Your PSA is not a service desk Here’s why

let's get uh started and as you know today's conversation is going to be about psa and the topic that we're specifically going to be speaking about is why your psa is not a service desk thereby telling you tips and how you can make the best uh use of your psa yes and for this we have with us mark cron and christian so you know mark and crawl you very they're well known in the msp community a lot of you here might already be uh already know them you know mackerel is the vp of sales with super upstate ai he's an msp veteran and a former msp owner uh he was also recognized as channel chief by crm and chris tim is the author of pc profitability and he's a technical director at sunderland consulting he's an msp business coach psc rmm expert and executive council member at comptia uh mark and chris did i miss out on something you want to add something no i feel better about myself already thanks it's good to catch up with chris again it's been a number of years yeah i was actually going to say i i've known mark for many many years back when i used to run my msp business too so um yeah so we've known each other for a very long time so always good to catch up with old friends likewise that's that's great that's great that's awesome uh over to you mark and chris to take it on from here thank you okay so um hi everyone um so my name's chris tim um i'm a msp business consultant uh specializing in helping msps to get the best style of their um the psa tool um you know and as um said today we're gonna be talking about um uh you know uh psa um is is not a service desk and and this is the reason why so let's kind of start on this and look at at what is a psa tool um so personally i don't like the word psa which stands for professional services automation um because really what a psa tool is is it's a business management platform so it's a platform that manages your entire business not just the service delivery side of your business so things like um you know contract management uh project management um you know even crm opportunity management uh you know everything in your entire business is managed via your psa tool um so that includes uh you know everything from kind of i like to call it from um from cradle to grave so um being able to manage the the clients effectively when they become or when they're a prospect or a lead um all the way through to i guess when they no longer become a client anymore or they're no longer a client but every single thing that you're doing with that customer um you know from generating the very first opportunity um to uh you know managing their contracts billing the customer um you know managing projects and of course all of the service delivery piece so you know you probably came onto this webinar thinking you know what the heck are these guys talking about of course a psa tool is is a service desk um yes it does have a service desk element of it um but very often you know we find that people kind of go into a service desk uh or also go into a psa tool with the service desk in mind and go in um you know wanting a service desk and kind of don't look at all the other bits and pieces that are you know that a psa tool will allow you to do so um how does this compare to a general service desk so you know there's a bunch of service delivery tools out there um i'm not going to mention any names on on this webinar i'm sure you know who they all are um you know that are pure play service desk uh platforms that allow you to create tickets for your customers that allow you to um you know manage everything about the service delivery element um and those are great right these are great for ticketing but that's all they are is they ticketing systems if you then went for one of those solutions you then normally would have to go and you know get a separate crm tool or a separate billing tool or a separate project management tool whatever it is that you're looking to do so so how that differs from um from a psa tool as i mentioned earlier on is you know the psa tool is your full business management platform that allows you to to manage the entire life cycle of your business so let's look at this and let's look at why do why do you need to get an msp oh sorry why does your msp business need to get a psa tool so life cycle management so we talked about this managing the client all the way through the entire life cycle of the customer so right away from you know when you take that very very first lead you create the opportunity you go through that whole uh sales process you know they go from a lead into a prospect all of those uh those things that you're doing with the customer um uh you know you you're managing the entire relationship with that with a prospect with the when they become a customer then you know they they sign on board you then might need to quote them for some other things so um you you know you integrate your quoting tool into that and then you get to a point where um they're going to need some some tickets at some point they're going to log some tickets with you um you're going to need your engineers to actually go in and um you know talk to the customers uh update those tickets all that kind of stuff so that's where um you know a psa tool is is really really going to help your business um you know from an entire life cycle management of that client not just not just the service delivery side of it and then all the way through to to things like um like billing your customer you know being able to to actually uh you know uh you have a contract uh with some services in there you're going to go ahead and actually