Chapter Four: Meraki Agile Service Creation
Chapter Objective
Accelerate your time to revenue when developing new Meraki managed services.
Owner
Managed Services Leader or Product Manager
Prerequisites
The following should be completed prior to beginning this chapter:
- Your managed services business plan is in place and under management.
- Your managed services business model has been determined.
- You and your team have an understanding of the Meraki portfolio and its respective capabilities.
Key Questions to Evaluate Need
- Have you identified the target customer profiles that will benefit from your new Meraki managed service offerings once developed?
- Do you understand your customer needs and how their requirements vary by segment and/or buying center?
- Which Meraki managed services opportunities will appeal most to your target customers?
- How will your new managed services align to your overarching business vision?
- What impact will new Meraki managed services have on your existing portfolio?
- How will your managed services provide competitive differentiation?
- How can you mitigate risks when developing new Meraki managed services?
- How do you accelerate time-to-market when launching your new Meraki managed services?
Overview
This chapter will provide recommendations, tools, templates, and resources rooted in Meraki and industry best practices that you and your team can utilize throughout the service creation lifecycle, from concept to launch. This framework provides the methodology to accelerate time-to-market by aligning buyer requirements and insights throughout the service creation process.
Service creation involves the execution of four interdependent workstreams: Product Management, Service Delivery Readiness, Marketing Readiness, and Sales Operations Readiness. Together, these workstreams form the engine of the Meraki Agile Service Creation Framework, which accelerates time-to-market by incorporating service delivery, sales operations, and digital marketing into your product management processes.
This can be easily accomplished by utilizing SaaS-based tools and applications to:
- Engage and survey target buyers quickly and cost effectively to obtain immediate market insight and feedback
- Integrate third-party cloud-based solutions to deliver new services (visit create.meraki.io for a list of existing third-party solutions or to create your own based on Meraki APIs)
- Target end-users using real-time sales and market analytics in order to drive customer success
Incorporating buyer insights from the outset can help ensure your new managed services will be aligned to your buyer’s requirements and preferences, the most effective routes to market are utilized, and that the packaging is relevant to your targeted end-customers. This not only accelerates your time-to-market, but reduces risks throughout your managed service creation process, ensuring a maximum return on investment.
Figure 2 – Meraki Agile Service Creation Framework
The Meraki Agile Service Creation Framework will be discussed in detail in subsequent sections of this chapter.
Service Concept Identification
In this phase, your team will work with Meraki to identify initial portfolio interests and establish a deeper understanding of specific solutions opportunities that can evolve into potential managed services.
While considering customer pain points and needs, you should have identified one or more opportunities that managed services can address. In addition, it is recommended to begin to identify ways to differentiate from competitors through the development of services based on existing Meraki capabilities as well as those that extend beyond them. Through the Meraki Open APIs and our technology partner ecosystem, you can craft truly unique managed offerings. When crafting potential managed service options, the following should be considered:
- Services based on Meraki features. Features and capabilities already in existence within the Meraki portfolio and the Meraki dashboard can be packaged as part of a service or positioned as a value-add for customers.
- Integrating with technology partners. apps.meraki.io identifies a number of ecosystem partners which can be bundled alongside a Meraki deployment for increased value and service differentiation.
- Customized solutions using APIs. Using APIs, integrate your own custom software with Meraki to develop bespoke solutions and services that only you can offer. Visit create.meraki.io for more information.
To begin, review and analyze available reports and paid research from industry analysts and, where possible, consider your own historical sales and market information within your own systems, recent wins and losses, customer and market surveys, and even anecdotal information. If appropriate, segment your customers and evaluate whether there are unique requirements by each segment or if your intended managed service offering(s) will apply more broadly. For each segment, it is important to understand your market opportunity, target customer profiles, and customer pain points. Table 7, Potential Managed Service Evaluation Matrix, can help to summarize this information.
