Greg Sharp: understanding who you are selling to. are incredibly time poor they’ve got no less than 50 or a hundred. vendors trying to grapple for their time It’s an incredibly saturated market at the same time, it’s a very unregulated market. How do we help more MSPs? Literally our mission is to help raise the tide across all boats in the industry.

Jeremy Balius: Welcome to Go to Market Playmakers, where we bring you winning go-to market strategies from the industry’s best. Each episode we sit down with B2B Tech and SaaS founders, executives, and industry Playmakers who’ve mastered the art of taking products and services to market. Whether you’re scaling a startup, refining your go-to market motion, or driving revenue growth through a channel program or partner ecosystem, this is where you’ll learn the plays that work.

I’m your host, Jeremy Bayless, and today’s theme is How to Sell to MSPs. I’m joined by Greg Sharp from Zen Contract. Greg’s got a 30 year background in the IT industry across the UK and New Zealand. Now he’s A-C-I-S-S-P certified IT Security engineer and managing director of Zen contract. His insight is valued on advisory boards in the APAC region for industry giant like Datto.

Autotask, Dropbox, Microsoft, and Cisco, and he has active roles on 3M SP advisory boards . I think what you’ll hear in this conversation is a deep empathy for MSPs as a whole and a mission to elevate the industry. It really resonated with me. You’ll hear about what it was like going from decades of growing MSP businesses and selling them, pivoting into building SaaS and then selling SaaS back into MSPs, the journey that he’s been on, the roadmap that they’re on now, and within that, the insights that he provides in terms of how to sell MSPs is particularly valuable.

I hope you take as much value from this as I did. Let’s get straight into it.

hey Greg. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today.

Greg Sharp: Thanks very much for having me, Jeremy. Good to be here. I’m looking forward to the discussion.

Jeremy Balius: I’m looking forward to it too. I’m really excited about what we’re talking about today. Before we get into all things selling into MSPs, though, luck to take a a, a rear view. Tell me your origin story. How did you get to where you are today?

Greg Sharp: Yeah, look, I’ve been in the industry for near on 30 years. I won’t bore you with the original details, but uh. Did a computer science degree promoted to being an IT manager for a, a reasonable size company at, at just age 22. ’cause there wasn’t that many people back then that knew about computers. So. You put your hand up and you could converse. You were, uh, you were elected reasonably quickly, and then

Jeremy Balius: Okay.

Greg Sharp: went, went to England and got into it. Security in the early days of it, became head of security for a bank, came back to New Zealand and started an MSP Back then, it wasn’t called an MSP, it was just an IT services provider or a reseller, value added reseller.

There was a number of different names for it, but yeah. Ultimately, what is the MSP model today? I built one, uh, up from starting from scratch, actually with a couple other guys. And, uh, we went from three people to 60 in about, in about three years.

Jeremy Balius: Wow.

Greg Sharp: I sold out of that one and went and started my own one called Base two in 2008 and sold that in 2020, uh, to New Zealand’s, sort of third largest telco. And uh, and along the way there. Started building some contract automation software, which is obviously gonna talk about today. So I’ve had, of my career is in MSP land. Uh, I was on the advisory board for Datto, Microsoft, Dropbox, a few others in, in this region. And Datto used to fly me around the world to go and talk about running an MSP, written a book about doing that and, sold a few copies of that.

So it’s, um, it’s definitely in the blood. And, uh, and, and now. Part of that, uh, journey about this, this contract automation is we lift and breathe the, uh, the gap was having good contract management in our MSP. And I’ve seen it in hundreds of other MSPs. And so the mission is to go and help the industry, which was been so good to me around getting protected and getting automated and things.

So that’s kind of the, the background story. Married two kids, one cat, all that stuff.

Jeremy Balius: It’s incredible story. Hey, I, I’m really interested in hearing, you spent decades in the services space. You started building a SaaS tool. You then pivoted when you sold out of the services business, you went fully into SaaS. Tell me about what that transition was like. What, were there any surprises? What did you learn about yourself?

