Essential MSP Tools, Cloud Highlight First Day Of ASCII Success Summit - Rhode Island
By John Oncea, Editor
The year’s final ASCII Success Summit kicked off October 13 at the Hyatt Regency Newport in Newport, RI with ASCII President Jerry Koutavas presenting Opportunity Hacking: Finding New Business Online Through Set Processes. Koutavas spoke about how most companies fail to discover opportunities beyond their normal sales activities and offered advice on how to increase the chance of finding and closing new business through a variety of creative, insightful methods and processes shared by fellow ASCII Group IT provider community members.
Also presenting during the first day of the two-day event was Herman Pool, entrepreneur, marketer, and author of One Hour Marketing: The Entrepreneur's Guide To Simple, Effective Marketing For Getting More Clients, Knowing Your Market, And Building A Stronger Business. Pool’s talk, based on the book, focused on the marketing tips he feels best help IT business owners grow their business and improve their lives by making marketing simple to understand on put into practice.
Jim Conkle, CEO of Roland Technology Group, presented The 6 Essential Tools To Scale A Million Dollar MSP with the main takeaway being — much like the mess you’d end up with trying to build a car without the right tools — you can’t run an efficient, proactive, transparent, consistent, and automated business without the proper tools either.
Among the advice Conkle shared: know your starting point, have a recipe to achieve success, and know what success looks like, Conkle also spoke to what is needed to make for a truly successful IT company, including lead generation, sales, and scale.
Dan Wensley, President of Passportal, presented Identity And Password Security — Don’t Have Your Head In The Clouds!, a discussion about security, the cloud, passwords, and more. Wensley asked, “If a technician leaves your company, are your clients’ networks vulnerable to breaches and break-ins because of what that technician still knows and may have access to?” If you don’t think so, consider this: 49 percent of ex-employees have logged into an account after leaving their company.
Following Wensley was CloudConnect’s National Channel Manger Douglass Sherwood who presented Deploying A Robust And Affordable Public, Private, Or Hybrid Cloud. This presentation centered on Desktop-as-a-Service which, as it approaches maturity, is placing emphasis on the ease in which user environments are sold, deployed, and supported. Sherwood said whether supporting the needs of a small user group or a true mid-size business, you need the necessary tools to deploy and support a public, private, or hybrid cloud.
The final presentation, Leveraging Network Assessments To Close More Managed Services Business, was presented by Mark Winter, VP Sales for RapidFire Tools and argued an IT assessment is perhaps the most effective way to win new clients and sell new offerings to existing clients. Winter said, with the right tools, a network assessment allows you to quickly and easily walk into an unknown network environment and come away with all the data you need without installing any agents, probes or software.
The assessment enables you to uncover everything from annoying performance issues to internal and external security vulnerabilities, as well as a vast array of hidden configuration issues waiting to blow up into big problems.
The ASCII Success Summit — Rhode Island is being held October 13 and 14 at the Hyatt Regency Newport. It is the final of nine solution provider-focused conferences ASCII hosted in North America in 2016. For more information on ASCII, go to www.BSMinfo.com/go/InsideASCII.