build your customer for those services that entire uh life cycle management piece is is what you're going to be able to do in in a psa tool um you know one of the reasons why as an msp you need to get a a psa tour also allows you to have those um those contextual conversation things like um you know when the contract is is about to expire you know do you need to go in and you know renew one of those services do you maybe need to charge um a little bit extra for some some servers um you know do that um uh you know is there a particular device um and he's needing much more attention and you're spending a lot more time on that device um logging more time more tickets that so it's those kinds of conversations that the um a psa tool allows you to have as well because you're going to have all of that information in so it's it's like a um a single pane of glass really it's gonna allow you to have all of that information at your fingertips to be able to um to really um you know have those those um uh conversations with your customers so um i i call that fact-based decision-making you know because you've got all the facts and now you can make the decisions based upon on those those facts and then um of course one of the the biggest reasons why your um msp needs a psa tool is is absolutely my you know my all-time favorite um topic is all about improving profitability so shiram um earlier on um i i recently authored a book sorry shameless plug but i recently authored a book on psa profitability it's all about how to get um you know the profitability information out of your your psa tool so being able to um you know really accurately pinpoint how much um you know each contract costs how much each engineer costs and then being able to run reports to really look right down to you know who is my most profitable customer who's my least profitable customer um you know which which contract is costing me money which customer is costing me money um you know and and you're going to be able to really pinpoint that right down to um to the contract and being able to have that information in the psa and having accurate information in there like you know understanding the um the cost of the the engineer and how much time that engineer is costing um all of that kind of stuff you're going to be able to put into the psa tool so there's a there's a bunch of reasons why your msp needs to get a psa tool over a traditional service delivery and service desk tool chris question for you um when you're looking at the msps out there what's i got my idea here but what's the biggest mistake that msps make in uh something they don't utilize in a psa that they should uh without when i was at one of those other companies that were one of the big psas out there in the top four uh we had a real struggle with getting people to implement it right i think the number was eighty percent of msps use twenty percent of their psas uh at best uh or their their entire platform that they have available what do you what do you find is the part that they don't implement is a real mistake i know what mine was that and that that's a great question and i think um most of the time it's it's probably the rest of the psa tool except for the service delivery side right so hence hence why we kind of you know had this topic on um you know on this webinar because a lot of people go into it buying it as a service desk tool and they implement the service desk side of it and and don't implement any of the other parts so they're still going to do their billing through you know whatever other platform they're still going to do their project management and their their sales opportunities and crm they're still going to do all of that through all these other tools and are using it predominantly as um as a service desk tool so i think certainly from that point of view from using it um the biggest mistake i think is that people um people buy it ultimately for the wrong reason right so they go into it with you know needing a service desk and they buy a psa tool for that and you know one of the things i always say in this industry is we're very much of a me too industry right so people will um be looking for a service service desk tool and they'll suddenly go hey what does everyone else use and 99 of the time people are using a psa tool and somebody will buy the psa tool because they think oh it's it's a great service desk tool um so so they don't actually look at it to see um you know really understand all the other pain points in their business that need solving and then look at the the psa tool that's going to solve those they just kind of buy it um because you know they want to do some kind of um service delivery to their customers i appreciate that that's a good insight i think you're right it's it's it's 80 of it that they don't use that is probably the mistake i i can strongly recommend if somebody just needs a service test there are great choices many of our current employees and executives came from uh zoho which is a fantastic tool easy to use reasonable price you got zendesk you got fresh works you all sorts of choices out there uh i take a journey back we mentioned that i started an msp back in 20 years ago in fact almost to the date and i didn't add a psa until about year two i had a couple of employees i was brake fixed i was going into this thing they called managed services and i had a customer call me and firemen and i couldn't understand why he says well i told you i had a printer i needed you to get to next time you could and i had written it down on that yellow pad that a lot of people use and you know you write down what the