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Tidying Up Your Documentation with IT Glue

By Ashley Ogilvie posted 2 days ago
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Does your documentation spark joy? It might, but we’re not going to get quite that deep into Marie Kondo’s latest Netflix series. We will, however, suggest that while Tidying Up With Marie Kondo has lead many to head straight to cleaning out their closets, it might be time that you went through your documentation. Rather than thinking about what documentation brings you joy, consider what documentation is offering you the most value. We talk a lot about the importance of documentation. If you’re documenting consistently, you don’t need to be told the kind of impact it can have on your business. That being said, if your documentation isn’t adding value, then ...
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Should you provide some services just because you can?

By Galina Marcus posted 3 days ago
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Get your bottom line up by partnering with specialized solutions providers. By Joe Schiavone @LANtelligence A big part of my job is to interview Managed IT Providers all around the US to understand what drives their decision to bring new services to their portfolio and what those new services do for their business. An interesting fact came up during my recent attendance at the IT Nation Evolve event (formerly known as HTG Peer Groups): Many MSPs add new services, like Cloud Voice, just to keep up with the growing competition. While racing to increase the number of services offered, many of the MSPs don’t invest in the proper development of those new offerings. ...
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How Efficiency Drives Effectiveness

By Ashley Ogilvie posted 9 days ago
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How many times have you heard us bring up efficiency? We talk about it all the time, and that’s because IT Glue is a fantastic tool for improving your efficiency. So let me ask you this – what does this efficiency do for you? Because here’s what it should be doing. The true value of efficiency I read an   article on LinkedIn   the other day that highlighted the true value of efficiency. It’s not about that short-run immediate bottom line impact, although improving margins and increasing profits sure feels good. The true value of efficiency is that it allows you to increase your effectiveness. You take a bunch of stuff out of your brain, and doing so frees ...
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Proof of Process: How Documentation Increases Transparency

By Ashley Ogilvie posted 16 days ago
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When a client calls in with a problem, what’s your process? Now, consider how you showcase that to your clients. It’s one thing to be able to talk about how your MSP meets SLAs or crushes tickets, but it’s another thing to provide the evidence that actually shows how those processes are accomplished. That’s what documentation offers you – full transparency. Team transparency The core of documentation is about getting information out of an individual’s head and turning it into shared knowledge. That transformation itself creates a strong degree of transparency. When only one team member knows the ins and outs of a client’s organization, a process, or an ...
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MSP Insights: What does a 2.7 billion record breach mean to MSPs

By Vincent Tran posted 23 days ago
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PROTECT YOUR CLIENTS—AND YOURSELF—WITH ROAR'S IDENTITY MONITORING Another day, another massive identity breach—or at least that’s how it seems. Just last week, 2.7 BILLION personal data records were compromised, the largest collection of compromised data aggregated in more than a decade. Last week’s breach was more than 5 times the size of the 2018 Marriott Starwood hotel group’s data breach. Were your clients’ records among them? If not, will you be so lucky next time? After all, it’s suspected that this is only the first of 7 mega-batches of data. With probably thousands of customers under management, how can you continuously review and protect every ...
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Webinar: From Data to Insights

By Vincent Tran posted 23 days ago
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Liongard’s Roar platform lets engineers be engineers: by capturing data across multiple systems and automatically updating system documentation, they get the answers they need where they need it without having to go on a scavenger hunt. That’s great for the engineers, but what about the rest of your team? We’ve got something new, just for them. The new Metrics & Lists feature in Roar brings together all the vital metrics that sales, account management, finance, and the C-suite need to know about your customers—and does it in one easy-to-use interface. Did you tune in to our recent Metrics webinar on January 24, 2019? Here’s what viewers learned: ...
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5 Reasons Your Non-Techs Need Documentation Too

