Upgrade Opportunities for You and Your Customers

Anything you do to benefit your customers benefits you as well, right?

Doing something for anyone usually makes them feel good, encouraging them to appreciate you and make you feel good too, right? And in many cases customers pay you to do things that benefit them, which directly benefits you. Even better (there’s something better than money?) they may see fit to refer others to take advantage of your services. What benefits you more than new customers?

SonicWall’s continuing mission to improve and upgrade our products is meant to go one step further in that, while it certainly benefits us with new sales, it also benefits you with new opportunities, and most importantly it benefits your customers. A Win-Win-Win!!

How Upgrading Benefits Your Customers

Notice we did not say “How Upgrading to SonicWall Gen7 Benefits Your Customers.” You’ve probably read plenty about the benefits of Gen7 already. This is all about the value of the process of upgrading itself!

New and Improved Technology

For manufacturers to remain competitive, they need to constantly improve their offerings. The new and improved technologies developed to create this improvement deliver several extraordinary values to customers, including better performance, increased resilience, superior security, improved management, along with lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and operating expense.

Improved Value

To fully appreciate the value proposition of any upgrade, we must first focus on the difference between price and cost. The price of the upgrade is the amount paid by the customer for the implementation of the newly upgraded products and services. It is a one-time charge. The cost of the upgrade includes everything the customer must pay for subsequent related procurements as well as operating costs caused or incurred by the upgraded system. The objective is to increase the customer’s profitability by creating more profit as the result of the upgraded system by generating more revenue and lowering costs.

Improved Reliability Means Reduced Support

Reliability is one of the characteristics of any product that every customer appreciates most. Recognizing this, manufacturers constantly strive to improve the reliability of their products. This should have the additional benefit of reducing the need for servicing and support.

Reduced Support Means Increased Risk

The biggest customer benefit of upgrading is that it avoids the risk of keeping equipment beyond the point where support from the manufacturer ends. Manufacturers regularly update their software for improved security, improved performance, improved firmware, and more. When a product is no longer supported with these updates, cybercriminals know it and those products become prime targets. Meaning if you still have them in your network, you become a prime target.

How Upgrading Benefits You, the MSP or MSSP

Making sure you keep your customers fully upgraded at all times pays off far more handsomely than you may realize!

Preventing Competition from Entering

If you don’t recommend valuable improvements to your customer, you can bet someone else will. This also gives that competitor the opportunity to ask, “why hasn’t your current MSP upgraded you yet?” Then they will present all the advantages we detailed above to their benefit. You really need to get there first.

Revenue Opportunities

This may seem obvious, but there may be more revenue opportunities than you expect. Growing companies may need modifications to their current network design, or even a complete redesign. Initial consulting, which should carry a fee, may uncover vulnerabilities created by growth, or misconfiguration by users, or other causes. At minimum, there is the deployment, configuration, and cutover to the new equipment and software.

Reduced Support

While it definitely serves the customer, the reduction in support created by improved technology and standardization across the network also reduces your requirement to deliver support. Even if you don’t increase the price of your service contract from year to year, you’ll still improve your profitability by reducing your operating costs.

Visibility

While it may seem that a service contract that ends up requiring no action from you is 100% profit, it also means your customer never sees you. Out of sight is out of mind until renewal time. If you haven’t shown up at least to perform upgrades, you may not see a renewal. It’s advisable to also perform preventative services, conduct quarterly business reviews, or find other reasons to get in front of your customer during the course of the contact.

Opportunity Hunt

The procedures you execute while configuring, deploying, and integrating the new, upgraded products and services will give you remarkable access to information that may suggest a wide variety of network expansions and other improvements you might not have found otherwise.

Your Reputation for Responsibility

“I know I can count on them…”

That’s the answer most people receive when asking about the best MSPs and MSSPs. Customers engage you to manage the continuing top performance of their networks. By being first to recommend upgrades as they are announced, you demonstrate to your customer that are always seeking every way possible to improve their experience with their network.

Get started updating your customers today. Begin by examining each customer’s installed base to determine which Gen7 upgrades to recommend. Learn more about SonicWall Gen7 next-generation firewalls (NGFW) and invest some time reviewing our video series!

Always remain alert to announcements of new upgrades and aggressive about informing and encouraging your customers to engage them.