David Branch has been appointed Sales Manager (World) for Remote Backup Systems, a leader in the development of Online Backup software. Based in the Memphis headquarters, David will provide experience and vital resources to RBS’ entire network of Service Providers.

David has a substantial career in software sales and support, having represented Ansys, PDA and AutoTrol. David has been involved with reseller networks and channel partners, and understands the distribution side of sales. We expect our customers to benefit from his experience and technical aptitude.

We’ve come to depend on MarketingSherpa to provide the case studies and research to help us further refine how we market and shape our best practices. This year’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report is no exception to the Sherpa collection.

Over 1,700 B2B marketers were surveyed for this report that includes 157 charts and analytical commentary on how to “attract and convert the modern B2B buyer.”

Within its 188 pages, MarketingSherpa reveals the two biggest B2B marketing challenges we face: lead generation (74%) and lead qualification (49%). These results, along with Sherpa’s report that the average B2B deal size declined in 2011, show us that marketing to a lengthening sales cycle has led to more promotional pricing than ever to get the deals closed.

The impact is widespread. Across all industries and sizes (and regardless of process maturity) marketers continue to struggle to achieve the proper balance of lead quality and quantity. MarketingSherpa’s research shows that smaller the organization, the more challenging this becomes.

Other top B2B marketing challenges:

· Generating a perceived value in “cutting edge” products (41%)
· Competing in lead generation across multiple media (40%)
· Generating PR “buzz” (38%)

Further, marketers indicated that an overall lack of resources (time, staff and budget) is the greatest barrier to achieving their marketing goals. This would explain why marketers are struggling to gain maturity in lead conversion processes. There simply isn’t the time, money or manpower to focus on an initiative of this magnitude.

So, how is marketing leadership planning to address these challenges? MarketingSherpa’s data on CMO’s strategic priorities for 2012 includes:

· Gaining greater insight of customers and target audience (56%)
· Optimizing lead progression through the marketing-sales funnel (55%)
· Achieving or increasing measurable ROI from lead generation programs (54%)

What provides the best insight in this most recent report is how MarketingSherpa dissects the data: by industry, by maturity, and by size. These cross-sections illuminate the why’s and how’s of B2B marketing to help us evolve our own best practices.

Download your own copy of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report today. With a wealth of industry-specific data, marketers everywhere must have this report to better inform their marketing strategy, improve best practices, and achieve more sales conversions.

If your company hasn’t yet established its presence on Facebook, take a look at these statistics from Deluxe Rev:

• Users average 15.5 hours on Facebook each month.
• On average, users visit Facebook 40 times per month.
• 50% of users log on to Facebook on any given day.

With Facebook popularity on the rise, it is time to get started! If you aren’t quite sure what to do first, you’ll find plenty of advice out there for the taking. We just found an excellent resource we recommend you download first, Deluxe Rev’s new ebook, “REV Up Your Facebook Marketing: A Guide for Small Businesses.”

Filled with statistics and how-to advice, this is THE Facebook marketing guide to get you going quickly. It includes practical tips like:

• Don’t worry about your Facebook page being perfect — it is more important to get started. Remember Facebook changes often and so will your page.

• If you have more than one administrator for your company’s Facebook page, create a list of guidelines for posting to ensure that your brand standards are being followed.

• Use “mentions” to help build your fan base. Post some recognition to other companies (think: congratulations and thank-you’s) that also share your target market. When you tag them correctly, these mentions will display in their fans’ news feeds, which will point new users to your company’s page.

Besides real-world tips, Deluxe Rev also has fascinating statistics to share (these are from a 2011 Buddy Media Study):

• The best length for a post is 80 characters or less.
• The best times to post are early in the morning or late at night.
• Thursday and Friday seem to be the best days of the week to post, although there are specific days that are better for specific industries (those are included in the ebook).
• Simple call-to-actions in your posts are most effective at encouraging participation (Like this…, Post this…, Comment here, and Tell Us).

However the biggest revelation is the importance of Facebook’s feature the News Feed. Social Media Strategist Ekaterina Walter of Intel says, “News Feed Optimization (NFO) is the new Search Engine Optimization (SEO).”

Those are powerful words, and they could not be truer. Facebook’s algorithm for determining what posts end up on News Feeds takes into account page popularity. Simply stated: If you have more fans interacting with you (Likes and Comments on posts) the higher your chances are to be included on your fans’ News Feeds. This is all the more powerful when coupled with this statistic: 70% of fans will not see Status Updates due to this algorithm. Yes, landing on the News Feed should be the number one goal of your Facebook strategy.

But to get on the News Feed, you first need a Facebook page. And to get started, we recommend Deluxe Rev’s “REV Up Your Facebook Marketing: A Guide for Small Businesses.” This ebook will give you the tips and techniques necessary to optimize your Facebook presence (and get on that News Feed), plus it includes some great case studies, too.

Cloud “communications and computing” solution provider 8×8 has announced the addition of Windows Cloud Server services to its portfolio. The goal is to enable enterprises of all sizes to extend their Windows network infrastructure to the cloud with virtual private servers.

Rather than invest critical time and money in new hardware, 8×8 says in its press release, it’s far more efficient to go with Windows Cloud Server and instantly gain access to more storage, memory and bandwidth that’s all manageable from a single web-based dashboard.

“While other providers are head down building solutions for software developers, 8×8 is focused on bringing user-friendly cloud server technologies such as snapshots, cloning, availability zones and hourly billing to conventional IT groups,” said General Manager of Hosting Solutions at 8×8 Andy Schwabecher in a prepared statement.

Of course, 8×8 is promoting the usual cloud benefits as unique selling points of its Windows Cloud Server solution, too: it’s paid by the hour (starting at $0.12/hour) or the month (starting at $49/month), requires no contracts, is scalable and each virtual server is upgradable, it’s fast and secure, and even uses IPv6.

While 8×8 never says so in as many words, it seems likely that this technology came out of its acquisition of Zerigo earlier in 2011. Zerigo specialized in — wait for it — virtual private cloud servers. And at that point, 8×8 was heavily hyping how Zerigo expanded its cloud play in the SMB space.

Now, Zerigo also added DNS and maintenance technology for cloud servers to 8×8′s portfolio, among other things. We’ll be watching closely for more clues as to how this all comes together.

On a final note: That offhand remark from 8×8′s Schwabecher about “other providers” leads me to believe that his company has no interest in getting into the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) marketplace. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who thinks it may be getting overcrowded.

Read More About This Topic

• Cloud M&A: 8×8 Acquires Zerigo for Cloud Management

I am happy to announce that RBS is now offering no-fees, no-interest in house financing on online backup software purchases.

We have had a number of requests for this service, and while we have offered it to a few customers, we have never formalized the process and made it available to everyone, until now.

This program is available for all software purchases from $1,000 to more than $10,000. Payment plans are determined by the purchase amount, with most monthly payments at about $800.

Here’s an example. The monthly payments for a 200-Credit Starter Pack ($3,350) are $837.50 for four monthly payments.

Financed purchases must be at the full retail price, with no special offers, upgrades, or coupons.

For more information and to apply, click this link.

We recently took another look at Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development. In this guide, Marketo is advocating the creation of a Sales Development Group: a collection of reps whose singular focus is on lead qualification and data capture.

This is an interesting idea.

We agree that lead qualification is the true intersection of sales and marketing. But in these challenging economic times, how likely is it that organizations will be willing to invest the necessary resources to create a separate Sales Development Team? Not likely. But we think there is no better time.

Don’t take our word for it. Here are the key takeaways from Marketo’s guide:

• A 5 minute response time is optimum on follow-up of leads received through a company website. Yes, you read that correctly. Depending on how much traffic your website receives, to provide a 5-minute lead response, you may need dedicated resources such as a Sales Development team. Still not convinced? The odds of qualifying a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times. And from 5 minutes to 10 minutes the dial to qualify odds decrease 4 times. (Source: Lead Response Management Study)
• Marketo recommends you focus your experienced (and best-paid) salespeople exclusively on closing. Don’t pay them their high-end salaries to waste time with leads that are early in the buying cycle. This is where your Sales Development reps should focus their time and energy.
• Don’t ask salespeople to enter and/or track their own data. They don’t want to do it and they make mistakes. This is something the Sales Development reps should do to ensure data accuracy and better information for optimization.
• Remove the guesswork from determining when marketing passes a lead to the Sales Development team. Implement a lead scoring system. Not only does this ensure a high quality of leads are passed along, it builds credibility that the process is working.

