vCIOs color their way to sales and customer success

Dover, Apr 27, 2020 (Issuewire.com) - Lifecycle Insights, a QBR reporting and assessment tool for managed service providers has taken an innovative (and colorful) approach to asset management and assessment analysis. Managed service providers (MSPs) frequently provide more than just IT support for their clients. They become strategic partners and work hand-in-hand with client leadership as their vCIO.

They are responsible for protecting their clients bottom line by way of technology. It would be a rare industry that could be successful without stable technology. The vCIO helps their clients with a strategy around IT needs, keeping a close eye on asset lifecycle management and performing risk assessments to identify potential exposures.

"The notion of a vCIO is not new to the IT channel," says Alex Farling, co-founder of Lifecycle Insights and MSP owner. "But the struggle in the industry has been having quick, accurate asset information to share in an easily digestible format for clients whose industry is not IT."

Alex teamed up with executives from both the world of software development and customer success to solve this problem. After rounds of product interviews with MSPs and beta tests, it became clear to the leadership of Lifecycle Insights that while MSPs had the technical skills to pull spreadsheets and reports to aggregate from multiple systems, they spent hours on that task for each client for each business review cycle. And they were still concerned about the data quality and formatting the data into exec-friendly reports.

That is where the color comes in. Step 1 was to take the manual process of data collection and aggregation and automate it. The developers built integrations to pull data directly from PSAs, such as ConnectWise Manage and ITGlue. Doing this confirmed the MSPs' fears that there was missing data. For step 2, Lifecycle Insights added warranty look-ups which filled in many of the gaps. But most importantly, Farling emphasized was Step 3. "The team built a data quality report in living color to show which clients were ready for a QBR (quarterly business review). It was a game-changer."

That wasn't the only colorful addition. The asset lifecycle report uses stoplight coloring to define when assets or their warranties were nearing or at the end of life. This data and the colors then fed through to the budget forecast.

William Pote, from eTop Technology, says, "Lifecycle Insights is a tremendous sales tool. I show clients the red on the report and explain that for healthy and stable technology we need to get the red out. That notion of red, yellow, and green makes it super simple for my clients to take action." 

Hear eTop's story of the first QBR here.

With colorful dashboard tiles and reports around data quality and asset lifecycle management, the other piece of the puzzle was to color reporting around risk assessments and stack alignment. "It really paints the full picture," Farling concludes. "MSPs have the insights they need to partner with their clients. And the speed at which they get those insights allows for more clients to benefit. We have seen an impact not just in sales but customer success as well."

Customer success tracking is an often overlooked data point. After a recent call with other MSPs, the Lifecycle Insights team built a customer health tracker assessment in the platform. "The next day we showed it to a group of MSPs and had our largest number of sign-ups in a single day." The flexibility of the assessment tool allowed MSPs to identify more qualitative measures around customer health. The stoplight coloring of customer health allows managed service providers to segment customers into those "red" at-risk at one end of the spectrum and those "green" on solid ground. This provides actionable data to increase check-ins to strengthen support of their neediest clients and follow-up for references at the other end.

Managed service providers are no stranger to data and complex reports. The problem is often found in trying to translate that data into action and information that is consumable by their clients. Lifecycle Insights took a step outside the box, the crayon box, to provide a solution.

Media Contact

Lifecycle Insights

[email protected]

302-487-0544

414 State St.

https://lifecycleinsights.io