Table 7, Potential Managed Service Evaluation Matrix
|
Potential New Managed Service |
Segment |
Estimated Opportunity Size |
Strategic Value |
Priority |
|
Potential Service #1 |
|
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Potential Service #2 |
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Potential Service #3 |
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|
Once your market opportunity has been reasonably validated, your focus should shift to developing the potential managed service ideas for consideration and prioritization. An effective way to begin this process is by conducting a Managed Service Discovery Workshop. The output of such a workshop would be a New Managed Service Idea Presentation (Table 😎 for each proposed service.
Managed Service Discovery Workshops
The success of the workshop is largely dependent upon your preparation prior to the event. Achieving a successful outcome – e.g. the completed template, in Table 8, for each candidate service – is predicated upon having the right participants in attendance, the required data, information, and analytics to consider, as well as knowledge of Meraki capabilities. The workshop itself should be an interactive, working session.
Led by your Managed Services Leader or Product Manager, and inclusive of your marketing, delivery (including NOC and service desk), and support leadership, this combined team should work to define and vet your potential managed service ideas. The end deliverable template, as below, should be reviewed to ensure clarity about the final outputs and to address any questions about the approach that will be taken.
Table 8 – New Managed Service Idea Presentation Template
|
Managed Service Element |
Description |
|
Managed Service Overview |
Definition of your potential managed service idea, including targeted market segments, channels, and relevance. |
|
Managed Service Positioning |
Definition of potential managed service’s fit into your corporate strategy and existing services catalogues. Key competitive differentiators should be identified. |
|
Competitive Positioning |
Describe the competitive landscape and whether this will provide unique market differentiation or fill a competitive void. |
|
Managed Service Pricing Strategy |
Describe your proposed pricing strategy (i.e., annuity, monthly, per hardware device, per customer, per user, per transaction, etc.). |
|
Customer Value Proposition |
Define your customer value proposition, including pain points addressed and compelling reasons for the customer to buy your new managed service. |
|
Managed Service Platform Architecture |
Define the architectural considerations: will this be an add-on to existing platforms, a new, or a third-party infrastructure. Identify and document any anticipated implementation challenges, if known. |
|
Go-to-Market Strategy |
Define your high-level GTM requirements, including sales, delivery, and operational requirements. Identify anticipated sales strategies, including inside, outside, and channels. Consider required marketing and enablement expectations (training, collaterals, demo, pricing tools, events, etc.). |
Once your new managed service concepts are adequately developed, a readout of what was developed will provide an opportunity to present and vet each prioritized managed service idea, address any questions, and refine prior to concept commitment and prospective buyer feedback and validation.
Buyer Insights and Validation
As a best practice and where reasonably practical, product marketing should be incorporated early into your new managed service creation process to develop an end-customer focus, mitigate risks, and ensure the likeliness of an accelerated time-to-revenue. This is now economically possible through digital CRM and survey platforms that enable businesses to virtually reach out to target buyers on demand.
At this stage, your new managed service ideas, their proposed branding, value propositions, and targeted price-points should be socialized with both your existing and target customers. This can be executed in-person through customer focus groups and advisory councils or digitally through online surveys. Digital tools can provide near-instant feedback to validate (or not) the market need, positioning, value propositions (and customer perceived value), competitive considerations, as well as price points. These critical, customer-focused insights can be used to validate and prioritize your new managed service ideas, tailor offerings to customer needs, provide an opportunity to course-correct early, mitigate risks, and optimize investments.
Obtaining buyer insights and validating service positioning, value propositions, and price points should occur multiple times throughout the overall process.
Managed Service Creation
The Managed Service Creation phase commences when you have validated your potential managed service ideas and receive the commitment, through executive sponsorship and resource/investment allocation, to advance one or more of these ideas forward. The objectives of this phase are to define and finalize your managed service specifications, develop and finalize your new service business case, and identify the investments required to take your new managed service to market. The outcome of this phase results in the development of the Market Service Description (MSD) and productization of the new managed service.