What was that transition like?

Greg Sharp: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll start off with the, uh, the anthropological or the human side of it and going from a team of, uh, of, I think it. Peak 60, probably 50. You know, us, us people in sales tend to exaggerate a bit. I think it was 53 when we sold, and you’ve got a busy office and, uh, you’re, well, you’re the center of attention.

You’re simply the center of knowledge and you’re making decisions all over the place. And so it’s a very, a very active time, even though. You’ve built the business where it’s, you know, considerably consistently cash flow positive and it’s a, it’s a great, uh, business engine. I think at that stage we were doing about $11 million.

So it was, you’re certainly making money. You were busy and you, um, you enjoyed the busyness and it was your baby and you’d built it to, then you sell it. And, uh, and I, I talk about this in a book that I’ve written actually, is that you, I didn’t have seller’s remorse, but I certainly removed from, uh, all that, that activity and that, and that hive.

Jeremy Balius: Uh.

Greg Sharp: It is, uh, there was only three months where I was working for the, uh, the other business that bought ours and, uh, for the handover. So it was a fairly short amount of time and then you’re into, uh, you against the world, you know? So it’s, it’s quite a change, uh, as far as the amount of activity that you had with interaction with other people.

So on the human side of things, it’s a real, a real change. And, and I had to, I had to, I spent a little while getting the motivation again to get, uh, to get up and. Part of what I found Jeremy, was if you, if you turned it into a bit of a mission as opposed to building a business, then you were a lot more motivated.

Um, was to, to get into the MSP market, both locally and abroad. And, um, it certainly started off with New Zealand and Australia, but soon went over to, uh, to North America and the UK to, to help those smaller MSPs cut some of the corners that we. That we messed up when we were building, you know, so getting those, uh, limitation of liability clauses, right, and automating the contracts, educating the market that it makes a big difference if everyone signs the terms and conditions or call to master services agreement, um, you’re, you’re then. Mitigating your operational risk, you know, and even back down to the little MSP actually getting them to understand that they are operating in a risky environment. If there is no agreements in place, you know, we had to go right back down to grassroots to start that education level. So yeah, humanistically, uh, I got lonely. That was, that was number one. And so had to start off again. Building a business from scratch is hard work. I’m sure you are familiar with that concept.

Jeremy Balius: Yep.

Greg Sharp: Yeah. And so. I, I, I soon got to the point where I went and raised a little bit of money and, and, and grafted a team around me. Now, this was a different model because a couple of the people that I got were remote. we were, we were very much an online business and that that was quite different from having all of the, uh, the culture and the forward momentum that can be gained with getting five or 10 or 15 or 20 people in a room. you have to work actively at meeting every day at, uh, at trying to create that culture in an online space, which is.

Which is hard and, and plenty of SaaS businesses do this, right? So it’s not like we’re unique there. But that’s certainly something that I would get into early is know, know upfront that that, uh, remote side of businesses is hard and you’re gonna have to actively work at the culture and, doing things like uniforms and, um. You know, coming up with a name for yourselves, I don’t know, with Taylor Swift or Swifties or whatever, but you know, having a name in line with your mission, so galvanizing people around a common cause is. Incredibly important to be able to create that culture and even harder when it’s remote. So you, you, you should know that upfront. So pivoting from services based in an office to SaaS based remote, uh, you know, that’s one of the challenges. Most definitely. And then, uh, the other thing that was, was interesting was longer term your business is gonna be high volume, but low, low, um, contract value per customer. Whereas I was going from selling, you know, million dollar a year deals, you know, annualized to, uh, 6,000 or 10,000 a year annualized.

