Building MRR for your Cloud Channel
Developing a source of monthly recurring revenue is the key to sustainable, long-term success. Once you’ve made the leap to offering cloud-based solutions, finding incremental revenue may be puzzling.
The key is to help clients understand how your company’s cloud solutions will change their business – and impact their bottom line. By demonstrating how your infrastructure solutions increase client productivity, you’ll provide the incentive to increase utilization.
To help with the ongoing growth of your business, we’ve put together a list of 6 methods to increase your organization’s cloud-based MRR.
6 Methods to Increase Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
Bundling
Businesses are looking to maximize cost efficiencies. By understanding what your customers need most and creating appropriate bundles, you offer immense value. Both in terms of cost, and in terms of time required to select and deploy a new solution.
Our Cloud Solutions Providers frequently offer an IT infrastructure package including cloud servers, back-up, and disaster recovery. By creating a bundle of these services, their clients can deploy a base cloud infrastructure and upgrade to include other solutions as their budgets permit.
Bundling is also a great way for a Cloud Solutions Provider to build out the monthly recurring revenue stream, following an incremental model that also fits their budget and requirements.
Cross-selling
While cloud hosting is on the rise, there’s still demand for hardware sales. Some customers will require physical backup sources to meet their regulatory requirements. In fact, there’s an excellent opportunity to cross-sell cloud infrastructure with IT hardware.
A cloud-based business built to maximize customer value can also support the incremental growth of a cloud service provider’s revenue stream. By clearly documenting expected changes to needs over time, offering regular required cloud and hardware infrastructure upgrades, you’ll meet the client’s solutions requirements and level up MRR.
Planning
Monthly recurring revenue growth doesn’t happen overnight. It requires dedication and planning. Cloud solutions offer a profitable revenue stream, with much higher rates of renewal.
That being said, some long-term planning needs to take place.
By referring to each client’s usage and long-term requirements, you can help with their planning process and establish your sustainable MRR. There might be upgrade opportunities down the road. Alternatively, a new application may be required at some point in the future to support business requirements.
Taking the time to understand the client’s requirements, and helping with planning, can be mutually beneficial.
White Labelling
Building a cloud infrastructure is a costly endeavour. With significant upfront cash flow requirements and ongoing maintenance costs, creating a cloud offering is cost prohibitive for most solution providers.
By finding a partner that offers white label solutions, you can offer fully branded integrated suite of cloud solutions for a fraction of the cost of developing our own. Many partners who offer white labelling also support your business development processes. From proposal development to sales and marketing support, working with a white label part can be the next step to building additional MRR.
“That special support that comes from a white label partner is key: the partner’s expertise can help to identify MRR opportunities.”
Pre-paid Contracts
Chances are, once a client upgrades to the cloud, they’ll stay with the cloud. Many cloud service providers pride themselves on their flexible, rolling contracts.
There is an opportunity to capture those clients dedicated to the client with pre-aid annual contracts. Annual contracts provide customers with an opportunity to reduce the overall annual cost of cloud hosting, while simultaneously boosting customer retention and MRR.
Remember to stay flexible. Even when locked into a pre-paid contract, customers may still need to adapt their contracts to meet their evolving business needs.
Collaborating
Your sales staff are a key determinant of monthly recurring revenue. They can readily identify present and future opportunities that will ultimately impact their compensation. So why not collaborate closely with your sales team to maximize MRR?
By paying monthly commissions on MRR margins, your sales staff can increase their overall package each time they sell a package with high MRR. With higher gross margins from cloud solutions, compensation plans can be very attractive to motivated sales people.
Grow MRR with Ongoing Thought and Planning
Developing incremental monthly recurring revenue requires dedication, thought and planning. This will implicate sales, technical teams, and management. There’s benefits to informing sales, and encouraging them to learn the product that generate MRR.
Curious about generating MRR specific to your business? Our Customer Success team can help assess your offerings and recommend solutions offerings. Get in touch for more information!