If creating a separate group dedicated to lead qualification isn’t in your company’s immediate future (or budget), there are a few steps you can take right now to help point your resources in that direction.

• Make marketing responsible for lead qualification. Determine the transition point from marketing to sales and make it a meaningful one that both teams agree upon. The goal is to only hand over qualified leads and not throw everything over the fence. Check out Go-To-Market Strategies’ Promotions/Lead Generation Pack of templates for some helpful tools to get you started.
• Capture your sales and marketing data and report on metrics. Create a Sales & Marketing Scorecard to track performance of sales and marketing activities at each stage of the sales process to show monthly and annual results. Not only will a combined reporting tool help hold both groups accountable to each other, it will raise awareness about actual results. Our Marketing Audit Template Pack can help.
• Train your lead qualification resources like you train your salespeople. Personal attention and effective conversation is the key for turning prospects into customers, make sure your lead qualification reps are comfortably well-versed in your offering, customer pain points you solve, and common objections and responses. Our Sales Training Pack and Sales Management Pack of templates will guide you through this process.

In today’s economy, every lead counts. We need to orient our sales and marketing teams towards effective and efficient lead qualification. Make sure to download Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development for more terrific insights.

We recently took another look at Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development. In this guide, Marketo is advocating the creation of a Sales Development Group: a collection of reps whose singular focus is on lead qualification and data capture.

This is an interesting idea.

We agree that lead qualification is the true intersection of sales and marketing. But in these challenging economic times, how likely is it that organizations will be willing to invest the necessary resources to create a separate Sales Development Team? Not likely. But we think there is no better time.

Don’t take our word for it. Here are the key takeaways from Marketo’s guide:

• A 5 minute response time is optimum on follow-up of leads received through a company website. Yes, you read that correctly. Depending on how much traffic your website receives, to provide a 5-minute lead response, you may need dedicated resources such as a Sales Development team. Still not convinced? The odds of qualifying a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times. And from 5 minutes to 10 minutes the dial to qualify odds decrease 4 times. (Source: Lead Response Management Study)

• Marketo recommends you focus your experienced (and best-paid) salespeople exclusively on closing. Don’t pay them their high-end salaries to waste time with leads that are early in the buying cycle. This is where your Sales Development reps should focus their time and energy.

• Don’t ask salespeople to enter and/or track their own data. They don’t want to do it and they make mistakes. This is something the Sales Development reps should do to ensure data accuracy and better information for optimization.

• Remove the guesswork from determining when marketing passes a lead to the Sales Development team. Implement a lead scoring system. Not only does this ensure a high quality of leads are passed along, it builds credibility that the process is working.

If creating a separate group dedicated to lead qualification isn’t in your company’s immediate future (or budget), there are a few steps you can take right now to help point your resources in that direction.

• Make marketing responsible for lead qualification. Determine the transition point from marketing to sales and make it a meaningful one that both teams agree upon. The goal is to only hand over qualified leads and not throw everything over the fence. Check out Go-To-Market Strategies’ Promotions/Lead Generation Pack of templates for some helpful tools to get you started.

• Capture your sales and marketing data and report on metrics. Create a Sales & Marketing Scorecard to track performance of sales and marketing activities at each stage of the sales process to show monthly and annual results. Not only will a combined reporting tool help hold both groups accountable to each other, it will raise awareness about actual results. Our Marketing Audit Template Pack can help.

• Train your lead qualification resources like you train your salespeople. Personal attention and effective conversation is the key for turning prospects into customers, make sure your lead qualification reps are comfortably well-versed in your offering, customer pain points you solve, and common objections and responses. Our Sales Training Pack and Sales Management Pack of templates will guide you through this process.

In today’s economy, every lead counts. We need to orient our sales and marketing teams towards effective and efficient lead qualification. Make sure to download Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development for more terrific insights.

Jack Wallen answers some TechRepublic members’ questions about how to destroy data on a drive without destroying the drive.

Read the article here.

We took a closer look at two recent reports highlighting how sales and marketing priorities and budgets are allocated in 2011. The good news is, according to CSO’s 2011 Lead Management Study, marketing budgets are on the rise. CMO Council’s The 2011 State of Marketing Report also confirms this, with 57% percent of respondents indicating that they are adding to their 2011 marketing spend. (Note that this represents a budget between 2 and 4 percent of revenue.)

So how are we spending all this money?

In CSO’s Lead Management Study, respondents reported their top three strategic marketing objectives this year as:

• Increasing new customer acquisition – 82.6%
• Optimizing cross-selling and up-selling – 41.7%
• Increasing brand awareness – 41.5%

However the real story is in the bottom three:

• Increasing customer renewals – 17.6%
• Enhancing customer experience – 16.3%
• Becoming customer-centric – 14.5%

CMO Council’s data also weighs in on our apparent lack of focus on our existing customers. Their State of 2011 Marketing report indicates that only 4% of marketers are concerned with customer churn when allocating their budget. CMO says “… marketers continue their focus on more costly customer acquisition strategies in place of customer retention initiatives.”

It’s been said before: it is far cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. So why is customer retention falling behind?

If we take a closer look at the data, we find that marketers are facing some big challenges this year:

• A lengthening sales cycle. Marketers now own more of the customer as sales cycles slow down and prospects spend more time on the web, learning and comparing on their own, before engaging with sales.
• Overwhelming amounts of customer data. Many more of us jumped on the social media bandwagon this year, afraid of being left behind and without having an integrated solution in place. Now, we have lots of customer data all over the place, and we aren’t sure what to do with it (or how to get at it.)
• Lack of talent. CMO Council reports that 37% of marketers plan to bring on new digital and interactive marketing talent this year. We’re not surprised. In 2011, marketers found themselves with Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, even going mobile, and did not have a well-thought out strategy for any of it.

What is being lost as we fight our way through these challenges? The opportunities to build loyalty, increase revenues, and promote brand equity through our most precious resource: our customers.

Determining what priority customer retention should take in your marketing strategy starts by understanding the lifetime value of your customers. If you’re not sure where to start, check out our Customer Value Pack. It is designed to calculate the core value of your best customers and help you more effectively define, acquire, and retain the ideal customer set within a reasonable budget.

Knowing the numbers allows marketers to prioritize customer acquisition and retention strategies with more precision and authority. Because of this, we believe that all marketers must understand how much they can truly afford to spend to acquire a new customer.

Do you?

Successful selling requires an understanding of the buyer’s mind, and most MSPs fail to develop a clear understanding of their customer’s true needs. Specifically, many MSPs don’t understand why buyers do — or don’t — buy from them. Great businesses take the time to understand their buyer’s psyche. Let’s delve a little deeper.

First, there’s the psychology of buying. People buy based on emotion rather than logic — even large corporations. Why do we all yearn for BMW 7 Series when a Honda Civic gets us from point A to point B just as well and for a lot less? Spending $90,000 on a car defies all logic and reason when you think about it. Here’s why we do it.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from psych 101? Well, it applies to sales, too. We want the BMW because it tickles the desires at the top of Maslow’s pyramid. Driving a nice car makes us feel important, like we have achieved greatness. It earns the respect of our clients and friends. These needs trump the basic transportation needs at the bottom of the pyramid.

The BMW Hierarchy of Needs:

• Physiological Needs: We need transportation.
• Safety Needs: A car allows us to work and earn income to support our family.
• Belonging Needs: Having a nice car like the people we aspire to be means we belong.
• Esteem Needs: A luxury car earns respect and adoration.
• Self-Actualization Needs: A luxury car gives us the edge we need to be successful.

The MSP Hierarchy of Needs:

• Physiological Needs: My business needs a computer network to function.
• Safety Needs: My business needs a safe and secure IT infrastructure.
• Belonging Needs: Good businesses use technology effectively and have competent IT departments. So should mine.
• Esteem Needs: Being a successful technology leader in business will make our company the envy of employees, customers, and competitors.
• Self-Actualization Needs: Effectively leveraging technology will allow me to build a more profitable and successful company.

The Seller’s Mistake:

Here is where most people falter. They sell from the bottom of the pyramid up, rather than from the top down. We tend drill in on the technological (“physiological” and “safety”) needs rather than higher level business concepts. We’re going to keep your equipment running, backup your data, patch your servers, and so on. Blah, that’s boring. These are important aspects of what we do, but they don’t inspire CEOs to pay top dollar for managed services.