problem is who called how many hours it takes you to fix it whether it was on site offsite and then you ultimately enter that into quickbooks and you send out your bill once a month if you're lucky and i had turned that notepad page one too many times and i never fixed this printer and some it guy came in and said hey anything i can fix for you and next thing you know he had my customer and next thing you know i was buying at that time auto task so it's it's you learn real quick you know funny mark i actually had a very very similar um a similar problem mine was more to do with with billing right so i would go and um uh you know again break fix um you know on on my own most of the time i'd have my pad with me i'd visit the customer and i would write down how long i i was on site for so you know i'd say two hours three hours whatever i get back to the office and i was like is that a three or a five i don't know i was there for three hours and i just kind of make it up um so i ended up finding that i actually wasn't billing the customer the correct amount most of the time because either i didn't write down the start and end time or i didn't um you know or i just wrote down how many hours i was there or not at all um you know and then i decided at that point i really needed to get a psa tour because i kind of need to get the stuff in there and i need to make sure that i'm i'm billing correctly the other thing it took me is is you know sometimes i always used to do my billing at the end of the week and it would take me an entire weekend to figure out firstly um you know what the heck all these numbers were that i'd written down and then get them manually keyed into into quickbooks when i bought a psa tool um it took me you know literally went down from an entire weekend to about two hours on a friday afternoon to do all of my billing because i just ticked a bunch of boxes billed for everything and sent invoices to the customers so you know that gave me back a huge amount of time gave me back all of my weekends to spend with my family so um yeah very similar reasons as to kind of why we why we went for a psa tool um uh you know it sounds like a kind of a similar thing to you i guess but more from a yours is more from a service delivery side i was more from a kind of a billing mistake side i think we could beat up a thousand reasons on why a psa let's um let's move along here we promised a brief introduction on who is superops uh obviously much more than a ticketing system superops is founded with a core vision we want to enable msps to establish and accelerate their practices faster okay and i can educate you on what a psa is what an rmm is but i think the industry's done a really good job of that over the past 20 30 years i think you know what the core functionalities of those solutions should be i want to give you an opportunity to see the vision we have that our founders came up with so j r but our ceo and cto they started this company about a year and a half ago and this history is important because you want to understand what's different i know somebody's going to post the chat what's different than you and connectwise are you in syncro are you in halo and there's a huge difference it's really the vision that we have in the journey we're taking to get there so about a year and a half ago our founders left freshworks did a great job of growing that company many of you are familiar with it now publicly traded company and they said well we've really got great experience we've got access to a great team what's needed and they were interacting with some folks in the msp some industry thought leaders and they said if the industry could use anything it's a fresh take on the psm psa rmm stack that a lot of the solutions out there were outdated clue g i'm not trying to to bash on them but they were written 20 30 years ago and some of that code's still there the the complexity of them has grown to the point where that is a enablement issue where companies can't implement because there's so many choices and you gotta you gotta hire a chris tim to get you can get started so what's the possibility those two guys gather together with about 15 industry experts you'll recognize some of these names uh jay mcbain dave sobel ryan morris uh eric simpson gary beechum the list goes on and they said what would that look like and with their guidance and the guidance of over 150 other msps they spent the past year and a half rolling out a solution that launched in january of this year that we call super ops so if you want to go to the next screen i hate having to narrate slides but uh we're trying to keep it as clean as we can so it is we got a poll yeah thank you i forgot about that let's throw out the pole and we tease them a little bit longer here yep see so yeah just launching the poll now we'll just take a 15 seconds for this yeah uh after this you know mark will run you through uh on super ops launching the poll yeah launch poll launch i don't know if they know the answer to that question yet but it's a good one so i try to vote on it and it says hosts and panelists cannot vote so you didn't get my vote sorry guys ah i think you know enough about us exactly super ops on the vision we took a fundamental take on how should a psa rmm work together and the first consensus was they shouldn't work together they should be one solution um integrations are good let's say that integrations are good unified better i know it sounds like i'm teaching remedial here but having a single source where everything lives all your users your single interface your both sets of data on assets and tickets are