By Rustom Hiramaneck, General Manager – South Asia at Acronis
Regardless of industry, every business aims to maximize profit margins while balancing low expenditures and high quality of services. Keeping this balance is one of the hardest challenges industry leaders will experience; many organizations either sacrifice quality and services for lower operational costs or invest too much in polishing their products while their profit margins suffer. Managed service providers (MSPs) are no exception to this rule, and last year, we added over 3,500 new service providers to our partner program, a personal record for our company. With our partner program, we aim to guarantee the success and growth of our partners, allocating resources such as product training, sales and marketing tools, personalized support, and more.
At Acronis, we want to ensure the success of our partners, so I’m going to take a few minutes of your time to discuss the key methods we provide our MSP partners with to maximize profits while optimizing costs: reach, footprint, yield, costs, and margin. While the following methods were established specifically for managed service providers using our partner program, these insights can be beneficial regardless of industry if applied broadly, while giving a peek into how Acronis has grown into the successful, leading cyber protection provider it is today.
Broaden your market reach
The first and most important step businesses must take is to increase their reach. There are several different methods to do this, with promotions, targeted ads, and broad advertising all offering broadened exposure, catching a widened net to catch whatever is possible. There are several other ways to increase a business’s reach, however, depending on the industry—MSPs, for example, can take advantage of Acronis’ #TeamUp Program, which connects providers to big names in sports. This program greatly boosts service providers’ brand recognition, putting their name and logo on playing fields and even on national TV. Offering unique services and differentiating yourself from the competition is another effective way to increase your reach, singling out what features separate you from the rest, and informing potential users why they should choose your product or service.
Next, your footprint, which is how your services or products benefit your users and leaves an impression, starts with your knowledge of your current customer base. This involves how many workloads they have, which types of workloads, the state of their cyber protection, and more, and if you’re not updated on this information, assume your competitors are. To obtain this data, providers can conduct surveys or use network discovery tools, which are provided in products such as Acronis’ Cyber Protect Cloud. Using our #CyberFit score service, you can generate a personalized report and reach out to your customers, offering them your services along with Acronis’ advanced disaster recovery, Microsoft 365 protection, advanced data loss prevention, and more, increasing your overall footprint with your existing customer base.
Consolidating success
Once you have an established customer base and understand their infrastructure the next step is to yield to their needs. Luckily, consolidated cyber protection services such as Acronis can supply you with the necessary data and cyber protection services needed to keep your clients safe, with different packages offering certain services such as backup at no additional costs. This leads directly into the next part of the growth process, where many businesses struggle the most—optimizing operational costs.
High operational costs can eat directly into profit margins, and while many businesses might believe that having multiple vendors and services integrated into their infrastructure will boost their footprint and yield, the opposite is usually true. As an example, overcomplexity in cybersecurity is a common issue amongst businesses that believe adopting several different cyber protection models will protect them, when in fact an increase of vendors leads to increased points of failure, multiple vulnerabilities, and a consistent need for updating, patching, and configuration the services to ensure they function. By adopting a consolidated cyber protection platform such as Acronis, all their cyber security and data protection needs are integrated into a single agent, reducing operational costs and time spent managing and configuring programs while offering more effective and comprehensive cyber protection. Additionally, having one point of contact to report to—one support line, one sales and marketing team, and one development platform—combined with certification and training programs offered in the partner program ensures every business is fully utilizing our products with maximum ease.
Finally, the final stage in this process is increasing your net margin and maximizing your profits. The average MSP margin is between 11% and 30%, according to our market research. At Acronis, we help our partners increase their profitability by offering services such as partner program rebates, where partners receive a rebate once they hit their quarterly target. We also give our partners direct access to our marketing managers, solution engineers, and account managers to help assist our partners with promoting and growing their businesses. Additionally, our partner program offers marketing development funds (MDFs), investing our own revenue into our partners’ marketing initiatives to help them achieve higher profits.
Acronis recognizes how difficult it can be for service providers to hit that sweet spot between lower operational costs and higher profit margins, and we’re confident our partner program is one of the best resources MSPs can utilize to hit that mark. Whether an MSP is looking to boost their marketing, consolidate their cyber protection services, increase their service offering catalog, or whatever else they might need, Acronis is here every step of the way to provide the resources necessary to ensure our partners’ success, as their success is our success.
