Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP) Tips for Partners
As this is my first post to the Canadian Partner blog, I should probably provide a bit of an introduction! I am part of Canada’s SMS&P Partner Team, responsible for the end-to-end CSP Program which was launched at WPC 2015. With just over a year in role, I have been fortunate enough to have many conversations with partners of all different backgrounds and technical specialties. In this post I am going to quickly touch on what I see as best practices to follow during the first few months of being in the CSP Program. I will expand on each in future posts and also cover topics pertaining to partners who are looking to evolve or refine their managed services practice. If you have topics you’d like me to cover or questions, feel free to post them in the comments and I will do my best to research them and post some thoughts on the blog.
With that, on to some tips for partners who are thinking about enrolling in CSP, or who have recently enrolled.
#1 – Defining your Managed Services Offerings
A key step you want to take before applying or enrolling in CSP is to work-out what are the Managed Services that you want to offer to customers. Stepping back further here are a few questions to ask:
- Who will be your target customer? Existing customers, or new customers in a demographic you don’t currently sell & service to?
- What are their under-serviced needs that you can uniquely address?
- In addition to the cloud service itself (Eg. O365, CRM Online, EMS, Azure), what professional services, IP or 3rd Party services will you package together for customers to address their needs?
- Finally, how much of this package can you integrate and automate so that your deployment for customers is as fast and efficient as possible (which will further boost your margins).
I typically recommend partners identify one to five offers to start with, and that could be one offer with various levels of services (gold/silver/bronze). Using this as a North Star for your business through the rest of the CSP onboarding journey just accelerates all the other work because it gives every task a purpose and a strategic direction.
#2 – Picking the channel model that is right for your business
As you may know, there are two channel models for CSP: An indirect model, where you purchase the cloud service licenses from a CSP Distributor; and a direct model, where you purchase directly from Microsoft. Both are profitable when matched with the right partner!
The key to picking the right channel model is to start by looking internally at your business and deciding if providing customers full support for their cloud services is going to be a long-term strategic direction for your company. Essentially you need to ask yourself, if you want to invest in the necessary resources and people to deliver world-class support to your customers? If the answer is yes, then the direct model may make sense for you, but if this is not a priority for your business, or you are unsure, you should look into the indirect model, because the CSP Distributors are set up specifically to help partners share the responsibility (and cost) of supporting customers.
#3 – Create a marketing plan to promote your new services
The sage advice to Kevin Costner of “if you build it, they will come” does not necessary apply in the case of managed services. Especially if you are planning to target net-new customers who are not familiar with your company or your brand. This is a great time to start assessing your businesses marketing needs for 2016 and setting aside investments to create awareness of your new service lines, and drive demand.
Our Partner Profitability Workshops have some great content on building digital marketing campaign to help increase the reach and impact of your marketing investments.
I hope this initial blog on CSP has helped shed some light on making some key decisions. If you have any feedback or recommendations, I would love to hear from you!
To leave you with some fun reading material to delve deeper into the CSP program, visit https://partnercenter.microsoft.com.
Cheers & happy holidays
David LeBlanc
CSP Partner Channel Manager