not being interchanged between different systems and having it all work together was the core concept that would be a refresh now we're not unique in doing this there's a couple of great competitors that do similar and are we done with the poll yes yeah we're done with the month okay it's just sitting on my screen there we go uh with a couple competitors have done this as well but we've got one other fundamental difference that i'm going to share with you at the end and that is our core differentiator so psa rmm a psa side again it's a tab within a single interface it's got everything you would expect and it does include basic project management now if you want to go into profitability per phase and auto billing per phase um what type of billing systems you should do there are great solutions out there what we want to do is establish the core fundamentals and build out from there so project management included in the psa tab on the rmm side of the house we have everything you'd expect from an rmm solution one too many slides we'll teach you how to drive these slides chris first time yeah in fact i looked at a roadmap this morning of the rmm side of what we've got planned this quarter and i cannot believe how much stuff is rolling out if you're already one of our users you're going to be super excited if you've seen a prior version of it it's not even going to look the same from a functionality standpoint but it does include basic i.t documentation so asset information is documented in a single place one of our biggest flaws when i implemented before i implemented a psa was my ability to grow the company without having standardized i.t documentation and time and billing you're right chris when you add employees if all any of you are first you know one-owner companies where you don't have any employees yet all those issues you have are multiplied by a factor of three when you had your first employee you had your second employee probably a factor of five it's it's an exponential growth in inefficiency without having a core platform we deliver all that and of course the one thing you would expect this is what i did at one of my prior employers is our centralized marketplace you can call it our integration hub through integration hub uh go and click on our integration hub you will have access to all the standard tool sets that we that's not our core competency we're not going to go out and build an anti-virus or a remote desktop functionality you can actually have free splashtop through us our pax integration activate integration was marked as complete today so i don't know if we're just now in beta or if they're ready to roll that out but in integration at the psa level with hundreds of other vendors uh bitdefender is enabled to us quickbooks in fact you can purchase bitdefender through us as well rebe root same thing the list goes on go to superops.ai slash marketplace if you want to take a look at those or i think you click marketplace but that's the core idea let me take it one level higher one of the core functionalities that they said they wanted to do with superops was the two things chris talked about earlier is help msp be more efficient on the documentation on the remediation and on their scalability if we can help you do that it would make sense how do we propose to that well yeah we're operation we're automation driven that's our core functionality hence the a and psa but intelligent automation is the other thing we're looking at they call it ai that's why our name is so from the inception we've been built with a purpose ai engine uh at the foundation so what that means in technical terms is the data is being normalized in a way that allows us to look at it and learn we are rolling out the industry first intelligent and learning intelligent alerting and nc8 that is the concept of where we are monitoring assets and resources and identifying when a particular resource is behaving in a different kind of way or there's a scenario where there's a potential problem occurring we can alert you and allow you to make some decisions do you want to change the thresholds of alerts for this type of asset or this one in particular do you want to kill this type of alert notification or do you want to convert it to a ticket that's step one and here's here's the sexy part can we can we be sexy in the psa was that possible anymore i think i think it is here's the sexy part the ability to take everything we learn from humans from a remediation standpoint and allow you to choose whether you want to apply those remediations automatically the next time those situations occur imagine if you could remediate eighty percent of your current service test tickets automatically i don't know about you but when it comes to growing the efficiency of your company the scalability of your company that's our ultimate goal and we can do that because we're next generation code we're not built on the legacy platforms we started from the inception into aws and it's allowing us to to do this so that's a high level view if you're like mark i'm really curious about this it sounds like vaporware i wouldn't be here if it was number one most of you know my reputation but number two check it out we've we've got the ability to get our website sign up for a free trial if you want a guided tour we'll put somebody on with a demo there's no pressure sales environment if it's a fit for your organization we'll let you know or you'll figure it out i guess if it's not we'll be the first to let you know we actually turn away a lot of customers because they're dependent on a certain feature or something that they just