It’s, it’s quite a different. Um, but the sales cycles took just as long, believe it or not. And I think that’s something we’re gonna dive into is, you know, understanding who you are selling to. Uh, are incredibly time poor and so getting them to make decisions and getting access to them, and they’ve got no less than 50 or a hundred. Uh, vendors trying to grapple for their time and trying to get their solutions in front of them. So it’s, uh, it’s an incredibly saturated market from that point. At the same time, it’s a very unregulated market. Like there’s no financial markets authority underpinning what contracts, you know, or sorry, what services we are providing or there’s, it’s a, an interesting, um. Dynamic and then it comes back from right in the beginning. There’s a lot of, uh, MSP owners that are getting to my age now, say 50, and we, we were at sort of the reasonable forefront of computers becoming commonplace in the work. So when we were growing up, not necessarily when we got into business, our age group kind of was that first age group that really, uh, built a business around supporting, uh, customers and. Not many of us went to business school,

Jeremy Balius: Mm-hmm.

Greg Sharp: right? I, I, I, I did. I was one of the few. But there’s most of the people that we are selling into, uh, a, a good technologists that got too much work, so got other technologists, so built a business around that. business professionals that start off with, you know, shareholder agreements and, uh, structures for what happens, you know, uh, inside the business.

And as we grow, we’re gonna do here. Not many business plans have been created by people. It’s just. Literally organically, we’ve got too much work, are another person. so some of the things that get left behind are the legal agreements, the business process, the business automation, you know. So teaching people to change their ways they’ve probably been in business for 5, 10, 15, 20 years is a challenge. And ultimately that’s what we are trying to do is to get them to clean up some of the. A perceived mess, uh, that they’ve had there running for a while, albeit that they don’t have to do it. Jeremy, probably the hardest thing that I’ve found in selling to MSPs is creating the urgency that they should change this particular portion of their business. Because there is the old adage, Hey, we’ve come this far for 5, 10, 15 years and we haven’t had a

Jeremy Balius: Right, right.

Greg Sharp: Yeah.

Jeremy Balius: It really, it, it really resonates with me in the way that you’ve needed to. Build the urgency for yourself and the drive around this mission of elevating the industry as a whole, and you’ve built a business, it sounds like that is a conduit and a vehicle to do that. But what’s really speaking to me in the way that you’re talking about people in the industry that came up together, is it, it seems like that mission is, is to protect.

Business owners and to elevate the overall, uh, excellence of the service, uh, to ensure that it’s doing right by others. That really resonates with me.

Greg Sharp: Okay. Yeah. I’m glad you hear that because that’s certainly our ev. Everyone needs a purpose, right? And our purpose in our business is to get these tools in the hands of MSPs. At the most cost effective way possible. It’s, I mean, it’s never gonna be free, right? We’ve, we’ve got mouths to feed and, and then people’s mouths, other kids to feed and stuff.

So it can’t be free, but it can certainly be cost effective and the legal services that we’re bringing to market along with the template. So one fifth of the cost of using the legal industry, right? And they specialized ’cause this is all we do. So that was a great add-on to help with our mission. And then the software allows it, you know, very easily to save time and effort in getting the agreements out there and getting them signed and stored and so that you’re protected, right?

Because it’s all very well and good having an amazing legal template. If it’s not out there and signed by someone and, and then managed, it’s worth nothing. Those two things had to work in hand, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s very much the way that we, uh, put together. I mean, a lot of our meetings are how do we get the story and how do we help more MSPs?

Of course there is some money flow that comes off the back of that, you know, and I don’t want people to listen to this thinking, uh, you know, where you just in it for the money, like there’s a money requirement. But literally our mission is to get this, get the solution in the hands of MSPs and, and help raise the tide across all boats in the industry.

The bigger ones that get to 30, 40, 50, 60 people and certainly that have done some acquisitions along the way or have been acquired, that happens as a, as a right because you’ve gotta reappropriate all those contracts that, that tends to sort of get everything up to speed. Our solution certainly aids there as, uh, ’cause if we’ve got a bulk scene function and it manages the seeing, the signing of all the contracts and stuff, and we’ll probably get to that later, but that mid-size, you know.