By Ashley Ogilvie posted 23 days ago
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Guess what? Your non-technical employees love saving time too. The problem of time waste is unfortunately not just limited to solving tickets; it’s everywhere. It’s in marketing, sales, human resources, finance – the list go on. What’s the solution? The same solution you’ve gotten your techs on board with. Documentation. Here’s why: 1) Shared knowledge When information is stuck in the head of individual employees, nobody benefits. Instead, documentation provides a shared bank of knowledge. Think about your hiring process. When a new employee comes in, how do you get them effective in their job as quickly as possible? Regardless of their position or department, ...
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4 Steps to Get Your Techs Documenting

By Ashley Ogilvie posted 30 days ago
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Are your techs documenting? They should be. Oftentimes if they’re encountering problems on the job, it can be boiled down to poor documentation. Lack of standardization? Time waste? Onboarding too slowly? Yes, documentation is the solution. Once your techs are in a   documentation rhythm , they’ll wonder how they ever survived without it. So how do you get your techs to not only start documenting but do it consistently? Here are 4 steps. 1) Show value Start with the basics. It’s difficult to love something when you’ve not yet seen the value in it. Start by highlighting what documentation can do for your techs once they start making it an integral part ...
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MSP Marketing. Know Your Target Audience

By Galina Marcus posted 01-22-2019
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Share this post with your sales team to help them communicate more effectively with their prospects in 2019! In 2018, IDG published a report and infographics describing new strategies for IT decision-makers. This report has turned the traditional IT sales paradigm upside-down, as it shows at least 8 different LOBs (Line of Business) involved in the IT purchase process. If you are selling IT services and SaaS and are looking to grow your customer base, then this is your new realm – get used to it. The days of selling to your fellow IT professionals, i.e. CIOs, IT Managers, and System Administrators, are over. Now your target audience is anyone from the CEO ...
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2019 Resolution: Protect Your Clients' Networks Against Outages

By Mike Siegler posted 01-22-2019
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At the end of 2018, CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in America, experienced a two-day service outage. This major outage cut internet, television and   911 services   across the U.S. The outage started at 17:18 UTC on Thursday, December 27, and was reported resolved at 19:49 UTC on Saturday, December 29. CenturyLink said the outage was   caused by a single network card sending bad packets . CenturyLink outage map, December 28, 2018 The issue caused so much grief that the U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has launched a public investigation into this outage. FCC chairman Ajit Pai (@AjitPaiFCC) called ...
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Top Causes of Employee Burnout in Your MSP (and How to Avoid it)

By Ashley Ogilvie posted 01-16-2019
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Feeling burnt out? All you need is a quick glance at Reddit to know that you’re not alone. A little while ago a colleague of mine stumbled across a Reddit page based on the opening comment, “Burnt out and I don’t know what to do.” The user worked for an MSP, and identified experiencing an overwhelming amount of responsibilities – the kind that isn’t sustainable. Scanning the page, a large influx of comments reported that many were struggling with the same kind of thing: feeling overworked, underappreciated, and experiencing something close to chaos in their companies. Burnout doesn’t come out of nowhere , though. So, what’s causing the flame to go out? ...
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How to Engage and Motivate Your Employees to Become a Loyal and Successful Team

By Galina Marcus posted 01-11-2019
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by Joe Schiavone @LANtelligence In the hundreds of meetings I have with MSPs across the country during the year, there’s one topic that usually stands out regardless of their service portfolio or vertical market: company core values that C-suite would love their teams to live by. CEOs and owners are trying to drive this culture from the top down, feeding the team mission and vision statements and core values. I think this is a two-way street and company culture should be a team effort, not a management directive. Regardless of what management might have planned, company culture is formed by the everyday attitudes of all the employees that come to work ...
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IT Glue’s Top 3 MSP & Channel Predictions for 2019

By Ashley Ogilvie posted 01-09-2019
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New year, new trends? Just before 2019 began, we sat down with a couple of our own channel experts to see what they thought the new year would look like for MSPs. Here’s what they predicted. Founder and former CEO Chris Day believes that the most mature MSPs will continue to separate themselves from the pack. “I think the delta between what is good and what is great will continue to grow,” he explains. “A lot of specialized services have higher margins, so a lot of MSPs want to add to their service offering. But if they aren’t stable in what they do now, how can they add things? The companies that are more operationally stable and performing well today are ...
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How to Ensure Your Website is GDPR Compliant