The Right Way to Sell:

Selling from the top of the pyramid down excites people. No CEO gets hot and bothered by patch management. Instead, focus on high level concepts. Show them how they can better use technology to increase sales, keep their employees productive, and reach their ultimate business goals. Demonstrate how their competitors are using technology more effectively than they are. Making more money and achieving success excites CEOs. Work from the top down. Show them how you can enable their business to be great.

Paul Barnett is VP and COO at Network Depot, the MSP that launched Virtual Administrator. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

Selling isn’t easy. However, if you adopt a systematic approach, support new technologies, and offer best-of-the-class services, you can really accelerate your sales. The following five points provide insights into such things and help you win new customers.

Among my top recommendations:

1. Take sides with a winning idea
2. Sell the idea, they’ll come
3. Show the difference in dollars
4. Share your customer stories and learning from the field
5. Use social media to reach out

1. Take sides with a winning idea
Your website is a basic sales requirement that gives details such as “who you are” and “what you do.” It helps prospects understand your portfolio of services. First create a website, it’s so easy. WordPress helps you create your own website. Next, choose a winning idea or product. It could be about cloud computing, virtualization, a good RMM or helpdesk. If you choose virtualization, contact all the vendors and try to provide the best offers that the market has to give.

2. Sell the idea, they will come
Follow the domain closely and try to establish yourself as a strong cloud/virtualization information company. Add flavor by writing informative blogs on the domain and educate your followers how it can help them. As the time goes by, people will recognize you and start asking advice. Gain the advantage of offering advice and selling to them.

When you have built your expertise in the domain, conduct webinars. Invite a keynote speaker to give some valuable information that helps customers improve their IT performance. Educate your customers on how technology helps them save their time and money. Focus on how you can help them with the technology.

3. Show the difference in dollars
Sell them an idea of parallel evaluation or a test run for a few departments. For example, if you are providing help desk service, offer RMM services free for 30 days. At the end of the month, provide a mock bill for the RMM services. Calculate the cost of inhouse IT staff vs. your mock bill (provided you can deliver services that cost less than inhouse IT). Educate the customer on the dollars that he can save by off-shoring IT and the pros and cons of in-house vs. managed services model.

Here’s a sample calculation: The cost of setting up an operations support team in Florida vs. outsourcing…

Some details about the chart and the calculations…

• Total number of devices to be managed is 500 and the number of operations support personnel required is 5. At an average salary of $55,000 per operations person per year, you would be shelling out $275,000 on salaries for five operations members.
• Workout the price for the managing the 500 devices. If you are charging $30 dollar per device on an average for 500 devices per year, it costs $180,000. A win-win for sides. Moreover, if you have multi-year contracts the difference becomes high when you include salary increments every year.

Also, get a user satisfaction survey. If the user experience improves, it’s great. It’s good even if people say there is no change. You can take the credit of having implemented an efficient system that costs less, without impacting the user experience. Reduced bill and improved services are a win-win for both you and your customer.

4. Share your customer stories and learning from the field
Share your customer stories that help other customers to improve their IT performance. However, be cautious that you never disclose the name of a customer to other customer.

Keep in touch with your customers via newsletters or monthly mailers that help them. Avoid using discounts and buy now links in the newsletter and mailers. Include at least 4 or 5 knowledgeable materials such as whitepapers, videos, analyst’s reports, etc. that benefit the customers. Target them month on month and the buy in will happen eventually. To send bulk mailers you can make use of effective email tools. These tools are available for as low as $15 per month.

5. Use social media to reach out
It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t use twitter or Facebook. Setup fan pages and use Twitter to send out relevant messages to your followers. Follow the analysts’ tweets and feeds, and retweet them. Keep the message stream focused to useful info – absolutely no place for “my cat did this” or “checked in at odd places”. Create a profile in the Facebook for you company, and make it interactive and informative. Post whitepapers and videos, and share useful articles that benefit the customers.

Conclusion
Include the above activities in your day to day process. Make sure you are in constant touch with your prospects and keep providing valuable information and tips to improve IT performance and reduce operational expenses. You will start reaping success in a very short period.

Bharani Kumar is the marketing analyst of MSP Solutions at ManageEngine. Read ManageEngine’s well received book “How to Set Up a Managed Services Business.” Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

Read More About This Topic

• MSPs: How to Increase Revenues Without Increasing Costs
• If I Was Launching an MSP Today: 10 Steps to Consider
• How to Simplify the Managed Services Sales Process
• Building Sales Collateral that Builds Business: 4 Requirements
• Do You Need Account Managers — Or Salespeople?

We reviewed Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics and found it lived up to its title with 70 pages of detailed advice on how to most effectively gather and measure key marketing metrics.

Within the Guide, a new profile emerged: the Revenue Marketer™. Marketo describes them as marketers who, “begin to operate and sound more like sales.” Trademarked by The Pedowitz Group, The Revenue Marketer™ “…knows how their key metrics stack up against their targets, and what they plan to do to improve their results.”

If you don’t classify yourself as a one of these new breed marketers, you’re not alone. 44% of marketers have no idea what profits a 10% increase in their marketing budget would generate (Lenskold Group’s 2010 B2B Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study)

However, we should.

As the Definitive Guide tells us (and as most of us suspected already), to gain more credibility and respect (translation: budget and resources) within our organizations, marketing needs to measure the things that will guide decisions that improve profitability. We need to start speaking the CEO and CFO’s language.

To do so, we first need to understand and develop goals around:

• How many sales we anticipate our marketing program(s) will generate
• How much revenue each sale produces
• What the gross margin percentage is
  

Next we need to design our programs so that we can effectively measure results. With clearly understood goals and well-defined ROI estimates at the outset, we can then track and connect measurements to our pipelines, revenue, and profits. We also can make adjustments to programs with actionable data to improve results, and therefore improve credibility.

To get started, we recommend you download our Marketing Audit Pack. This group of templates includes our Marketing Plan Audit Template, Marketing ROI Template, Sales & Marketing Scorecard and S.W.O.T. Analysis Template, and will help you:

Make well-informed adjustments to your marketing strategy

Understand the true performance of your marketing plan vs. the estimate

Report your status on a weekly basis to raise awareness about your sales and marketing results

Calculate the ROI on your marketing plan

Think about it. Prospects are taking more time to gather information from the wealth of content online, content that marketers produce. This means we are presiding over a much larger share of the revenue cycle than ever before. If you aren’t yet measuring your ROI, it’s time to start. The Revenue Marketer™ is here to stay.

When you’re dealing with a system that won’t boot, you need to fall back on some diagnostic skills and recovery strategies. Jack Wallen shares his field-tested approach.

Scratching your head about which Samba security mode to choose? Jack Wallen’s description of each option might help make a decision.

Energy drink maker uses mobile campaign to drive awareness of “build-a-thon” contest

From flugtags to x-fighters, Red Bull pumps out wacky marketing events around the world like it’s downed way too much of its homebrew.

From July 7-10, it raised the bar with “Red Bull Creation,” a creativity contest held in a Brooklyn park that pitted 16 teams of the country’s most way-out “hackers, tinkerers and fabricators” in a three-day “build-a-thon.”

The teams were given a theme—“energy in motion”—the night before the competition kicked off, and then had 72 hours to build whatever they’d dreamed up—the weirder, the better.

The event’s mindset is perfectly illustrated by the winning entry from a Minneapolis team called 1.21 Jigawatts. Red Bull described it as a “massive hamster wheel, wired into a mobile network, given its own phone number that received up to 60,000 one-word text messages at a time.” Upon receiving a text message, the wheel would begin rolling and print out a perfect copy of the word on the ground.

Practical, schmactical. 1.21 Jigawatts beat out other entries, including a wheelie-popping shopping cart and a mechanical inchworm named Chillerpillar, on the basis of being “unequivocally awesome.”

Red Bull’s promotional campaign was pretty creative itself. Before the event, it posted ads with QR (quick response) codes on bus shelters all around New York City. Passersby who scanned the code with a mobile device were redirected to a video promoting the event. The campaign seemed to work; on the final day of the event the teams finished their projects onstage before a packed house

Red Bull is no stranger to unique mobile promotions. Last year, it targeted Formula 1 fans with a new racing game built for iPhones and iPod Touchs. This year, it participated in a campaign at 1,400 Canadian convenience stores that delivered instant coupons to shoppers carrying Bluetooth-enabled devices.

— Bob Pickard

In response to a TechRepublic member question, Jack Wallen reveals a couple of troubleshooting steps he takes when Outlook is muddying the waters of the powerful .pst and .ost files.