Managed Service Creation Workshop
An effective way to accelerate new managed service creation is by conducting a Managed Service Creation Workshop. Led by your Managed Services Leader or Product Manager, the objective of this workshop is to bring the required marketing, service delivery, and operations resources together for a working session to define the specifications of the new managed service, obtain cross-functional buy-in and approval, and begin to define your business case. The results can be used to develop the managed service concept presentation and messaging framework that can be incorporated into your new product (or service) introduction and go-to-market processes. Exhibit 1 provides a sample Managed Service Creation Workshop agenda:
Exhibit 1 – Sample Managed Service Creation Workshop Agenda
- Market Trends and Opportunity
- Target Segments and Customer Profiles
- Service Fit into Your Existing Services Portfolio
- End-User Value Proposition Development
- Standard and Optional Service Features
- Service Delivery Architecture and Processes
- Business Planning – Service Pricing and Revenue Opportunity Sizing
- Competitive Differentiation
- Managed Services Operational Model
- GTM Planning, Buyer Journeys, and Customer Success
These workshops are most effective when the required resources are present and empowered to execute. Participants should be prepared and knowledgeable of market information, buyer insight data, and existing work-product to date, such as the New Managed Service Idea Presentation from Table 8. A pre-workshop call is recommended to finalize workshop logistics, set expectations, review the agenda and deliverable templates, and ensure that participants have needed resources and are fully prepared.
The output of the workshop should further detail the specifics of each service element, as outlined in Table 9:
Table 9 – Managed Service Development Template
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Managed Service Development Element: |
Questions to Address: |
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Managed Service Description: |
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Positioning and Pricing: |
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Value Propositions: |
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Managed Service Architecture: |
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Managed Service Delivery: |
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Go-to-Market: |
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It should be noted, it is unlikely that a final Managed Service Concept Presentation and business case will be completed during the workshop. As a best practice, follow-up activities should be agreed upon and assigned ownership and deadlines, preferably within two weeks, at the conclusion of the workshop.
Packaging
While your new managed service will very likely generate value on its own, a greater value exchange to end-customers and to your business can frequently be found when combining with other service offerings.
To identify bundled services opportunities, first identify (1) what, if any, services your customers must purchase [or have already purchased] as a prerequisite, and (2) any managed services that could also be positioned as optional add-on services. Based on market data, you own historical sales data, target customer and buyer profiles, as well as buyer feedback, identify combinations of services currently being, or likely to be, purchased together. Evaluate and determine whether a service bundle would be more compelling to customers and provide greater sales growth. Determine the opportunity and anticipated value of bundling your new managed service with others in your existing services portfolio. Table 10 provides examples of how to bundle Meraki managed services:
Table 10 – Meraki Managed Service Bundling Examples
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Service Element Example |
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Managed Switches |
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Managed AP’s |
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Managed POS |
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Managed Wi-Fi Analytics |
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Managed Security |
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Customer Dashboard |
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Business Internet |
||
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Marketing Campaign Package |
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Operationally, you must determine which packages you will offer with a single SKU, versus which will have special pricing when specific SKU’s are purchased at the same time, or as add-ons over the customer lifecycle.
In addition to bundled technology, there is typically a value-added “service” component which includes several service processes and service level agreements (SLA’s) that can uniquely differentiate your firm from competitors. These service elements are typically delivered through a NOC and service desk. While not exhaustive, Table 11 outlines examples of typical service processes, descriptions, SLAs, and required platforms and resources.
Table 11 – Managed Service Process Examples
|
Process |
Description |
SLA Metric |
Required Platform |
Required Roles |
|
Incident Management |
Monitors, generates notifications and trouble tickets, and resolves known issues |
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Problem Management |
Troubleshoots, documents, and resolves unknown issues |
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Change Management |
Change process that creates service requestor moves, add, changes, and deletes |
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Release Management |
Executes Service Requests |
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Configuration Management |
Records and tracks changes |
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Availability Management |
Monitors and manages customer system availability |
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Performance Management |
Monitors and manages customer system performance |
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Note that partners providing business services may offer extended bundles or service wrappers that include non-technical services, such a marketing campaign service, splash page design, or other business capabilities. These business services may be managed through a service desk, but they will usually not be delivered in a traditional NOC and service desk setting.