The personas that we get. And we certainly have done quite a lot of work on, uh, of understanding our buying personas. ’cause it’s, it’s different from the, the CEO or founder than it is from the head of sales, than it is from the head of finance. Yeah. They, they want

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Greg Sharp: they want the same outcome, but they come at it from slightly different angles.

So we need to understand who they are and what their drivers are. I wish

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Greg Sharp: I wish we’d done that earlier. By the way, if someone’s listening to this thinking I want to get into SaaS is, uh, there’s a few bits of advices. who you’re selling to as early as possible.

Jeremy Balius: Well, that’s, that’s a perfect segue because you’ve, you, you and your cohort, the guy, the guys that started when you did, you, you literally built the industry. Um. Now you’re building four MSPs. Uh, for those founders or vendors who are thinking about MSPs as a, as a target customer, can you tell me about the mindset and the drivers that are motivating the, the, the, the founding group or the leadership teams within those MSPs?

Greg Sharp: Yeah, there, uh, there, there’s probably a couple, there’s probably three different flavors, right? There’s, there’s the one that’s had the, uh, eternal lifestyle business that’s, um, 10 years ago was three people, and is now is three and a half people. And, um, you know, it’s a, so they’ve got different drivers, right?

They just wanna mitigate their risk and make sure they’re still in business. And another 10. We certainly helping them in a way to try and give their, their main driver is saving time, right? Is, uh, getting the outcome they want. Be saving time.

Then you’ve got the scaler, someone that’s, um, you know, spend the first five years and has got to six or seven people, but then realizes that, that if they knuckle down on this, they could actually get it up to 10 or 11 or 12 and build themselves a lifestyle and have something to sell at the end. Uh, and then you’ve got the people that are just going for it and they’re either acquiring or they have taken the leap and turned themselves.

So they’re productized their services and

Jeremy Balius: Mm-hmm.

Greg Sharp: products, you know, so it

Jeremy Balius: Yep.

Greg Sharp: be managed services, advanced VSEO services, voice services, network services, managed wifi, whatever.

Yeah. There’s usually eight or nine in there that productize those, and then they’ve turned themselves into being engineering led to being sales led. Right, both on a, we’re scaling and getting net new customers and or we’re using some, uh, leverage or debt leverage or cashflow to go and buy another company and add it in.

And those ones are looking for the ability to be able to get proposals, contracts, master services agreements in market and get them signed as fast as possible and then manage the renewal process and not miss anything and get ahead of the game. Because about 70% of our industry misses the renewals and then tries to do it after the fact.

And, uh, you know, pretty, pretty weak position to try and ask for uplift and cross sell and everything. ’cause you just, you’re not the most organized person in the room ’cause you just missed it so. Yeah, that’s what a really good CLM or contract lifecycle management solution allows you to do is get ahead of the game, be the most person, organized person in the room, do it with the least time.

Uh, and when you are looking to, to scale your business, you are, um, you’re very much in a position of strength and power, knowing that you legal footprint across your wider customer bases is, uh, is all sewing up. And let, let, for those listening, let me give a good example. If you’re on an old set of terms and conditions that you.

Stole from somewhere or had someone cheap do or get a template, even a lawyer 10 years ago, there won’t be a limitation of liability clause in there that says if our team doesn’t do something properly or fluffs it up. You can sue us for as much as you can until our insurance waives out or until we say no or whatever.

You can come after us as much as you can for business interruption, for reputational damage, all those other things. Whereas if there’s a limitation of liability clause, usually around one month’s fees or two months fees, and that’s agreed by both parties up front before anything’s gone wrong, 99% of your customers will agree to that because they’re not looking to be egregious. Then if something goes wrong, that’s as much as they can come after you for. And that can most of the time be the difference between the business going under or not. Your MSP going under or not. I just posted on LinkedIn the biggest threat to your business. It’s not hackers, it’s actually your contracts not being up to scratch. Uh, yeah. I mean, look, that’s, those are the three different flavors, Jeremy is that we are selling to.

