Lead generation continues to be the number-one challenge facing MSPs today. Many of my blog posts to date, along with several of the boot camp sessions I have delivered so far, have been focused on this all-important topic. But what do you do when you get a bite and you now have a prospect that wants to meet with you? How do you structure this critical first meeting so that you can successfully navigate the prospect through the rest of the sales funnel to becoming a signed, closed deal at the end?

Over the years, I’ve spoken with many of our partners that use N-central, and it always amazes me how few leverage custom properties. Often when I explain one or two uses for them, their minds are immediately racing with other potential uses as well, so today we are going to look at some of the many uses for custom properties and how they can benefit the support and service you provide to your clients.

Automation is critical to unlocking efficiencies in your MSP business and helping you grow. By creating scripts and policies that can remediate some of the most common problems your customers face, from enable and monitor bitlocker or checking battery health to monitoring backups, you’re freeing your techs up to deal with bigger issues. This effectively allows you to be able to do more with what you’ve got and take on additional customers without having to employ more techs.

Earlier this month, we were delighted to have been awarded Gold for IT Department of the Year at the American Business Awards®. Last year (2021) was a transformative year for N-able and the award was received for the IT Department’s ability to spin off, revamp, and rebuild a whole IT infrastructure for a brand-new public company and be fully operational within an impressive timeline of only 10 months.

There was an IT Salary Report 2022 that was recently completed by a Facebook group that our #HeadNerds team is a part of called “This Is an IT Support Group”. Although the survey asked for salary information for IT personnel, there was also a section in the survey where the respondents were asked, “What is the biggest pain point you have working in IT?”

As a business, we talk a lot about automation as one of the key ways to drive efficiency and growth within an individual MSP. By automating the response to and remediation of some of the more common IT issues customers face, technicians are freed up to spend more time dealing with bigger issues. Ultimately, this means the business is able to handle more customers without having to invest in growing its technician base.

One difficult part of taking on a new role, especially a technical one, is learning all the jargon. Listening in on a conversation among specialists in any field you’re not intimately familiar with can be highly confounding. It sounds like they’re speaking English. At least some of the words are English, but you’ve never heard them put together in that particular order before. I heard someone mention SMB and SME? Is that a Small to Medium Business or Small/Mid-sized Enterprise?

In my final blog as the Head Nerd for N-central and now your newest Product Manager for N-central, I thought it would be time to update my previous blog from July, 2021 and provide a few more details as to why hardening the N-central server—and for that matter any on-premises server that has an operating system—is critically important.