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So tonight I am going to ask a question rather than forcing my opinion on you all, although I suspect my opinion will leak out into this post someplace along the way.

What are the CRM / Professional automation tools / time tracking tools that MSPs are using out there?

I was recently reading a blog comment on MSP Alliance and it shocked me to see that a traditional IT provider looking to transition to managed services had asked the question of what CRM tool they should use and the only tools they had stopped to consider were sugar CRM and Salesforce.com. Does it seem odd to anyone else that players like Connectwise, Autotask, and the myriad of others, are not on the list for anyone doing this evaluation?

So this got me to thinking, what is out there that people are successfully using that is not even on my radar?

I recently spoke with a provider that has spent the last 3+ years developing their own internal time and scheduling application, they have a development side of their business so it seemed to make sense on the surface. As we talked about why they had developed internaly and what they wanted their tool to do vs. what our off the shelf tool does (we use Connectwise PSA) it seemed obvious to them that they had spent a lot of time and energy reinventing the wheel. - Not that there isn’t any value in building your own tools under the right circumstances, the circumstances just weren’t there for this provider.

Anyway, I think it would be interesting to know what other are using and if you are willing to share the why of the decision that would be great as well.

If you are not comfortable posting on the site feel free to email me directly as well (please put MSP CRM in the subject if you go this route): jclifford@everonit.com

JC

There are a variety of tools out there that are a requirement of playing the managed services game but tonight I thought I would talk about an easy way to start creating sticky managed services revenue.

SPAM

There are a variety of good SPAM filtering services out there these days and it is easy to setup a reseller agreement and start marketing them to your client. Once a client signs up for the service you drive some project revenue for the setup, most likely take control of their DNS during the cut over, and create a sticky service to keep the client on board with your services. Not to mention you solved one of their biggest problems by doing this.

If you have any question about how easy it is to sell a good SPAM solution to your clients take a look at this article from Slashdot:

Stony Stevenson writes “New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all email sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam. The data from Sophos also indicated that 23,300 new spam-related web pages were created every day during the period, or one about every three seconds.”

Man, I don’t even have to tell my clients these statistics, they tell me about the problem and I give them a solution.

Over the coming weeks we will begin to talk about tools and partners role in building your successful managed service business.

Oh yeah, we currently use www.appriver.com to provide SPAM filtering to our clients. Yes we could have setup our own filtering service but why spend the time when these guys have it nailed.

JC