And what’s the driving force behind them?

They are definitely three different driving forces. Some of them are building, building themselves a long-term lifestyle. Some of them are staying afloat. That’s the small one that’s the same size as they were a while ago.

It just kind of hasn’t really got their head in the game of, do I want to grow this so that I can get out of a job? All they’ve got is a, a job with a lot more admin than, uh, than you’d have with a job. then you’ve got the, the sort of five or 10 employee

Jeremy Balius: Can you.

Greg Sharp: that are. That just on the precipice that if they really go after it, they can get themselves to where they’re buying some of their own time back.

And so maybe an organization that would run when they’re not there in the office all the time. If they set it up properly, then you’ve got the ones that are scaling up. You know, and luckily, our, our solution sort of tailors to those three, but mainly the latter two. Yeah. The, the, the smaller guy that’s just got a job and the admin, he’s probably only got three or four clients and he can handle the contracts as long as he’s got the right template.

He doesn’t need the automation software there.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, understood. And it’s probably worthwhile noting here for listeners, we’re not talking about selling into MSPs to attract them to resell or build on top of, we are. Selling to MSPs for them to utilize in their own business, are we not?

Greg Sharp: Yeah, you’re right. There’s, there’s two different models. So let’s, uh, so our solution is currently, won’t be in the future, but it’s currently a sell to model. We

Jeremy Balius: Mm-hmm.

Greg Sharp: that allows the MSP to be more operationally efficient, reduce risk, save time, you know, all those things. If I had an, a managed, sorry, a, a cyber security solution that I would be selling through, I would have the MSP as a partner.

They would use our s. Software to go and deploy to their customers, and they would margin that up and make money off the back of that service. Right? That’s a sell through. We have a, uh, a policy management module that’s coming to market, uh, and they’re not too distant future that will allow the, uh.

The MSP partners that we have to monetize managing policies and cybersecurity policies for their end users, uh, you know, at a really cost effective way, because it’s certainly something that’s being required of our industry.

And, uh, most of the time so our industry doesn’t have a way of doing it effectively. So we’re gonna fill that void. But you’re right at the moment, we sell two. And there’s, there’s plenty of, uh, there’s plenty of organizations that. Sell through. An interesting point there is that, uh, I’m not sure what you, I’m sure you do, Jeremy, but this, uh, the MSP industry has lots and lots of conferences.

If

Jeremy Balius: Yes.

Greg Sharp: attend those conferences, you know, like seeing contracts been to quite a few, you will buy a booth for 10 or 15 grand or whatever it is for that conference, and then you’ve got travel coming to and back and everything. So need to figure out your business model as to whether that is, is. Effective as a sell to when you’re a

Jeremy Balius: Hmm.

Greg Sharp: If you only go and get three or four partners and they start delivering your stuff into 34 each, or 30 or 40 of each of their customers, it’s gonna margin up quite nicely. So you’re gonna

Jeremy Balius: Yes.

Greg Sharp: a return on your. 15, 20 grand, 40 grand, a hundred grand, whatever it is, relatively quickly as a sell to quite a bit longer depending on what your price point is.

So that’s probably something I would learn. Again, I, I possibly use a bit much money doing that type of activity early on. When I was selling to the MSP industry, just not really understanding what my ROI was on attending these conferences. ’cause they’re super expensive. are good to get direct access to the MSPs, don’t get me wrong, but you just wanna make sure you’re really clued up on what your ROI is.

Jeremy Balius: Well, I think that’s a really interesting, uh, reflection there because yes, it puts you physically in front of MSPs. Uh, they’re not necessarily there in buy mode, uh, in in what ways? You know, maybe leaning on your background in MSPs and building MSPs, how are MSPs even evaluating software for their business?