When MSPs think about the benefits they provide their SMB clientele, they probably focus on internal efficiencies that can benefit the bottom line. But MSPs need to take a broader look at how their services can aid all aspects of an SMB’s operations. For example, managed contact center services can aid your SMBs clientele in providing high quality customer service, and even in charging a premium for them.

A case in point: A new survey commissioned by Fonality and conducted by Webtorials shows that on average, customers of SMBs would pay a 20% maximum premium for exceptional service. In contrast, larger companies could only charge a maximum premium of 15%. In addition, 58% of the respondents prefer to do business with an SMB, compared to only 16% who prefer to do business with larger enterprises.

Fonality is a business communications provider, so naturally this survey has a marketing angle, but one that holds promise for MSPs. Unified Communications (UC) and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions were cited by SMB respondents as important tools to help SMBs achieve greater levels of customer service that would allow them to charge a premium rate. Eighty percent of SMB respondents indicated they were already leveraging VoIP to improve contact center capabilities while reducing operating costs or had plans to integrate the solution within the next 12 months.

Meanwhile, UC, which combines voice, email and chat communications, was either being used, or soon will be, by 64% of those surveyed.

UC, VoIP Can Help SMB Productivity

The survey also shows that SMB users of VoIP and UC-based contact centers surveyed achieved significant productivity gains and cost reduction, with 52% saving 20% or more and almost as many (46%) reporting productivity gains in excess of 10%. Webtorials concluded that smaller budgets and limited skill sets associated with SMBs made them primary candidates to benefit from the greater ROI of cloud-based VoIP and UC services, as opposed to installing and maintaining expensive, complex IT solutions.

MSPs should not focus on the exact figures quoted in the Fonality study, but undoubtedly VoIP and UC services can be of great assistance to SMBs looking to improve customer service and increase profitability. Not many SMBs are equipped to host this type of leading edge technology in-house, making MSPs ideal candidates to enable superior customer service.

Sign up for MSPmentor’s Weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Follow us via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com. Read our editorial disclosure here.

Read More About This Topic

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• Alteva Launches Microsoft-Integrated UC for SMBs
• New Buzz: Communications as a Service (CaaS)
• Fonality: Open Source VoIP Meets Managed Services
• Emerging Managed Services Opportunity: TelePresence Sales Doubling Annually

Bill Detwiler shows you how to avoid five blatant security mistakes when deploying a new wireless access point.

Call it a blessing in disguise. Most recent economic reports say SMBs have been slow to make hires. But most IT research indicates that SMBs continue to expand their IT spending. In theory, that means SMBs will increasingly turn to managed services providers (MSPs) and other external folks for IT assistance to fill tactical and strategic gaps.

Indeed, the US SMB tech support market will be worth more than $15 billion in three years, according to a Parks Associates study which says the combined SMB/household tech support market will reach $30 billion, with households accounting for well over 40% of the spend. That still leaves more than half of a very lucrative pie in the hands of SMBs, which by default leaves much of it in the hands of MSPs who serve SMBs lacking in-house tech support capabilities.

Market Underutilized

It should be no great surprise to MSPs with SMB experience that Parks Associates terms this slice of the tech support market “underutilized.” Study data indicates 44% of SMBs experience computer problems, but only 28% of those SMBs use professional support services.

A combination of many MSPs ignoring the potential offered by smaller clients and basic ignorance on the availability of managed services on the part of many SMBs leads to this market not living up to its potential. Of course, this is great news for MSPs who serve the SMB vertical and aren’t shy about trumpeting the advantages their services provide.

Stay Up to Date with Platforms, Channels

The study also finds that long-term growth in the SMB tech support market depends on the ability to add support for new platforms and scale services to provide for multiple channels of support. Parks Associates advises that expanding to include on-site, remote, and depot repair, with proactive maintenance services for multiple devices, is key to growing the market.

In plain terms, don’t expect to achieve long-term growth by finding some new customers for your existing services. That will gain you some initial new clients, but they won’t stick around long if you can’t grow along with their needs.

Game-changers any MSP seeking long-term growth in the SMB tech support market needs to stay abreast of include tablets, smartphones, cloud infrastructure, and integrated cross-channel platforms. Even your small clients are moving away from a siloed IT architecture toward a more holistic model, your support services need to follow suit.

Previously, I wrote an entry on how big box retailers like Office Depot are trying to capitalize on the SMB tech support market. Parks Associates specifically cites how big box retailers, as well as telecommunications companies and the OEMs themselves, are “important” in the space. But when it comes to personal SMB relationships, can anybody really compete with effective MSPs?

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Generally speaking, I think most MSPmentor readers have been building their managed services businesses for five to 10 years. But what if you were building that business from scratch right now? Here are 10 steps to consider for startup MSPs — though the steps certainly apply to established MSPs that are looking to rethink their strategies for the second half of 2011.

1. Rethink Services: Take a look at ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini’s Modern Office blueprint. It’s not sexy. Instead it covers all the basics of IT services — everything from printer management to VoIP. Pieces of the strategy have floated around here and there for about five to seven years. But Bellini crystallized the discussion: Even as big cloud companies move into the SMB market there are dozens of IT services that VARs and MSPs can offer. Bellini made the point last year that VARs and MSPs should focus on help desk and vendor management:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I concede: At first I thought the advice was somewhat basic. Fast forward to the present and I’m starting to see the light. Seems like the best MSPs think of their help desk as an Apple Genius Bar — deliver superior customer experience and your customers will never leave you. Also, as a small business co-owner, I can see the value of vendor management. Our own Web integrator handles a range of vendor relationships for us — which allows us to focus on our core business: online media.

2. Rethink Pricing and Branding: At the recent Schnizzfest conference, TruMethods CEO Gary Pica told MSPs to offer…

• One Comprehensive Solution: Stop promoting individual ingredients (patch management, remote monitoring, etc.) and instead sell chocolate cake (the total customer experience).
• One Comprehensive Monthly Price: Stop offering line-item pricing for each ingredient, and instead offer a complete per-user, per-month price that covers everything. Of course you need to figure out your costs before setting a price, but the best MSPs charge more than $100 per user per month for all-in services.
• A Firm Monthly Minimum: The best MSPs don’t accept business from super-small customers, and insist on monthly engagements that start at about $2,000 per business (roughly).

3. Rethink Cloud: At Schnizzfest, Pica told MSPs that they were over-complicating cloud discussions. He organized and prioritized cloud services into four simple categories for MSPs to pursue. And he reinforced his all-in pricing. Instead of charging a storage fee, a security fee, etc. — just charge a single flat fee (per user) for everything each month.

4. Rethink Devices and Bet the Business on Mobile: During meetings in Silicon Valley this week I’ve heard a consistent theme from Oracle and other major software companies: The big opportunity going forward is for channel partners to deliver a consistent user experience across all devices — desktops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets and smart phones. MSPs that master the mobility challenge are well positioned to profit for years to come.

Bonus: Start spending time at a local college campus. See and learn how students are using mobile devices and related applications.

5. Rethink Target Customers: Sure, focus on SMB. But at the same time pick three verticals to evaluate — perhaps health care, retail and financial services. Assign a specific person in your organization to own/research that vertical for three months. That dedicated person should:

• Join an association focused on that vertical, and attend relevant meetings.
• Meet with one target customer per week to learn more about pain points, legacy infrastructure and other information about the vertical.
• Create a shortlist of horizontal solutions (PCs, networking, VoIP) that can be easily sold into the vertical.
• Research a shortlist of vertical solutions that the target customers may need.

After the three months of research you should have enough info to evaluate which vertical is a potential long-term target for your business.

6. Rethink Ownership: Avoid the temptation to form a business with a partner who has skill sets that are largely similar to yours. Instead, go into business with peers who operate in different sandboxes — one person focusing on sales, the other on technology, another on financial management, etc. If your ownership team has entirely redundant skill sets you’re raising your monthly overhead without addressing weak spots in your business.

7. Rethink Debt and Lines of Credit: Develop lines of credit before you need them. Partner with vendors’ financing organizations before you need to. Check out the Channel Finance 25 for some potential financial partners.

8. Rethink Your Devices: Don’t spend outrageously on IT, but do carry the latest disruptive devices — tablets, Chromebooks, etc. Tell customers why or why you don’t like your latest device during meetings… Establish yourself as a thought leader on disruptive technologies that can either help or hurt your customers, then figure out how to monetize those learnings.

