Writing: The Achilles Heel of MSPs, And What To Do About It

By Bob Vogel, B2 Marketing

Most MSPs and IT service providers I know struggle with writing. For some reason, writing simply is not a core competency for most people who chose technical careers. And conversely, many great writers I know are luddites, and don’t know a mouse wheel from a cartwheel.

While this is certainly a generalization, it’s a documented fact that creative and analytical thinking are driven by different parts of the brain, and they are not often equally dominant in most people. It’s the classic “left-brain, right brain” schism.

That’s probably why most IT techs are great at fixing and maintaining networks, but they lack good writing skills, and they rarely document their work.

The practical ramifications of this are multi-fold: Techs are notoriously bad at updating service tickets with good notes. They are not the folks you’ll be expecting to produce a comprehensive report for your clients detailing the work they’ve performed. And they’re certainly not the people who are going to walk out of a prospect situation and generate a well-written and well-organized set of documents detailing what they discovered, and what the implications are.

That’s probably why Network Detective has taken off and become the leading IT Assessment tool in just two years. The various modules collect an enormous amount of machine and network data very fast, and without any installs of software, agents or probes . . . but the REAL value is the branded reports that you can automatically generate with them.

Depending on the modules you have, you can run a general network scan, an IT security scan, an MS Exchange/Office 365 scan, or an SQL Server scan. There’s also a module that comes with a specialty appliance that you can use to perform an internal vulnerabilities scan.

All of these modules come with their own sets of reports that can be generated literally with the check of a box and click of a mouse. The reports are all easily branded with your choice of colors, images and company information and logos. You can also easily edit them. Here’s the link to a web page with descriptions of all the reports and samples you can download.

With tools like Network Detective it takes a lot of pressure off of you and your techs to produce the compelling reports you need to turn prospects into new clients, and to justify your fees to your existing clients.

In the end, you can be doing a great job at IT service, but if you don’t do an equally good job communicating with your clients and prospects, you’ll never achieve the full potential of your company.