Greg Sharp: So they, they would take, so there, there’s obviously the principles, but let’s say, uh, there’s a thousand people at the conference. There’ll be 300 principals and they would have one or two others, uh, of their, from their business there as well. And everyone’s in education mode. Most definitely, they would, a, a few of them will go there with a problem to solve. of them will be going there to understand what new products they can margin up, what can they make more money out of, or. How can they save a whole bunch of time on doing particular tasks and stuff, right? So very few came there looking for an answer to how to manage contracts.

Jeremy Balius: Right.

Greg Sharp: So we had to stand out, um, had to stand out in a way with our, within our budget, right?

So we were, you know, spending 10 or 15 grand, which gets you a three meter by three meter if you’re lucky. And then you, you’re up against one or two or $300,000, which is, you know, 15 meter by 15 meter. And it’s got sort of eight people on it. And remarkably. Of them look better than you. So the, it’s, it’s hard to stand out.

And so you need to come in with something that will grab attention and, and um, make sure that you are again, understanding the buying persona. ’cause you’ve gonna have the CEO there, you’re gonna have the head of sales there, and you might have the technical lead there now taking three days out to go and.

Find solutions, find ways of making more money. So definitely if you can come up with a message that allows the MSP to, to make money or to make it glaringly obvious that they’re leaving money on the table. Or you can save them a considerable amount of time, which frees them up just being more time or making money. time, money, those, those are their biggest drivers. Most definitely. And, uh, and don’t underestimate time because, uh, certainly the CEO is got. They’re really time poor. The, the margins are not amazing in MSP land.

And so therefore, it’s not until you start to get a little, a bit of scale that, that you start have the ability to work on your business and not in it. Uh, and so time is a, is a real good thing to be able to do that for, you know, MSP owners, we, we really dug down on mitigating risk, like getting rid of that. MSPs lie awake at night going, what if my, what if my customers get hacked?

Jeremy Balius: Hmm.

Greg Sharp: On a number of boards of MSPs, and I had one not that long ago, 15 of their clients got hacked on Monday morning like crypto lock, so 15 at one.

Jeremy Balius: Wow.

Greg Sharp: So that three weeks was not fun for that business to live through and, and I’m glad to say that we had a limitation of liability clauses using our software in their business, and that really saved them. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Real life example actually. And so that we really appealed to, uh, that what keeps you up at night, of, uh, emotional state of the MSP owner, whereas the MSP, so the sales leader was saying, you know, you can get more proposals, more contracts out in market, uh, in less time, right?

What used to take you six or seven hours to create one now takes five minutes you get a whole bunch of automations off the back of that. So we’re saving you. Time and money and repeatable business process and now someone else can do them for you and you don’t have to put them together, you know, that type of thing.

So yeah, it, it’s, uh, I guess I’m starting to repeat myself, but understanding the buying personas and then finding a way to be able to stand out. And when we had, I’ve attended a number of MSP conferences and some of the smaller booths were some of the more innovative, you know, they had people dressing up as robots.

You know, I.

Jeremy Balius: Okay.

Greg Sharp: To capture attention

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Greg Sharp: if you don’t, when you’re going in there with a cell. Two, you’ve gotta get very inventive to stand out to,

Jeremy Balius: Yeah,

Greg Sharp: allow you to get, uh, that, um, amount of, of leads.

Jeremy Balius: yeah, yeah. Get that attention.

Greg Sharp: another reflection I had. We went to, uh, Datto conference in 2019, just pre COVID with San Diego. In the very first instance of Zen contract, we hadn’t tested our platform beyond. 20 partners, two zero. Not, not in no big number.

And we got, we got 450 leads and people and we got about 50 people wanted to sign up straight away ’cause we did a good job of it. It looked great. And you know, we spent a bit of money and we probably had that mid-size booth. There was nothing else around like it, our fell over about the 33rd customer ’cause it just wasn’t architected to go that that large.

