In the competitive world of today’s Managed Service Provider (MSP) market, determining where your company’s growth might come from and how to capitalize on it is often a challenge. Even for MSPs who are fortunate enough to have a clear growth path in an expanding market, creating a comprehensive strategy that drives the entire team in a unified direction can often be an overwhelming task. In this blog, we will walk through our framework for defining your growth model.
A Framework for Defining Your Growth Model
Defining your model to enable high growth involves 3 steps:
- Where to Play: Identify the markets and accounts you want to focus on, and the initial point of view for the portfolio of solutions, products and services that you need/want.
- What to Do: Design integrated solutions and offers to apply and take to the market.
- How to Enable/Win: Implement the systems, processes, technologies, and talent that make it all happen.
Each piece of the strategy creation puzzle can feel challenging and a bit daunting. As your business looks to define its strategy, keep the following customer and market-related questions in mind:
Where to Play
- What are the most pressing challenges and problems to be solved in our selected and targeted market segment(s)?
- Where should we be operating that we are not today?
- Where does the market expect us to operate?
- Which markets are too far away from my core business model to operate in?
How to Play
- What solutions and offers does the market need right now?
- Why is the market looking for those types of offers?
- What solutions does the market expect my organization to provide?
How to Enable/ Win
- How do I differentiate my MSP in these segments?
- What competition exists in this segment with similar products, services and solutions? How will I overcome that competition?
- How is my product or service differentiated?
- How can my sales and marketing approach cut through the clutter?
- How can I create lasting relationships with accounts?
Conclusion
As stated in our other blog, Defining Your Growth Goal and Strategy, a well-defined growth strategy is the bedrock of success. The decisions of Where to Play, How to Play, and How to Win are foundational components of a growth strategy embedded with differentiation and a market-back, market/customer centric focus rather than in inward one focused on “what can we sell them…..?”.