By Pete Busam posted 01-08-2019
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One of the most significant changes to the internet and online privacy was made earlier this year – the General Data Protection Regulation. This EU data protection directive affects every business with an online presence – even those who operate mostly in the US. It’s essential that you take steps to ensure your site is GDPR compliant to avoid any fines – which can be up to 4% of your total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year. To keep your business and your customers protected, tackle these five tasks.  Update Your Privacy Policy If you haven’t touched your privacy policy in a while, or just copied it from someone else’s website, ...
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Is that Kendra Lee Singing Jingle Bells?

By Jennifer Hillman posted 12-20-2018
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It’s that time of year again when I write a sales rendition of a favorite Christmas song or poem. This year’s song is purported to be the first song ever played in space back in 1965 by the Gemini 6 astronauts: “Jingle Bells!” Get the tune solidly in mind, then use these salesy lyrics to have a holiday laugh all the way to the bank. Dashing for the sale End of year is here. It seems you cannot fail, Sales closing big and fast Making our team cheer. What fun it is to close at last Prospects from last year! Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle to the bank! Oh, what fun it is to beat Your quota every year. Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle ...
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Want a solid forecast, Create Demand!

By Pete Busam posted 12-17-2018
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Each week sales teams attend a status meeting where management exercises each member of the team for a status on accounts.  The reps do everything they can to justify their existence.  The meetings are typically not productive since they rehash what has already been provided in the past.  It sets the tone for the week and reps run from management when they seem them coming down the hall or the cell phone rings with caller ID that says “run”!  It truly is time that the management team gets focused on why sales are down and what is keeping the organization from moving forward. Well, let’s start with something simple.  Most organizations fail on a process to ...
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MSP Marketing. Tips For Social Media Engagement

By Galina Marcus posted 12-13-2018
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Social media is a flexible tool that can be effectively used for your marketing, as we discussed in the previous posts of this series. It is inexpensive (or even free), it provides good exposure to the audience, it helps promote your services, and it boosts brand awareness. In this post, we talk about how to actively engage MSP prospects on social media. Most companies treat their social media activities as passive promotions. They make sure they have their three-four posts a day with relevant content and track the traffic generated by those posts. This can bring you some results and is not very time consuming, unlike actively engaging with your followers. ...
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What MSPs Should Focus on During Holiday Down Time

By Ashley Ogilvie posted 12-12-2018
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Plans for the holidays? It’s time to make some. With Black Friday kicking things off as November came to a close, the holiday lull for many MSPs is starting to set in. While B2C companies anticipate the holiday buzz, B2B businesses like your MSP are often a little quieter. So how can you make the most of the quieter times around the holidays? You’ve got some options. In fact, the slow holiday season brings its own multitude of opportunities for MSPs to take advantage of as they prepare and press into the new year. We put some ideas together to help. The daunting documentation project you’ve been avoiding Documentation takes time, and it’s easy to get ...
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New Trends to Help Grow Your Managed Services Business In 2019

By Galina Marcus posted 12-04-2018
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As an HTG Gold Member, we were honored to attend their November meeting in Orlando. This year’s event was especially significant for several reasons. Firstly, the HTG peer groups are now officially a part of ConnectWise events for MSPs all over the world. Secondly, this event highlighted some new trends and dramatic transitions most Managed Service Providers have to go through in order to preserve and grow their business. The recurring theme of the HTG event was adding SaaS services, including voice, cyber security, video conferencing, data circuits, and more, to an MSP’s portfolio. After all, the rapid rise of SaaS technology was supposed to make end-users’ ...
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Hello World

By Clayton Lee posted 12-02-2018
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10 Print Hello World 20 Goto 10
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