you know they do their business a certain way and it's not a fit we're not going to try to be everything to everybody we'll let you know so you can move on that is a summary of superops uh invite you guys to take the journey with us on this vision even if you choose not to do a demo or not to uh sign up for free trial uh there is a candy board we've got over one million postings on that the past year of msps just like you that are giving us the feedback we call that our advisory board jump on there you can see the roadmap you can see what's been accomplished what's planned what's in motion you can also give your feedback on and vote on other people's opinions about what should be included in the future of the msp platform so we'll bounce over some questions i see the chat window lighting up there does yes we have swipe somebody asked does superops have any integrations for or recommendations for accessing payments like connectboost or something similar yes and we are aggressively working on making sure there's even more of those and sherm you want to go ahead and lob some questions at us you were probably monitoring that closer than i was yep uh so i think there's just one question that's popped up uh on the q a so yeah if you folks have questions please feel free to drop them in the q a tab yeah okay there are a bunch in in msps and gain access to the tools the msp and psa have access to yeah within limitations you obviously want to expose what's important to them and we're aggressively working on what else a lot of the answers i'm going to give you guys and i don't want to sound like a salesperson i'm a recovering engineer like many of you a lot of the answers are it depends what we have and what we're building is a hundred percent dependent on you as an industry and that candy board i mentioned with a million posts as as things are voted on and raised higher on the stack we implement them bottom line yeah it's going to do david smith called me out on talking too long before we showed an overview of what superb says and david i respect you for that thank you i've told a few vendors a few times where it made sense integration with zoho i know i've heard the discussions on that i would have to look on the candy board you can go there and you don't have to sign in and you can find out where that sits and if there's a conversation on it you can certainly vote on it but we have a lot of employees from zoho and a lot from freshworks so i i would anticipate that there is some direction that way in integrating our psa and our future quoting and uh general ledger with zoho that would make a lot of sense uh reading through yeah just put in the effort to build the integration engine i i love it we got called out on our apis a couple of times let me just tell you guys the reality of it um as superops was developing it was right in the midst of a couple of really big news articles on a couple of rmms and there was an immediate concern because we are an agent-based rmm is are we going to be the next one in the news for the wrong reasons and we took a very cautious approach on opening up and developing the api for the rmm side uh that was obviously a big concern so why we don't have more integrations with other solutions that we haven't spent the time developing an integration engine is we want to do it right the first time and never ever risk we do have a zero tolerance approach here [Music] there's actually another question from in the q a from um uh jason who said what about documentation are you planning to integrate it with rt glue or something similar or is there any kind of documentation built in well yes and no the the answer is yes we are planning on integrations with them if we have enough votes in our candy board the reality is a lot of what it documentation can exist in it glue is stuff we have either in our system or in development will we ever catch up with them no is that our goal no it's to give you the most important stuff and not a bloated product i'm not accusing them of being bloated but we want to avoid running down that path so uh we're getting the core stuff that's essential to msps first we killed all the questions i think we've done the right yes well i appreciate everybody joining us today taking time out of your business to work on your business you can't do it enough if there's ever anything i can assist anybody here with i know chris is available i'm available hit me up on linkedin i made all the mistakes possible for an msp and i would be glad to have some side chats with any of you as time permits or meet you at one of the events and uh help you with your business and not just because i work for superops but because i love this community and i know chris does too i've devoted my career we do have a free 21 day trial as i mentioned there's no credit card required you can go to our website click on book a demo or you can click on free trial whatever fits your need and we'll get you taken care of yeah and i just wanted to echo what you said mark even though i'm a you know i'm a consultant and i i do this for a living i do i do enjoy kind of talking to people and just shooting the breeze about msp in general and um you know helping out where i can so you know um i know there's a bunch of people on this call who you know who i am um and yeah so anyone you know got any questions on msp specific stuff or psas um you know hit me up always happy to help where i can thank you chris thank you everybody thanks everyone thanks everyone you'll receive a recording of this tomorrow on email yeah hope you had a few quick learnings thank you cheers thanks cheers guys