9. Rethink Talent: While you’re spending time time on local college campuses (see tip 4 bonus, above), be sure to partner up with colleges’ Career Development Centers to find potential interns and entry-level employees. Also, Always Be Interviewing — schedule one meeting per week with a person you’d like to potentially recruit to your company. Even if you don’t have positions open right now all that networking will pay dividends when you’re ready to hire.

10. Rethink Your Exit: Manage your company from Day 1 as if it was publicly held.

• Track all of your key financial indicators closely — revenues, operating margins, profit margins, EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), etc. Consider using an open book policy so that employees can get a feel why they need to help manage expenses while driving revenues.
• Join a peer group organization to see how other MSPs manage their finances.
• Standardize on PSA (professional services automation), RMM (remote monitoring and management), sales quoting and IT acquisition software to automate as much of your business as possible.

And most of all: Build your own assets. Instead of “reselling” or “brokering” the sale of third-party cloud services, figure out how to build your own branded services to generate monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Keep growing your MRR and profits and you’ll increase your company’s valuation. As your own brand and profits grow, potential suitors will likely seek you out.

In short: Your exit strategy should involve (1) building a highly valuable business rather than (2) focusing on a potential company sale before you’ve even booked your first customer.

What Did I Miss?

Which of the items above directly relate to your business? Which ones miss the mark? And what strategies did I completely overlook? I’m open to constructive criticism. Also, despite the headline I’ve got no plans to ever launch a managed services business because, frankly, I don’t have your skills. I offer the guidance above based on what I hear from a range of MSPs. I look forward to hearing how your business continues to evolve in 2011 and beyond.

Sign up for MSPmentor’s Weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Follow us via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com. Read our editorial disclosure here.

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When it comes to profitably scaling a service provider business, there are two key requirements: First, delivering effective customer service that leads to more and more happy customers. Second, establishing the operational processes that enable this level of service, while boosting the efficiency and productivity of staff.

The service desk, more than just about any other platform or service, has a direct and fundamental role to play in both of these areas. A strong service desk can bring value to internal operations, and it can deliver differentiation in the market place. Therefore, it’s not overstating matters to say the service desk plays a very pivotal role in the MSP’s business performance and prospects.

Today, there are several approaches that you can take that will help your service desk support the growth of your business. Here, I’ll focus on one: providing customers with self-service access to the service desk.

Providing customers with direct access to information and processes in the service desk is one of the most beneficial things a service provider can do. This effort can both cut costs and improve customer service levels and satisfaction. That’s why instituting these capabilities should be job number one for any MSP that doesn’t already deliver them.

However, to date, a significant percentage of MSPs have not extended self-service to customers, even though a lot of service desk solutions deployed today support it. Why? Following are a few reasons:

• Mindset. In many service provider businesses, the service desk has been viewed solely as an internal tool, a mechanism that helps internal IT staff to do their jobs. This mindset has shaped tool purchase decisions and limited the effort service providers have put into the service desk—and as a result, their current capabilities are going to work against them.
• Limited knowledgebase. One of the key requirements of an effective self-service service desk is the knowledgebase. If service providers don’t have a robust, current knowledge base to leverage, the work involved in delivering self-service gets tougher.
• Tool limitations. Even though many tools may ostensibly offer self-service capabilities, the reality is that many are too cumbersome or limited to use effectively. In many cases, tools weren’t initially designed with self-service in mind, so these capabilities are limited or difficult to use. For example, many service desk platforms don’t offer a robust Web client interface.

Getting Started

For those organizations looking to deliver self-service capabilities, following are two examples of services that can be offered, and how delivering these services can help:

1. Self help. Service desks can be the tool customers use to solve issues themselves. For example, if a user encounters a problem with a printer, they can go to a self-service portal, get quick access to relevant guidance in the knowledgebase, and take steps needed to solve the problem. This type of service has two significant benefits. First, customers will be delighted. In many cases, they can resolve an issue far faster than if they had to submit a ticket and wait for resolution. Thus, they are happier and more productive. Second, this service can directly and significantly reduce a service provider’s costs, which can feed directly into profits or more competitive pricing.
2. Ticket submission. Service providers can equip users with a self-service portal through which they can log in and submit tickets themselves. By doing so, organizations can save a lot of money by reducing the number of calls coming into service desk personnel. For example, many estimates indicate organizations spend $12.00 to $20.00 per tier one service desk call. If a service provider has 1,000 calls coming into the service desk call center each month, and can realize even a 10% reduction, that reduction can yield savings of approximately $2,000 a month. In addition, when MSPs enable customers to check status online, users can see on a real-time basis what the status is, and what steps have been taken—whenever they want. Consequently, service organizations provide greater transparency, so users enjoy better visibility and grow more comfortable and satisfied with their service provider.

In both of the scenarios above, service providers enjoy reduced call volume, lower costs, and increased margins. What other tasks on your plate will provide more worthwhile outcomes?

Interested in discovering some other approaches that can help you turn your service desk into a profit multiplier? Be sure to sign up for the upcoming MSPmentor webcast, entitled “Five Managed Services Pricing Tips From Two Top MSPs

As we audit marketing plans for our SMB clients, we are excited to see interactive marketing taking a more prominent position in the marketing mix. For companies that are on a limited budget, there are many effective ways of putting email, social and search to use that bring value far beyond their traditional counterparts.

This spring, American Express OPEN published the results of its “Small Business Search Marketing Survey,” reporting on how small businesses are currently utilizing some type of online marketing, and revealed the following:

• Three quarters of small businesses plan to add some form of online marketing in 2011. Roughly three-in-ten will add a company website (36%) or social media (29%). About one-in-five plan to add search engine optimization (23%), mass email (22%) or search advertising (16%).

• The most common online marketing techniques currently being utilized by small businesses are a company website (86%) followed by social media (44%). One-in-five (21%) small businesses report that they are utilizing search advertising.

• Among small businesses who conduct some form of online marketing, two-thirds (66%) say that new customers find them through search engines/Internet, compared to 82% who say word of mouth is still the main source where new customers find them.

The American Express survey echoes what Forrester reported in August 2010. Their report “Interactive Marketing Priorities for SMBs” gives insight into how SMBs are allocating their budgets and perhaps more importantly, why.

The biggest takeaway for us is that SMBs are finally using interactive marketing to provide a key focus on customer care—both in acquisition and retention. Forrester stats to support this include:

• SMBs weigh lead quality, partnerships, and understanding buyer behavior more heavily than do enterprise firms, in part because smaller companies have fewer key clients to lose.

• For SMBs, the most important business objective when determining how to invest in interactive marketing is NEW CUSTOMER SALES, followed by overall sales, brand awareness, and leads.

And because of their size and flexibility, SMBs can respond with the timeliness required to maintain an effective interactive campaign. Becoming more responsive to their customer’s voice in real-time, SMBs can make an impact that is more powerful, more quickly, than in traditional marketing.

Although marketers should heed this warning: going interactive requires manpower (even recruiting key players from the rest of the organization to implement effectively). To do this is challenging, so much so, that even at the enterprise level marketers complain they do not have enough staff dedicated to interactive marketing, Forrester reports.

Last week’s quick survey of network admins shows an unsurprising number who are finding less time for training, squeezing all they can out of less-than-cutting edge technology, and spending most of their precious time doing routine user support.

Pew Internet reports, “The number using social networking sites has nearly doubled since 2008 and the population of SNS users has gotten older.”

The breakdown looks like this:

• The average age of SNS users has shifted from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010.
• Over half of all SNS users are over the age of 35.
• 56% of SNS users are female.

The report is filled with interesting nuggets, such as:

• Facebook users are more likely to trust in others and are more politically engaged,
• MySpace users are more open to opposing viewpoints, and
• LinkedIn users have more diverse social networks than users of other sites.

While fascinating to read and identify with the above findings, marketers should truly pay attention to these stats:

• Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn.
• The average adult MySpace user is younger (32 y.o.), and the average adult LinkedIn user older (40 y.o.), than the average Facebook user (38 y.o.), and Twitter user (33 y.o.).
• MySpace and Twitter users are the most racially diverse mainstream social network platforms. However, a large proportion of users of “other” social network services are racial minorities.
• MySpace users tend to have fewer years of formal education than users of other social network services, whereas most LinkedIn users have at least one university degree.

These demographics may surprise you, or they may validate your own assumptions about which social media sites are best to engage in a dialogue with your customers. In either case, the differences between the social media options are becoming clearer as the popularity of social media increases.

