Deliver Your Meraki Service

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Chapter Six: Taking Your New Managed Services to Market

Chapter Objective

At the conclusion of this chapter, you should be able to develop and execute your go-to-market (GTM) plan to launch your new managed services, beginning with a pilot or controlled launch.

Owner

Both your Marketing Leader and Sales Leader are responsible for executing on the recommendations in this chapter.

Prerequisites

Completed development of your new managed services as per Chapter 5 of this playbook.

Key Questions to Evaluate

1. What is required to establish your GTM plan to launch your new managed services?
2. Which market segments and customer profiles should be prioritized?
3. What sales enablement is required?
4. What are your requirements for an effective pilot or a structured launch?
5. Are your new managed services ready for launch?

Overview

With your new Meraki managed services fully developed and ready to take to market, it is time to develop a detailed GTM plan. Effective GTM plans formalize the GTM strategy and define the specific business objectives and operational details required to attain the established managed services business objectives. It will provide specific actionable details that can be communicated across all business functions and levels to drive execution and accountability every step of the way.

Meraki MSP Program

Meraki will provide the opportunity for partners to enroll in an MSP Partner Program to receive simplified pricing and additional benefits.

The new program will simplify how partners do business with Meraki and introduce new benefits exclusively for partners investing in managed service offers. The program will be suited for all types of SP’s, MSP’s and partners delivering Meraki as a managed service.

To enroll in the Meraki MSP Program, a MSP must meet certain eligibility criteria which may include:

• Business Plan
• Providing first call support
• Monthly billing capability
• Revenue commitment
• Meraki Accreditation
• PSA platform in place
• Title held

Examples of benefits that MSPs can receive through the program include:

• Simplified, standard pricing
• Customized Learning Plan
• Access to Marketing MSP Tools and Resources
• Access to Meraki Community
• Access to MSP features
• Inclusion in MSP Co-Development Community

GTM Planning

An effective GTM plan relies on the collaboration of your managed services leader or product manager with the sales, marketing, and delivery leadership to: 

• Define launch sales objectives in each target market. These should be an operationalized version of your agreed upon business case.
• Identify your routes to market strategy while also addressing the considerations outlined in Table 13. 
• Align market phasing and timing with your business case and defined financial objectives. 
  • Establish sales ramp and timing estimates to ensure adequate capacity and resourcing in each target market. 
  • Formulate a list of target customers in each target market segment or sub-segment. 
  • Determine modes of business development to generate demand for your new managed services.
  • Establish interlock between sales, sales channels, delivery, the NOC, and service desk.
• Establish full leadership team alignment and commitment for your GTM execution.
• Communicate and publish your GTM plan to all relevant teams to begin driving awareness, accountability, and execution. 
• Identify and develop plans to address your sales enablement and training requirements.

Your GTM plan should include a level of specificity to help drive execution, as well as cover the following key elements for each target market segments and sub-segments:

• Business objectives
  • Market phasing 
  • Market segments
  • Sub-segments 
• KPIs/OKRs and success criteria 
  • Leading indicators 
  • Intermediate indicators 
  • Lagging indicators 
• Sales and delivery capacity management plans
• Enablement plans 
• Business development plans 
  • Top 10 target customers 
  • Messaging framework which can be referenced for all marketing efforts
  • Customer facing collateral 
    • At-a-Glance 
    • Overviews 
    • Website / Portal 
  • Demand generation 
    • Campaigns 
    • Promotions 
    • Sales incentives and SPIFFs 

Sales Enablement and Readiness

Sales enablement and readiness are critical for the success of your GTM plan and services launch. This includes training your sales teams on your new managed services vision, value propositions, business plans, associated expectations, KPIs/OKRs, customer engagement framework, and your new managed service offers. 

Effective sales enablement plans should prepare your sales teams to position and sell the value of your new managed services to the appropriate customer stakeholders, including:

• Evolution of your sales methodology, motions, and customer engagement framework, including new business processes and rules of engagement
• New managed service offers and bundles
• Managed service value propositions
• Customer use cases

Sales KPIs

Key sales performance indicators (KPIs) and requisite sales quotas should be defined based on your managed services business plan and GTM objectives in order to manage sales execution and accountability for execution. Effective metrics will provide insight into performance and likely results, for example:

• Managed services sales activities, such as target account plans, customer engagement, executive meetings, and business development presentations and demos
• Managed service pipeline generated
• Cross-sell / upsell of managed service bundles
• Proposals 
• Actual sales 
• Forecast accuracy 
• Win / close ratios

Sales Compensation

Compensation and incentives drive behavior, and behavior drives results. If managed services are new to your business, you should evaluate current sales objectives and compensation structures to manage and reward superior sales performance and to ensure alignment with your new managed services business focus and sales objectives. 