Pricing
In establishing your price, or pricing models, for your new managed service and/or package of managed services, ensure alignment to the market research, customer profiling, business cases, and assumptions developed earlier in the process. Your pricing strategy should align to your overall business strategy and the deliverables and specifications outlined in the Market Service Description (Chapter 5). Other pricing considerations include:
- Determining the unit of pricing: per device, per license, per user, per customer, per transaction, etc.
- Determining if the pricing will be perpetual or recurring (e.g. per month, per quarter, per year, etc.)
- Will there be multi-year or prepaid discounts/benefits?
- Determining the package pricing strategy: will there be packaged SKU’s or do customers receive special pricing when specific service SKU’s are purchased together
Using the Meraki Business Case Generator (download and complete) or financial models will provide you the opportunity to evaluate your total addressable market assumptions, service constructs, anticipated sales volumes, associated costs of sales, and required investments. Effective financial modeling provides the ability to identify and agree on the best-case, conservative, and most-likely scenarios for a successful launch, as well as overall risk tolerance, financial objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). In order to be impactful, it is recommended to consider the following financial drivers:
- Target market segments: Including the number of unique customers and users, devices, or other inputs based on your planned pricing model
- Market share
- New / refined managed service constructs (if variations exist)
- New service COGs (hardware, licensing, services/maintenance)
- New service renewal rate
- New service non-recurring charges
- New service non-recurring COGs / margin assumptions
- Non-recurring program investments, if any
- Non-recurring platform investments, if any
- Non-recurring infrastructure investments, if any
- Non-recurring marketing investments
- Non-recurring training and enablement investments
- Recurring training and enablement investments
Financial modeling should be an iterative process amongst your key stakeholders: product management, marketing, sales, and operations. A final vetting and rationalization of your business case is recommended to ensure full alignment, followed by a rationalization of the new service concept with your target customers and likely buyers, if possible.
Final Target Market Confirmation
At this stage, digital marketing can be used to socialize your new managed service concepts, their proposed branding, value propositions, and price points with your existing and target customers. In addition to driving an early awareness of upcoming new capabilities with your targeted buyers, you can also solicit additional buyer insights and feedback and validate demand for your new managed services.
Market Service Description (MSD)
The purpose of the MSD is to define your new managed service and detail the feature specifications. The MSD will define the roles and responsibilities of your firm, third parties, including Meraki, and even your customer during the delivery and receipt of your new managed service. It will establish what your customer will and will not receive for their investment. As a result, the service description should focus on the features and functionality of the managed service (the “what”) rather than the underlying methodology and processes used to deliver the managed service (the “how”).
The MSD is typically considered part of a broader contractual structure which will vary on the specific context of the relationship between you and your customer. For example, some deals will be contracted on customer terms and conditions (but using your standard service description), while others may be under a Master Services Agreement (MSA) or other contract vehicle that you establish with your customers.
In all cases, the MSD should avoid straying into certain areas, such as service levels, the contractual remedies, or charges/payment/termination penalties. These details should be covered in other parts of your contract agreement. Keeping contractual terms compartmentalized in this way makes the agreement easier to negotiate, amend, and manage, enabling a “modular” approach so offers can be combined or changed without updating multiple layers of documents.
MSDs should be comprehensive yet concise, as the contents of the service description will become legally binding commitments and your firm held accountable if it fails to meet these or any related service levels. Therefore, very detailed or prescriptive service descriptions could limit your flexibility as you may be accountable to perform the services exactly as described, unless utilizing the defined change management procedures, including having the customer sign-off on proposed changes or deviations.
It is strongly advised that your legal team be engaged when developing your MSD.
Chapter Five: The Managed Service Product Development Engine – Developing Your New Managed Services
Chapter Objectives
This chapter covers the workstreams needed to develop your new service and the ensure market readiness. It’s important to understand the parallel and agile workstreams which must occur to develop your new services and ensure market readiness: product development, service delivery readiness, marketing readiness, and sales operations readiness.