Before you dump a whole bunch of money in, do some, do some soft testing and go and test the market or whatever. But before you go deep, make sure that you’ve got the ability to scale. That would be my learnings. ’cause we had to

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Greg Sharp: rewrite then, uh, and then, and then COVID hit and everything. So that kind of cost us a whole bunch of time.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Understood. Yeah, that’s, that’s good advice. I. I, I think that also what stands out for me in terms of your own cut through, is that it’s built specifically for MSPs. Now, I don’t know for sure tell, correct me if I’m wrong, I would imagine a lot of these guys are running their contracts and agreements and everything else on DocuSign or even Word documents.

How, uh, how does Zen contract cut through that and show that specifically for MSPs, this is the way to go?

Greg Sharp: Yeah, look, most of the industry and a lot of the services industry would have a document that they’ve either got from another partner now chat, GBT. but most of the time it’s usually from, uh, a, a, a non. Technical based lawyer, they’ve actually spent a bit of money and gone and got, you know, a template and it’s sort of itemized for, for their business. But it’ll be old. ’cause once you do it, it’s, you know, it’s relatively old.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Greg Sharp: And the process, typically Jeremy would be that they would, um, some of them built it into templates with like, uh, with, you know, mail merge. Prompts or something, but, but not many. Most will just have a normal document. It’ll be in a folder in SharePoint.

They’ll go and grab it. They’ll change the details. It might be an appendix on there for the services they’re providing. So they’ll cut and paste something, they’ll read it through. Uh, invariably there’s some mistakes in there, but they, they might have done spell check on it.

They’ll then save it as a PDF and they’ll either email it straight out as a PDF and ask the, the client to sign. If they’re local, they might actually drive it over there and sit with them. Some of them will then detach it and go and upload it into DocuSign and send that out. Right. And then, uh, they might negotiate back and forth via email. Then there’ll be some changes, and then they might get a signature, and then it probably won’t come back to them for a, account of signature.

And then they detach it and they save it in the right place. And then they email it off to finance. And then they, uh, will go into their main line of business application, which is what, what’s called a PSA, and usually. Pointwise Manage or Autotask from Datto or Halo or one of the others. And then they’ll go and set up the contract and then they’ll notify the team in managed services or managed security that they’ve gotta go and start building that and what the start date is.

So there’s a lot of phases in there. What Zen contract does is templatize all of that, and it allows to go from a signature and counter signature. It automates all of that process. It opens up the API builds the contract. It will manipulate the opportunity into your PSA, opens up the API into SharePoint stores.

A copy of it there. Emails, all the right people, emails, finance it. Uh, it then puts it into a contract lifecycle ’cause it knows the start and the end of the contract.

And it will start 90 days out. Bombard, not bombarding, but emailing the people that are supposed to renew their contract, letting you know that these are all the renewals that are coming up in the next X amount of day. And sitting above that is a very easy singular portal to be able to make sure that. 50%, 80%, a hundred percent.

Obviously, you’re looking towards the move towards a hundred percent of all of your customers, regardless of whether they’re buying a pencil or high-end managed services off you as signed a master services agreement. So compliance and, and making sure that your legal footprint is 100% up to date, having operational agreements that are super fast to get out

Jeremy Balius: Get there and get.

Greg Sharp: and everyone’s notified, all of your filing is done. Yeah, you go and try and find a contract and all MSPs listening to this will resonate to this ’cause you go and try and find the contract, it’s not actually the one that was there.

It was signed by one person. It’s old, it’s not stored in the right place. Cuts through all of those sort of things. So again, like operational efficiencies. Making sure

Jeremy Balius: He should be good

Greg Sharp: business process that always gets the outcomes that you want. You can apply governance and controls around those agreements to say, people can only discount by this much if they’d like to sell this service for X, Y, and Z.

It’s gotta go off to internally for here for approval when it’s out externally for. Getting a signature.

Jeremy Balius: a.

