10 Feb Win New Business With IT Assessments
There are plenty of prospective clients out there that still take a break-fix approach to their IT. They avoid regular IT audits and assessments. They are slow to patch their software or update their systems. They don’t know how vulnerable their systems are until they experience a data breach. These break-fix prospects represent a great opportunity for any MSP. But there’s a problem in selling managed services to these prospects: they don’t know what they don’t know.
The key to converting the mindset of these prospects is to show them what they don’t know. And the best way to do that is by conducting a comprehensive IT assessment and delivering compelling reports that demonstrate the need for your services.
Fortunately, there are tools available for MSPs that make it easy to quickly conduct a wide range of non-intrusive IT assessments and generate purpose-built risk reports that make the case for managed services.
Let’s look closer at some of the IT assessments you can perform to win new clients.
MS Cloud Assessments
Microsoft 365 can be found in almost every small and medium size business. The explosive use of Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive as core business applications is dramatically changing the IT environment. In most cases, these environments are completely unmanaged and unmonitored. There’s a ton of file uploading and sharing, adding users with improper permissions, creating groups with external users . . . all things that may be putting their data at risk.
When McAfee analyzed over 20,00 cloud services, they found that nearly 60% of sensitive data in the cloud is stored in Microsoft Office documents. Of course, Microsoft safeguards its products with high-rated security, but those protections don’t defend against internal risks facilitated by malicious, careless, or ill-informed employees.
An MS Cloud assessment using Network Detective Pro will generate a wide range of reports, including separate assessment reports for Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Azure AD. Additionally, cloud security reports will highlight the need for better management.
Basic Managed Security Service
For broader security surveillance, you can perform basic network security assessments. Even the best anti-virus software and firewalls are not 100 percent impenetrable, and they cannot protect against internal threats. You can perform a comprehensive security assessment, including dark web scan, internal and external vulnerability scans, PII scans, and more to identify a wide array of security issues. Network Detective will automatically generate a series of IT security assessment reports that you can customize, brand and use to sell your managed security services.
Specialized IT Assessments
When you get in the door at a prospect site to perform your IT assessment, you may find additional areas to use Network Detective’s scanning tools to find even more opportunities. For example:
- PCI Assessments – if your prospects sell products or services and accept credit cards, perform a PCI Assessment.
- HIPAA Assessments – if your prospects are in the healthcare industry, or even if they are Business Associates of healthcare providers, they need to be HIPAA compliant. A HIPAA assessment will uncover plenty of opportunities.
- SQL Server Assessments – for prospects with mission-critical applications running on Microsoft SQL Servers, you can run a SQL Server assessment at the same time as your network and security assessment. You don’t need SQL Server expertise or even DBA expertise to run scans or deliver reports with Network Detective Pro.
An IT Assessment is a great way to convert a break-fix prospect to a managed services client. To learn more about winning new business with IT assessments, check out our e-book: 7 Secrets to Winning New Clients with IT Assessments.