Owner
It is recommended that your Managed Services Leader (or Product Manager) take the lead, with the full support and active participation of your Delivery Leader (NOC or Service Desk Leaders if one exists), Support Leader, Marketing Leader, and Sales Leader.
Prerequisites
Satisfactory completion of the Market Service Description phase.
Key Questions to Evaluate Need
- How will your firm operationalize the new managed service offering(s)?
- How can you address NOC and Service Desk requirements?
- What platforms will be required to deliver your new managed services?
- What resources will be required?
- What is the ordering process for your new managed services?
- Have you established lab / demo capabilities?
- What is your process to onboard new customers?
- What is your process for billing and transitioning customers from onboarding to service delivery?
- What are your different buyer persona journeys, and do you have the right marketing strategy to address them?
- What are your routes to market, and do you have the right sales operational processes to support each?
Overview
In this phase, you will begin to productize and ensure market readiness of your new Meraki managed service(s), addressing the critical details required to take these new managed services to market relative to service delivery, marketing, and sales operations. This includes addressing the operational systems, platforms, and processes that may be required, as well as the readiness of your service delivery infrastructure, lab and production environments, service delivery onboarding, support, productization (including operational and business support system (OSS/BSS) integration), pricing, and end customer success considerations.
Network Operations Center (NOC) and Service Desk
The “services” portion of managed services are typically delivered through a NOC and a service desk. They provide the foundation of any managed service business, and the ability for MSPs to deliver the feature specifications, client commitments, and service level agreements (SLAs) outlined in the MSD.
The NOC serves as the epicenter of the MSP; it provides connectivity to customer networks and a physically secure facility for remotely managing client IT systems. To be effective, the NOC must provide redundancy, remote administration tools, and secure access to customer data. A sophisticated, well run NOC can provide a source of competitive differentiation relative to other MSPs.
Whereas a NOC focuses on the actual delivery of managed services, the service desk serves as the single-point of contact for all customers. Further, it coordinates the communications to all key stakeholders, including the receipt of customer requests, reported problems, change management, SLA management, and resolution. Although they have separate functions and responsibilities, many VARs/SIs or smaller SP partners combine the NOC and service desk functions when initially launching new managed services, until it makes business sense to organizationally separate.
Traditionally, establishing a NOC required significant investment in a hardened location, costly platforms to provision and deliver managed services, and people to staff the NOC 24x7x365. Cloud innovations, like the Meraki dashboard, have evolved how NOCs (and service desks) operate and have significantly reduced the investments required to launch new managed services.
The Meraki MSP dashboard can handle provisioning, remote monitoring and management, and even ticketing. A professional services automation (PSA) platform can provide additional services, including the ability to fully integrate help desk tickets, managed services, SLAs, dispatching, time, expenses, and billing to streamline managed services. Because these platforms, including the Meraki dashboard, are delivered in the cloud, the requirements for a physical NOC can be reduced. NOC engineers and service desk analysts can often access these systems remotely and perform many functions as though they were on site.
With a number of NOC and service desk-as-a-service offerings on the market, many offering white-label services, you have the opportunity to partner and outsource/out-task routine activities. The enables you to focus on your own unique service wrappers. Table 12 identifies the key trade-offs for your delivery leadership to consider when evaluating the cost-benefit of whether to build, buy, or partner NOC and service desk functions, if these capabilities do not exist within your business today.
Table 12 – NOC Build, Buy, or Partner Trade-offs
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NOC Strategy |
Pros |
Cons |
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Build |
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Buy |
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Partner |
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Product Management
Meraki MSP Dashboard
The Meraki MSP dashboard provides a cloud-based, simple and intuitive, full-service IT management platform that enables accelerated service creation, deployment, and maintenance. It provides full, secure visibility across all your customers and the ability to perform remote troubleshooting, ticketing, and firmware updates. It provides you with the ability to manage your customer networks 24x7x365, escalate complex issues to Meraki, and offer role-based, co-branded portal access to your customers. Based on your MSD, the Meraki dashboard can provide you with a cost-effective, simple, and efficient way to provision, manage, and support your new managed services.