Make sure to gut-check your social media strategy with the tidbits in this new report. You can download your copy at Pew Internet.

If you’re like me, you were a great technician who decided to start your own business. As your company grew, you learned to be a good leader by being the best engineer your company. But sales? In order to be a good sales leader, you have to embrace sales and drive the adherence to a sales process. Not easy when you’re a techie at heart.

The reality is that most IT solution providers suck at sales, so we have boiled down the essential ingredients for sales success to make it easy for you to catch up and even get to the front of the IT sales wolf pack. In our experience consulting with our partners, we’ve seen some partners who are doing some of these steps, and some who are doing none. A rare few are executing all five.

1. Set Sales Quotas: You can’t measure achievement when you have no goals. Sales people need goals to measure success and to enable you to evaluate and reward their results.

2. Enforce Opportunity Recording: Make sure your team records all of their sales opportunities in your system so they are easily track-able and actionable. Don’t let them keep it all in their head or in disorganized disparate systems.

3. Hold Weekly Sales Meetings: Conduct weekly sales meetings at the beginning of each week to focus your sales team on their action plan for that week. Regular public accountability is a powerful motivator. Small team or large, this is vital.

4. Make Sales Capture Easy: Opportunity is everywhere; sales data needs to be easily captured so anyone in your company who finds a potential sale can quickly relay that information to a centralized location. This includes client referrals and even the landing pages on your website.

5. Follow the Sales Process: Choreograph the sales effort of your team and use a repeatable process that includes the 4 other Sales Success ingredients. Follow the best practices and sales process that is built into your professional services automation tool.

Adding those five ingredients will help you increase your sales and profits while adding accountability for your sales staff. Salespeople can easily juggle 20 times more opportunities than they had before, just by following the process and seeing it all in one place.

To hear more about the secrets to winning sales agreements and key strategies for increasing profit margins, you’re invited to join ConnectWise for a free webinar June 22nd with MSP legend Gary Pica, as a part of our Success Wise webinar series.

David Bellini is president of ConnectWise. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsor program. Read all of Bellini’s guest blogs here.

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Within the SMB managed services market a multi-year debate has been raging: Should managed services providers develop price-per-user or price-per-device business models for MRR (monthly recurring revenues)? I heard a surprising answer to that debate during the recent TruMethods Schnizzfest event in Philadelphia, Pa. Here’s the answer and the background.

The surprise answer: Increasingly, some of the best MSPs user neither business model. Instead, top MSPs are pursuing a so-called “price per engagement” or “price per experience” model. Privately, top MSPs continue to figure out their per-user and per-device support costs, and then build in the appropriate margin. But publicly, those MSPs refrain from discussing per-user or per-device pricing.

Instead, the top MSPs offer a total services price — covering everything from help desk and NOC services to monitoring and management of IT infrastructure. Building on that theme, TruMethods CEO Gary Pica called on MSPs to stop selling ingredients (patch management, remote monitoring, anti-spam, etc.) and start selling chocolate cake (that is, the total user experience).

Hidden Numbers

During multiple sessions at TruMethods Schnizzfest, top MSPs described how they continue to generate roughly $100 to $130 per user per month in recurring revenues — without breaking out the individual per-service fees to customers. Moreover, several MSPs said that they no longer accept SMB engagements that fall below a minimum MRR (monthly recurring revenue) fee, typically $2000 or so.

Two MSPs who went on record:

• White Glove Technologies CEO Tommy Wald, who said he’s using the price-per-engagement model to blanket small office customers. Instead of nickel and diming customers when they add a piecemeal service or a new managed PC, White Gloves’ contracts include a clause that allows the MSP to raise annual rates — roughly 3 to 4 percent or so.
• masterIT CEO Michael Drake, who said he’s using the per-experience model. Although it sounds like masterIT still sells on a per-user level, masterIT no longer breaks out the price of each individual service. Instead, Drake pitches masterIT as a trusted advisor and/or virtual CIO to his SMB clientele. And for that virtual CIO service, customers are going to pay for the complete masterIT experience — rather than one-off services.

No Magic Bullets

Are all MSPs taking the approaches outlined above? Certainly not. During the TruMethods conference, plenty of established MSPs mentioned rising competition from aspiring MSPs that charge as little as $10 per seat for basic managed services.

But when low-ball or lower-price rivals emerge, leading MSPs like IT Solutions CEO Ted Swanson re-frame the customer conversation — pointing out that it’s impossible for aspiring MSPs to deliver high-quality service at low-ball pricing. When customers say a proposed price is too expensive, the best MSPs re-frame and re-set the conversation by stating: “Compared to what?” notes TruMethods’ Pica, himself a former MSP.

Once the MSP has pinpointed the customers’ frame of reference, it’s easier to re-set the pricing conversation and drive back to the original value and service delivery conversation.

Sign up for MSPmentor’s Weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Follow us via RSS, Facebook, Identi.ca and Twitter. Check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com. Read our editorial disclosure here.

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What can entrepreneurs do to keep them focused and driven towards success

The June Microsoft Patch Tuesday is supposed to be huge and nasty, count on Justin James’s in-depth analysis on patch day to get you through it safely.

In this installment of our Food Skill Builder series, guest-resident geek gourmand Jeff Potter runs through some of the cooking capabilities of common hotel and office kitchenette appliances and some yummy food you can make with them. -Gareth

I have a confession to make: I’m a picky eater. My everyday cooking is much more about healthy, simple foods that get the job done than the over-the-top, involved productions that one might expect from the author of a food science book. Don’t get me wrong, I love whipping up a fun, multi-course meal with friends. But day-in, day-out, I’m much more likely to stick to simple, healthy meals that have a good nutritional profile.

But what about those times when I’m away from my home kitchen? Finding healthy, affordable meals while on the road is unfortunately still hard. Luckily, by knowing a little food science, you can re-purpose common kitchenette appliances, like coffee makers and toaster ovens, found in hotel rooms or on your cube farm, into something more than they were originally designed for. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Coffee Makers

Coffee makers are the combination of three different things: a hot water dispenser, a “pot” (usually glass), and a hot plate. Ignore the hot water dispenser, and you’ve got yourself a stove-top setup that can cook anything that normally gets cooked via simmering. Oatmeal? Soft-poached eggs? Crab legs or stew? They’ll all work, for one simple reason: the coffee maker gets hot enough-around 200°F-to trigger the chemical reactions that cause things like the proteins in eggs (~144-158°F) or starches in oatmeal (~200°F) to cook.

While the idea of pulling off a stew in a hotel room is probably beyond most of us–although I do know one person who’s done it (not yours truly)–things like oatmeal are super easy. You can even pack up your own TSA-friendly oatmeal mix before you hit the skies. In a small plastic bag, measure out one cup steel-cut oats, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, a spoonful or two of raisins, and a small handful of walnuts. Check into your room, drop the dry ingredients into the coffee maker’s pot, and fill the reservoir with two cups of water. Set your coffee maker to go off an hour or so before you want your breakfast the next morning, and off you go. (You might want to rinse out the coffee filter part in case there are any stray grounds.) Total time? Five minutes. Total cost? Less than a Starbucks coffee. Snag some yogurt at a local store, and you’ve got a good blend of healthy carbs, fats, and proteins. Tasty, too!

Pro-tip: a plastic bag of steal-cut oats, walnuts, raisins, and cinnamon will keep practically forever. Stash a bag of this mix in your cubicle for days when you’re running late and don’t have time for breakfast at home.

Toaster Ovens

Like coffee makers, toaster ovens get a bad rap from the get-go: the first word just screams: “I’m only good for one thing: toast!” Nice try, Mr. Toaster… Toaster ovens are nothing more than small, miniature ovens. They’re not designed to run for hours on end, and aren’t as well-insulated as their bigger brethren. Still, they can be used quite successfully to do everything from poaching salmon to baking cookies.

Ovens are essentially “hot air chambers” that heat up air which then in turn heats up whatever items you pop inside. This type of heat transfer is called convection. In an oven, air imparts energy into your food, a dry cooking method; in a coffee maker, it’s the water that transfers the heat, making it a wet cooking method.

One of the key differences between dry and wet cooking methods is temperature. Wet cooking methods–steaming, poaching, boiling–can only get the food as hot as the water (~212°F under normal circumstances); whereas dry cooking methods–roasting, baking, grilling–can get foods much, much hotter. In cooking, there are two important chemical reactions, the Maillard reaction and caramelization, that don’t occur until well above boiling point. Because of this, these reactions and their resulting flavors can’t occur with wet cooking methods. This is why boiled or steamed Brussels sprouts are so bland. Next time, try roasting them: quarter ‘em, coat with olive oil and sprinkle them with a little salt, and roast ‘em. You’ll get these great, richly-flavored Brussels sprouts.

