of regulatory laws that are on the books, just about every business is required to comply in one way or another.

The following example is just a small sample of the thousands of data retention requirement laws that are currently in effect.

MSP’s and IT solution companies have a significant opportunity to educate and provide compliance and archiving solutions to ensure customers are meeting necessary requirements. The opportunity provides for adding an additional recurring revenue stream for hosted cloud-based archiving and compliance products, as well as potential project revenue for designing and implementing a company wide retention policy.

While there are hardware-based solutions on the market, the cost of hardware, licensing, installation, and maintenance makes them a much harder sell to customers. Comparatively, cloud-based solutions offer all of the protection, required access, and security without upfront costs, maintenance requirements, and storage limitations.

Though there are a number of cloud-based vendors to choose from, it is important to understand the differences between compliance and archiving solutions from a provider like ExchangeDefender and other cloud solution providers. ExchangeDefender will provide its partners with a Business Associate Agreement also known as a (BAA), which is required for HIPAA compliance. Other providers are quick to point fingers and often times resell 3^rd party solutions branded as their own providing little recourse and protection for their partners. As well, some other vendors are not providing solutions that are hosted utilizing SSAE16 standards and auditing practices and procedures.

Compliance and archiving solutions are becoming a necessary requirement for all businesses. As an MSP or IT Solution provider, standardizing on an offering that includes this critical component is an important step in providing the best protection and service for your customers. Whether a business is micro, small, medium, or an enterprise-sized company, the threat of litigation, government compliance, or imposed fines is always a possibility. On top of all of this, providing archiving and compliance as a standard solution for customers provides an additional layer of disaster recovery by providing offsite and hosted availability to customer email information.

Since very few businesses are in compliance, the opportunity to present and provide solutions to customers is great. Begin educating by marketing compliance requirements through typical marketing outlets, discussing these issues with customers at Quarterly Business Reviews, and including compliance and archiving solutions built into managed service deployments. By providing this level of service you will not only be protecting your customers, but you will be protecting yourself as their IT provider.

How do you make sense of a unified solution?

Many MSPs pride themselves on putting together their own custom stack for their customers because they like Company X for this product and company Y for that product. However, when you have multiple platforms interfacing with either other you’re leaving the door open for possible issues. Our recommended approach is a unified platform.

The biggest problem with combining multiple vendors across an offering starts when these third party applications aren’t playing well with each other and you need help to resolve an issue. We’ve all been part of those conversations unfortunately, where you have one vendor refusing to work with another or they are just not putting forth the effort you’d like to see. This is more common place than we’d like to admit. The root cause isn’t that people don’t want to be helpful. The problem that arises that once your data leaves the first provider’s platform, they’re now looking at the great unknown. And that’s IF the other party wants to help, because there are times when you’ll engage a vendor on an issue and you’ll be stonewalled instantly once your question involves another provider.

So what’s the proposed solution?

A unified platform that you can trust.

You already choose ExchangeDefender for arguably the most important piece of technology to your clients, their email. But we offer more. You can use our ActiveDirectory syncing software (XDSync) to maintain password synchronization between their desktop logins, their email, and the ExchangeDefender products. Upon first glance that doesn’t sound like much, that’s because folks forget we’re more than an anti-SPAM company.

Now you have a synchronized password for your clients:

E-mail

Desktop

Cloud Storage

SPAM Quarantine

Web Sharing

Business Continuity with Contact and Calendar Sync

Compliance Archiving for eDiscovery and long term email storage

Mobile Applications

Those are the positives for your client. If that’s not enough consider this. Next time there’s something up with your client’s Compliance Archive or Business continuity routing, what happens?

You call us, we will resolve it. We will resolve it quickly, efficiently and with as little hoop jumping as possible.

What happens if your email goes down and you don’t know what to do? You call us.

What happens when your clients are having a cloud storage issue? You call us.

Offering our unified platform will simplify your client’s access to technology and your support process. If you have any problems with our services you can always call us. Not an overseas partner of a company we just acquired. We are always here, and more importantly, here for you for our entire platform.

Does this sound good? It should, this is why your clients hire you: they want a single provider they can turn to that can make their IT problems disappear. When there is a problem they count on you and it’s easy to see why you need someone to count on as well.