OSS/BSS/PSA Integration
In addition to the onboarding and support platforms and processes, OSS/BSS/PSA integration requirements must be defined in order for your team to operate, provision, manage, and bill for your new managed services. OSS/BSS/PSA requirements to support your new service should be defined, evaluated, and prioritized to ensure requisite systems readiness upon launch.
Ordering
Depending on prerequisite services and/or how your new services will be packaged with other services, you may be required to develop ordering processes or guides. For example, a managed Wi-Fi service may require your customer to purchase managed access points at the time of sale. Alternatively, you may offer a special bundled price when managed Wi-Fi and managed security are purchased together, either at point-of-sale or as additional services are added over time. These ordering details, business rules, and processes need to be defined, documented, and clear to both customers and your internal teams to ensure excellent customer experiences.
Customer Success
The final element of product development is end-customer enablement and education on the benefits of your new managed service and how to consume them. Your team should ensure they have a process to drive customer success relative to your new managed service, beyond traditional onboarding and service activation. They should ensure the appropriate feature activation as well as basic customer training and enablement. Consideration should be given to how you will address the application of new use cases to differentiated customer user personas, integration into business processes and applications, and validation that pain points are solved, and desired outcomes are achieved.
Service Delivery Readiness
Lab Environment
It is recommended that you establish a lab environment to test and validate service functionality prior to launch. Your lab should have the ability to replicate customer environments and experiences when troubleshooting issues and be able to support both targeted use cases and acceptable customer uses, based on the specifications outlined in the MSD. Ideally, your lab should also be capable of trialing new service capabilities over the service lifecycle, as well as testing integration and cross-functionality with third-party applications and platforms.
Service Onboarding and Support
While your responsibilities and deliverables, and that of Meraki and your customers, should be outlined in the MSD, the actual operational considerations of onboarding and supporting customers relative to your new managed service need to be defined.
The following are key onboarding considerations:
- What are your routes to market for new managed service sales - direct sales resources, channel or agent sales, or will your new service be self-service?
- If direct: will your sales resources be inside, outside, or both?
- If indirect: channel, agency, or both?
- Who owns your end-customer relationship throughout the managed service agreement?
- What information is required at time of sale to successfully onboard your customer?
- What people, processes, and handoffs are needed to operationalize new customer onboarding?
- What is your target customer onboarding experience in terms of timing and communications?
- What are your delivery team’s readiness requirements relative to resources, tools, enablement, and training?
- What activities will trigger first day of service and billing?
- What are the processes to hand-off and transition from onboarding to support?
The following are key support considerations:
- What are your target customer experiences related to service support?
- What are your support team’s readiness requirements relative to resources, platforms, tools, enablement, and training?
- What are the requirements to prepare your NOC and service desk for supporting your new managed service(s)?
- What is your escalation path for support?
Marketing Readiness
Marketing readiness focuses on addressing all the details of ensuring your managed service specifically addresses the target market requirements, including specifically understanding the target buyers, their purchasing journeys, and how they’ll consume your new managed services. Additionally, marketing will need to finalize customer value propositions, the positioning of your competitive advantages, and all the required marketing collateral required to accelerate awareness and launch.
Sales Operations Readiness
The service creation process should have identified the optimal routes to market for your new managed services. This can include online or self-service, inside or outside direct sales, channel, and business partner relationships. Effective buyer journey mapping should have validated your target customer’s sales engagement and interaction expectations, and now, you will need to ensure the sales readiness for those intended routes to market. Table 13 outlines the key sales operations readiness considerations for each route to market.
Table 13 – Route to Market Considerations for New Meraki Managed Services
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Route to Market |
Key Considerations to Address |
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Self-Service / Digital |
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Inside / Outside Sales |
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Channels, Agency, and Business Partners |
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