How does knowing this help somebody like me when trapped in a hotel room? Given a coffee maker, microwave, and if I’m lucky, a toaster oven, and I can think about what type of heat the given device produces. Once I understand that, I can think about foods that match up with what each device can do.

Take a toaster oven. They get plenty hot to brown toast, so things like cookies will work too. Place a spoonful of cookie dough on top of a piece of tin foil, drop onto the wire rack in a pre-heated toaster oven, and 8 to 10 minutes later, you have fresh-baked cookies. (If you’re on vacation with your significant other, snag some cookie dough from a grocery store and then when s/he’s not looking, pop the dough into the oven. Snuggling up to watch a movie with fresh cookies while on vacation = repentance for every time you had to work late…)

If you’re on a budget but still want a gourmet lunch at work, poached salmon works surprisingly well in a toaster oven. Salmon, like most fish, can be quite easily cooked in oil at relatively low temperatures, and a properly-cooked piece of fish, straight out of the oven, has this incredible texture and flavor. With fish, like most meats, it’s the temperature of the food, not how long it’s been in the oven, that matters. Snag a probe thermometer, a heat-safe bowl, a piece of salmon, and some olive oil. Place the fish in your bowl, cover with olive oil, and insert your probe. Set the thermometer to beep at ~130°F and transfer to your toaster oven. Two tips for making this easier: 1) have the store cut the salmon into individual-size portions, so that you’re not having to do any cutting; and 2) use a small container–a coffee mug will even work–that just fits the fish, so that you only need a few tablespoons of oil to cover it. Once the fish is done cooking, drop it onto some fresh greens, and you’ve got an easy, healthy, and great-tasting lunch.

Even if you don’t try making oatmeal, poaching salmon, or baking cookies, hopefully these office cooking tricks will inspire you to try adapting your favorite dishes to work with whatever appliances you have at hand while away from home. I’d love to hear what on-the-road tricks you use for cooking-both success and failures! Drop me a note in the comments below, or on my blog.

In the Maker Shed:

Cooking for Geeks
Jeff Potter, O’Reilly, 2010
Are you the innovative type, the cook who marches to a different drummer, used to expressing your creativity instead of just following recipes? Are you interested in the science behind what happens to food while it’s cooking? Do you want to learn what makes a recipe work so you can improvise and create your own unique dish? Author Jeff Potter has done the cubicle thing, the startup thing, and the entrepreneur thing, and through it all maintained his sanity by cooking for his friends.

Bill’s back! And his subject this week may be the ultimate example of a truly astounding piece of engineering that we all tend to take for granted: The computer hard drive. A favorite college physics professor once admitted to me that the hard disk drive impressed him more than almost any other single piece of modern technology, and I have since found that, the more I think about it, the more I agree with him. As always, Bill Hammack does a great job of explaining things in a way that will appeal to both experts and amateurs. [Thanks, Bill!]

The results are in from Chief Marketer’s annual Interactive Marketing Survey, conducted between February and March of this year with 647 marketing professionals from both B2B and B2C.

Key insights into 2011’s interactive marketing budgets include:

• The average allocation to interactive marketing is 25.2% of total budget
• B2B marketers plan to devote more money to interactive than B2C (26.2% vs. 24%)
• 30% of the overall marketing spend will go toward digital campaigns this year
• B2B marketers are more likely to increase both their interactive budgets and their overall marketing spend than B2C

Strategically, the number one goal from interactive campaigns is to build brand awareness according to 79.2% of respondents. This is followed by driving consumers to website (61.5%), generating sales (61.0%), and generating leads (60.4.%).

What surprised us is that even though building brand awareness is the leading goal for their interactive campaigns, only 24.6% of respondents are measuring brand “lift.” This speaks to the power of brand and the renewed energy around brand building with the power of social media.

Other data points to note:

• Email marketing has held steady from 2010.
• Other mainstream tools such as social media (Facebook, LinkedIn), SEO, Twitter, Online Ads, Paid Search Ads, Social Media Ads, and Viral or Word-Of-Mouth campaigns are all seeing more use now than last year.
• Top 3 leading niche-marketing tools are webinars, blogs, and online contests.

The challenge for us marketers has always been measuring how well our interactive marketing campaigns are doing. What are the metrics that we use to determine whether or not we are successful? Responses indicate the top 5 metrics being watched currently are:

• Click-throughs (58.7%)
• Traffic to website (53.3%)
• Lead generation/user opt-in (43.3%)
• Page views (38.3%)
• Incremental sales (34.1%)

Yet marketers aren’t quite sure how cost-effective interactive marketing actually is. Those who think online campaigns are more profitable than offline declined nine percentage points this year (25.7% of respondents), whereas those who think online is less profitable than offline went up (9.3%). That being said, 29% of marketers simply don’t know if interactive is more or less profitable than offline methods.

What is clear is that any uncertainty about the ROI of interactive marketing is not making an impact on the pursuit of these key initiatives. Marketers across all industries agree that is far worse to be left behind than worrying about its cost-effectiveness right now.

Download your own copy of Chief Marketer’s 2011 Interactive Marketing Survey for more information.

With summer on its way for many readers, vacation season is already starting to kick in for many of us. After a long winter—and this one has been brutal for much of the U.S. —who wouldn’t want to get away from the everyday routines and stress? Even if Hawaii and Paris aren’t in your plans, taking a break from your managed services business is necessary to rejuvenate your mind and spirit. All too often, planning all the work-related actions required to take a vacation is virtually impossible. The result is all too often working through a vacation; attached to your smartphone and unable to relax.  If you include yourself in that group, it’s time to develop a plan that can restore some “peace of mind” to your life and some viable structure to your business.

The key value in a managed services practice is the “managed” element. While consistent billing is a great benefit, without effective delivery and retention strategies the managed model will eventually bleed the MSP business of customers. By creating greater efficiencies in your clients’ operations and IT environment, you create value and earn predictable compensation. While emergency outages or equipment failures are inevitable, the cloud and managed service technologies available today allows an MSP to minimize number of required “truck rolls.” The true “peace of mind” comes from being organized. When your business and customer-oriented procedures are clearly defined and follow industry best practices, the processes can then be automated. That’s how successful MSPs get their life back and bring sanity to their workplace.

Step 1:  Take time to assess roadblocks

Start out by evaluating your current services workflow. Is your team able to create and complete customer service requests consistently, effectively, and efficiently? If your honest answer is no, you should detail and track how specific issues are managed by your staff and work to improve them. If you’re able to make the investment, join a peer community and acquire tools to help you determine your individual business metrics. Understand how your business compares with other MSPs in service delivery, financial performance, and continuous improvement activities. Take that knowledge and leverage to drive process improvement throughout your organization.

Step 2:  Make the commitment to managed services

Next, take and inventory of your organization’s skills sets. Is your technical team transitioned fully from the break fix model to a proactive management role? If any members haven’t bought into the managed services business plan, it’s time to evaluate their true value to your organization. Just one or two disgruntled or disillusioned technicians or sales professionals can create more headaches than they are worth, whether they are your least experienced or most skilled team members. Some employees will never make the mental transition and commit to the new business model, and the organization will benefit in a million different ways by replacing the “old guard” with your next managed services superstar.

Step 3:  Appoint or hire a process champion

If you haven’t already assigned a process champion in your business, do it now! Even if it’s been years since you transitioned from a traditional service model, one person should always be responsible for assessing your workflow; with an ultimate goal ensuring client support is able to function like it’s on autopilot. While you may be that individual initially, be sure to assign someone else as your business grows so you can focus on other strategic objectives. Review major changes they recommend before implementation, but give them the moral, financial, and technical support needed to accomplish their goals. Ownership must be shared among the entire team, but someone has to hold each contributor responsible for meeting deadlines and encouraging their progress.