As your business evolves toward recurring consumption models, whether usage-based, monthly, or annually, special consideration should be provided to the structure and timing of compensation. Incentives should support your GTM plan and ultimately align with your overarching managed service business plan.

Structured Pilots

Piloting your new Meraki managed services will provide an opportunity to validate your new offers and your end-to-end service delivery processes. This will ensure your new offers resonate with customer needs and are consumable with your target customers before being made generally available. An effective pilot will validate all systems and processes throughout the onboarding and early customer lifecycle. It will identify weak points in your delivery processes and provide a proactive opportunity for your team to address any identified issues. Further, it can provide an opportunity for you to capture early customer success stories, references, and testimonials prior to general availability.

The following are recommended best practices for running an effective pre-launch market validation: 

1. Clearly define your objectives of the marketing pilot. Effective pilots should have clear objectives, defined entry / exit criteria, and definite start and end dates. Having these defined upfront sharpens your focus and that of your customer. It will also streamline your pilot's evaluation process. Clear pilot expectations should be established and communicated to participating customers, while also ensuring potential risks (e.g. data loss) or liabilities are identified, discussed, and acknowledged.
   
   
2. Map your entire customer experience and lifecycle. From lead generation to sales to customer success, steps including ordering, provisioning, support, invoicing, and reporting should provide both a customer journey map of all your anticipated touch points and the opportunity to ensure customer value realization. It should define ways to make every customer touchpoint a memorable experience while testing your processes to identify any weak points or opportunities for improvement along the way. Identified issues should be documented and managed to resolution. 
   
   
3. Select the “right” target clients. Select ready, willing, able, and friendly clients that not only match your target customer profiles, but who will provide candid feedback – the good, bad, and ugly, if applicable. Because they are friendly, they will not hold the bad and the ugly against you in the pilot phase, and if they see you taking their feedback to heart, they will likely provide good client testimonials and reference points that can be used in your launch.
   
   
4. Validate your end-to-end approach. By executing the defined sales, onboarding, support, management, and billing processes, you’ll have the opportunity to test and validate your end-to-end approach not only as an internal process, but from the perspective of your end customer. 
   
   
5. Validate your contracting language and terms. Ensure contract terms are clearly defined and clearly understood. By going through your contracting process, latent customer contracting issues will be identified. Your legal team should be engaged to address any such issues, not only for the sake of the pilot, but in your standard contract language and in the MSD. 
   
   
6. Ensure service deployment and customer value realization. Evaluate your onboarding and deployment processes relative to the deliverables outlined in the MSD. Verify your new services are not only delivering the contracted value, but also the intended business value that was positioned within the sales process and associated collateral. 
7. Complete a formal pilot closeout. Interview and obtain customer feedback, lessons learned, and, if customer value is realized, solicit testimonials, including quantifiable metrics, or references that can be used for the launch. 

Table 14 provides a checklist for piloting your new managed service offerings.

Table 14 – Managed Service Piloting Checklist

Question / Consideration / Task	✓
Are clear market testing / pilot objectives defined?
Are clear entry and exit requirements established?
Has your process been defined to map and evaluate the entire customer experience – or as much as can be validated in a market test?
Are target pilot customer profiles clearly aligned to those targeted upon launch?
Are your target customers ready, willing, able, and friendly?
Have your new managed services support processes been established?
Is your overall approach in place and ready for market testing?
Are contract language and terms for your new service clearly defined and ready for market testing?
Are your deployment and onboarding teams and processes ready for execution?
Are customer success processes defined and in place?
Are there ways for your teams to quantify customer value realization?
Are pilot closeout interview questions standardized?
Is your new service ready for general availability?

Sales Execution and Acceleration

With sales readiness activities completed, the final steps of your managed services development process are to ensure your sales and GTM strategies are fully aligned, and to then accelerate your sales execution. When taking your new managed services to market, an executable sales plan which prioritizes and stages markets to optimize early successes should be established. Consideration should be given to those markets with the likeliest possible returns and the least number of obstacles. Based on your GTM plan and your target customer profiles, develop a prioritized list of target accounts with which to engage:

• Phase 1 target customer list (prioritize early adopter and friendly customers)
• Phase 2 target customer list

The timing of the launch sequence should provide sufficient time to assess feedback and correct, improve, or adjust accordingly. Establishing the correct timing will lead to success and efficiency when launching subsequent markets. 

ACTION PLAN: Chapter 6