Welcome to the March AV MSP newsletter! That’s three in a row!
We’re continuing The AV Service Roundtable with our next one on Thursday, March 27th, at 12PM EDT. You can sign up for the event here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/b7ac551c-c31e-4bfc-8152-6381cec239fc@c488692e-4c20-4c29-9db1-1f2c1084271c By signing up, you will get notified of future roundtables via email and nothing else. This is a no marketing event, even on the follow up.
The Main Story
The main topic this week is about partnership. When it comes to business to business (or b2b, if you’re a cool kid) transactions, a major theme during the sales process is PARTNERSHIP. Companies want to be partners with their customers, but in the AV business, this can be an odd concept given how most relationships go. Here’s a typical lifecycle – a salesperson gets to know a technology manager. A few lunches or dinners follow. Eventually, an AV integration project comes up. Finally! Integrator does job, cashes the check, and says “Thank you!” to the technology manager. Unless the customer is a massive company with constant AV work going on, that may be the only AV work they do until it’s time to do a refresh. That could be three, five, or more years until you have another opportunity to do work – except for service.
This is why we at AV MSP harp constantly on the importance of service. If you’re not doing it to make money directly from the service, you should be doing it to maintain a relationship with your customers. It’s nearly impossible to learn about a company’s culture, goals, internal workings, standards, hopes, and dreams when you only talk with them once a month or less. When you are talking to customers regularly, even for service, you have an opportunity to get to know them and respond to needs as they come up, instead of hoping your customer remembers those needs when you occasionally talk to them. This can be anything from learning about a new integration project, to helping set refresh standards, to hearing about frustrations with a product line that give you an opportunity to step in and help.
There are a few ways service can be configured that you should consider with customers:
In-House
In this model, the customer has full-time employees and direct contractors that provide all aspects of service. This might include design, project management, programming, support, and repair services. While this is becoming rarer, there are still some customers that prefer a high level of control over their AV environment. This may seem like a closed door to service, but there are still opportunities to partner with customers that have this model. There are still tasks like interfacing with manufacturers that, due to the AV industry, present challenges you can help overcome. There are also benefits to having deep knowledge that’s available on-demand, so the customer doesn’t have to keep someone with that skill-set on staff for an occasional task.
Co-Managed AV
This is where most AV organizations fall. The customer has some in-house staff, management, expertise, and decision making; but they strategically identify well-defined tasks that can be outsourced to an AV vendor. These are things like management of devices that require a specific skill-set or training, handling parts of the AV lifecycle such as the design phase, or providing flexible staffing for when there are occasional tasks that don’t warrant a full-time, dedicated resource.
This is where partnership is in full play – you, as an integrator or service org, exist to find ways to ease the burden on your customer when it comes to the day-to-day. This is where you get to know how things work, and you could make suggestions as you see those challenges.
Fully Managed AV
In this model, an AV support org takes care of everything – all AV incidents, being the point of contact for new projects, taking care of AV-related questions, and coordinating repair and replacement of hardware. There is typically a vendor manager that you would report to internally at the company, but that’s going to be about it. This may be one of the most difficult ways to manage a relationship. While it sounds ideal that you get EVERYTHING, much of the work is time-sensitive and involves a lot of direct interaction with end users. Often this work is for low margins on tight service level agreements; however, this is also a great opportunity. You are a truly integrated partner, and the business does not run without you.
Homework!
We want these newsletters to give you a reason to keep reading and we do that by giving you some homework. This month, here’s what you need to do:
- Examine your service organization and make an honest assessment of what type of models you can support. Smaller integrators probably don’t have the resources to support a fully managed AV service without hiring resources dedicated to the customer. Most integrators can offer value to customers with in-house AV.
- Reconsider your investment in services. When you’re engaged in a consistent, non-sales relationship with a customer, you will grow to understand customers in a way that you cannot with integration and the occasional call-out request. Ensure you have the tools to provide the service your customers need.
- For existing service customers, make sure that your service managers understand how to build relationships with key stakeholders and how to recognize opportunities. Consider creating a compensation structure for bringing in new work via the service organization.
Or you could ignore all of that and just hire us! Really though, service is very important and as we watch the ups and downs of the economy recently, we need to be working on income streams that are reliable. Get out there and get to know your customers!
On Certifications
The AV industry has a professional organization called AVIXA. This organization has a number of certifications based on their Certified Technical Specialist: CTS (the original), CTS-D (design), and CTS-I (integration). They also just added the ANP or Audiovisual Network Professional certification meant to demonstrate proficiency in networking, which doesn’t require a CTS (like the -D and -I certs do). While these a can be useful for demonstrating some ability in the AV field, support workers might be better served by other certifications.
Here are a few alternatives:
- ITIL® Foundations – this is the baseline of process and vocabulary for IT service management. Having this will give you the tools you need to talk with IT.
- CCNA – Cisco’s base level networking professional cert.
- CompTIA A+ – an entry level IT worker cert.
- CompTIA Security+ – for security.
- CompTIA Network+ – for networking.
- CAPM – this is a good intro to project management and a good start into getting the PMP.
- Extron AV Associates – a free certification that gives a baseline of AV knowledge to non-AV people.
And of course, when you’re dealing with specific manufacturers, most (with a few exceptions) have training available to everyone to learn how to configure and work with the hardware. Check those out!
News and Links
Microsoft is adding QR code support for of the AI Facilitator that will transcribe conversations, now in-person. If you’re using this tool and have MTR Pro licenses, you’ll probably want to explore this: https://portal.changepilot.cloud/MC1020213
Joe Pham, CEO of QSC, has retired from the industry after negotiating a massive sale, which we’ve included in past newsletters. We of course wish him well, but this adds to concern over the future of QSC with the sale plus new leadership. https://www.avnetwork.com/news/breaking-news-exclusive-interview-with-qscs-ceo-joe-pham-on-his-retirement
Tom Arbuthnot has a very good (although heavy on AI-focused content) Microsoft Teams newsletter. We subscribe to it, you should too! And yes, the link above came from there, so we’re going to have to find new sources of news that we don’t tell you about. https://m365perspective.com/
The Marketing
Thanks for reading, here’s une publicité (that’s French for advertisement)! We are AV MSP. We provide audio visual managed services directly to corporations, universities, and other organizations with large AV environments. We also provide services in collaboration with AV integrators and IT MSPs. All of this is done with modern ITSM software and standards. If you’re looking to elevate your services in the new year, please reach out to us at sales@av-msp.com to chat. You can also follow us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/av-msp/, on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/av-msp.com, and of course on our website at https://av-msp.com. NEW! You can also now type in www.av-msp.com and it’ll still go to our website.
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