Step 4:  Leverage existing technology fully

After you can confidently say your processes are tweaked to maximize business efficiency and customer service delivery, it’s time to put your automation tools to work. That means getting the most out of the systems you use to run your business as well as those used to manage your clients’ infrastructure, from remote monitoring and remediation (RMM) tools to the client console for backup solutions. But that’s just the start…

Many MSPs don’t leverage all the features of their RMM.  For example, are remote monitoring alerts integrated into your professional services automation (PSA) platform so the ticketing system is automatically routed to the proper technician? That can save time for each occurrence, reducing the number of manual procedures required every time an issue occurs. The time invested now to properly implement the integration will save you a significant number of billable hours later on. Elimination of manual and repetitive tasks in this fashion will improve your staff morale, create greater efficiencies, and lead to faster response times. The end result is a happier staff, satisfied customers, and fewer of those stressful, “immediate need” demands on your time.

Cloud based backup and recovery solutions, hosted email and anti-spam tools, and cloud security products that integrate tightly with RMM and PSA systems can each streamline your workflow; automatically creating and directing service tickets to the appropriate support personnel. When your team is able to work primarily from one tool, and dispatch is centralized through integration, entire workflow processes are simplified. Training occurs faster, employees communicate more effectively, and reporting both internally and externally is enhanced. Additionally, response times are generally shortened when tickets go directly to the tech in charge of that site or technology. That’s good for you and good for the client!

Step 5: Go on Vacation and Relax

When you look up and realize that your processes are both effective and managed on a daily basis, and your management tools are working together effectively, you might feel just a little like you don’t have much to do. That is the perfect problem to have! What is the next step? Take a vacation with your loved ones and focus your attention on them. When you come back refreshed and ready to take on the world, you’ll find that the business continued to function well in your absence.

Ted Roller is VP of channel development at Intronis. Find out more about Intronis’ partner program. Guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

We had six terabytes of data to copy from one NAS device to another, and not enough time to do it. Here’s how we turned on the afterburners to move that data in about thirty hours.

A customer’s Server was down because of a bad NAS device, and unfortunately he didn’t have a hot backup. He needed to copy a lot of data quickly, and he asked us to help. The data set consisted of many 35GB files, 6TB total. He needed to copy it across a 100MB Ethernet fast network to a new NAS device.

The customer had tried copying the data using the Windows copy function, but Windows failed to copy 35 GB data files across local network. It usually failed with an error “Not enough server storage is available to process this command,” though it was not a problem with the actual storage device itself.

A reboot would sometimes provide a temporary fix, copying the first file, but it would fail on subsequent files. There are some registry tweaks posted on blogs online, but none proved useful. Each 35GB file took about an hour to copy. Rebooting for each file was unreasonable.

Then we tried using a variety of utilities including Robocopy, xcopy and eseutil  (an Exchange utility) but all failed with similar errors. (Although Robocopy was able to resume from the point of failure, each file would take 2+ hours to finish the copy due to all the interruptions.)

Research turned up a couple of possibilities. One of them, FTP transfers, never occurred to us. But it turned out that when used in a local network environment, and running multiple threads, FTP is REALLY fast and efficient.

The second possibility was to use a program called “RichCopy,” which was originally written by Microsoft for internal use, and later released to the public as freeware. It is really good at copying huge files. We decided to use both of them.

For FTP we installed a Filezilla server (freeware) and SmartFTP client. Using FTP alone, we were able to move each 35 GB data file in 15-20 minutes. The SmartFTP client can do multiple simultaneous transfers (worker threads.)

But, with 6+ TB of data in 175 files, the copy process was still too slow. So we fired up RichCopy and set it to run with three threads.

Using this combination of tools we were able to copy six terabytes in about 30 hours.

Erik Eckel updates his tips about starting an IT consultancy to include some lessons that his office learned in the wake of the financial crisis.

Managed services providers (MSPs) use everything from Google Adwords to Kutenda for their online marketing programs. But marketing experts like Robin Robins continue to promote direct mail strategies as well. Fortunately, a range of companies have designed direct mail templates to help small business owners — including MSPs — with their marketing efforts. One recent example: Postcard Services has designed a marketing campaign platform for small businesses.

The service sounds simple enough: First, users fill out a company profile on the Postcard Services site. Then, the system automatically drives limitless direct mail postcard campaigns. Companies can then create mailing lists, print postcards and ship items in bulk once they receive the postcard campaigns.

There is no fee to set up an account and Postcard Services says it uses the highest quality, green print on the market. Prices vary according to company size and material demand, but new customers receive 10 percent off of their printing services until the end of June 2011.

Postcard Services has more than 35,000 small business clients throughout the United States. But a disclaimer: We haven’t tried the service.

Also, you’re going to need a direct mail marketing strategy before signing up for any potential services. To potentially get started, check out this list of seven ways you can measure your direct mail marketing success.

Sign up for MSPmentor’s Weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Follow us via RSS,Facebook, Identi.ca and Twitter. Check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com. Read our editorial disclosure here.

Shared by jagwrangler

This is a nice article that demonstrates one of the biggest differences between the cheap online backup services that service a very wide area (Mozy, Carbonite, KineticD, etc.) and the local, personal service that YOU can offer using Remote Backup Systems’ RBackup Online Backup software.

-Rob Cosgrove

As some MSPmentor readers know, my hard drive failed on May 3. A few readers have asked me for an update. Specifically, was my cloud-based backup service able to restore my files? Unfortunately, it’s not a simple Yes or No answer. Here’s why… plus an important cloud sales lesson for managed servi…

Jack Wallen describes how to create virtual images and serve them over your network using free virtualization software called VirtualBox.

Full Service Online Backup Service Providers can offer their customers far more than just simple backup and restore. They can offer services like on-site full backups, bulk restores via USB drives, proactive monitoring, full system management, hot-site and cold-site services, and Disaster Recovery planning – services that those cheap $5/month services simply cannot offer.

This is why full service online backup services can charge more – because they can deliver so much more – and why they are not in competition with the cheap $5/month services. If you are offering a full service online backup service, do not consider Mozy and Carbonite your competitors, and do not try to compete with them on price. Your segment of the market is much more savvy than theirs, and knows the value of your added services.

If your prospects are telling you, “Yea, but I can get the same thing from Mozy for $5,” then you have not done an adequate job of explaining your services. Work on your pitch so you can very quickly explain the difference between your service and theirs.

Here’s an article I wrote on competing with cheap online backup services. It has a nice chart you can use to help explain the difference between your full services and the $5/month cheap ones:

Here’s something else you won’t get with the $5/month services: a complete Disaster Recovery Plan. But, as a full service provider, you can offer your customers this valuable service based on the FREE Disaster Recovery Plan Template I’m going to offer you now.

My 19-page Disaster Recovery Plan is a template in MS Word .DOC format that you can edit, customize, and use in your own business. The plan includes sections on DR Goals, checklists, contact lists, Preparedness, Recovery, impact analysis, and more.

Get your FREE Disaster Recovery Plan Template here.

Rob Cosgrove, CEO Remote Backup Systems

Rob Cosgrove is the President of Remote Backup Systems, founder of the Online Backup Industry, and a vocal advocate for maintaining the highest standards in Online Backup software. His latest book, the Online Backup Guide for Service Providers: How to Start and Operate an Online Backup Service, is available online now, on Amazon.com, and at bookstores.

Remote Backup Systems provides brandable, scalable software and solutions to MSPs and VARs enabling them to offer Online Backup Services.

Would you like a FREE download of the complete Online Backup Guide for Service Providers as an E-Book? Only 200 available through May 15. [PICK THIS LINK].

Here at RBS, “Our mission is to make you successful.” Is more than just a motto – it’s how we do business. We want you to be successful in the Online Backup business no matter whose software you use (although we hope you use ours!)

That’s why we give away so much valuable information about actually operating online backup services. If you are successful, we are successful. It’s about a lot more than just selling software.

One of the most valuable things you can do when starting your business is to develop a formal business plan. It helps you set your expectations, acquire the right resources, and budget the right amount of money to make your business a success.

Here’s a FREE 37-page business plan template designed for an Online Backup business. You can modify it for your own business. The business plan will be sent to you as an MS Word file in .DOC format attached to an email.

Click this link for your free Online Backup Service business plan template.

Rob Cosgrove is the President of Remote Backup Systems, founder of the Online Backup Industry, and a vocal advocate for maintaining the highest standards in Online Backup software. His latest book, the Online Backup Guide for Service Providers: How to Start and Operate an Online Backup Service, is available online now, on Amazon.com, and at bookstores.

Remote Backup Systems provides brandable, scalable software and solutions to MSPs and VARs enabling them to offer Online Backup Services.

Would you like a FREE download of the complete Online Backup Guide for Service Providers as an E-Book? Only 200 available through May 15. [PICK THIS LINK].