Greg Sharp: also have a counter signature. You can have multiple external signatures. You can have the ability to be able to sign an initial, a number of pages or specific clauses you can negotiate with within the actual And then all that’s marked and tracked and audited. Uh, and you can manage those exceptions, you know, uh, within a single platform. So it’s half managing the legal documents. So I think DocuSign on steroids for MSPs, plus all of the automations that go in the background. the access to legal professionals should you need them to be able to interpret some of these contracts and, uh, and understand, you know, where that’s at.

So it’s about

Jeremy Balius: About 90

Greg Sharp: and 10% legal

Jeremy Balius: legal services

Greg Sharp: but there’s access to it. You know exactly when you need it. And so you don’t have

Jeremy Balius: so you don’t have to carry

Greg Sharp: uh, you know, or access non-industry specific lawyers all the time, which is. Mostly what we get is general contract. Lawyers are good at a number of industries, but it’s certainly not ours.

Jeremy Balius: Uh, when you co, when you compare it like that, it’s so abundantly clear in terms of the actual meaningful value I’m trying to picture in this scenario where an MSP is using DocuSign or Word, this fear amount of responsibility seems to lie on a person. Remembering lots of stuff all of the time. Is that the risk that you’re, you’re, you’re specifically cutting out?

Is everything systemized? Everything’s repeatable, replicable and process driven. Removed from that person who’s supposed to remember everything about that Word document.

Greg Sharp: Precisely. And so you’re also removing the, uh, singularity of responsibility from one person to, to

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Greg Sharp: people, but

Jeremy Balius: Hmm.

Greg Sharp: the business always gets the right outcomes because there is governance and controls about people can

Jeremy Balius: Right,

Greg Sharp: templates.

Jeremy Balius: right.

Greg Sharp: The filing’s always done. The people are always notified. It happens way quicker because you’re not waiting on those water cooler moments where you know, Bob’s talking to Sally and doing the handover. All that happens 100% seamlessly. So what we see is about a 50% uplift on throughput and that whole onboarding of customers, the accuracy goes to a hundred percent because we’ve eliminated the ability for us, amazing humans to forget to do something or not put it in the right place.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Greg Sharp: And then when someone’s on leave, the process still runs, right?

Because there’s three or four or five people that can, uh, that can execute that and also. a proposal’s out or a contract’s out and it gets signed, of those people are notified, right? All of the filing’s done, the contract’s automatically built. So when a contract automatically gets built into the professional services automation, then it flows through to the accounting and it flows through to billing. And that’s probably one of the biggest things that I’ve lived and I’ve seen for hundreds of MSPs, is that you sign a contract, that’s great. Someone starts delivering it, they apply licenses and no one sets up the billing. And so who wears the can as the MSP for a couple of months.

Jeremy Balius: Uh, wow.

Greg Sharp: That billing is, you can do it, but it’s not a great way to set up the relationship.

And also it sort of puts everyone on tender hooks that you’re not that organized to do the billing in the first place. So you want to, you wanna make sure that you get there and it’s infancy with the relationship. You’ve gotta get set up properly, you know, you wanna be looking like you’re on top of your game. So, yeah, that’s, uh, that’s an interesting point. The other, the other type of thing is that is getting the correct. Legal’s in your master services agreement. The MSP industry is variable billing. Right. I’ve got a sister company called Cloud Olive that actually does a whole lot of billing, reconciliation and do a great job at that.

But our contracts allow you to set up to do a 90 day pre and post audit because if I sign someone on managing them at 20 seats and they go to 22 and 23, I’ve gotta have a way of capturing that and increasing the billing because I wanna make sure there is, uh, you know, I’m getting paid for all the work that I’m doing. Now there is some automations around and your PSAs can handle that and stuff, but you need to have the legal framework to allow you to actually do that audit on them. Monthly or a quarterly basis and then go and adjust the bill. And then our industry also buys a lot of software on behalf of customers for the next or 12 or two years, or whatever it is, telco or software.

And, and if those relationships break down, we need to have a framework to be able to pass those costs back on. To that particular person and that particular company, many businesses don’t do that, and they’re carrying the risk of buying that software in a forward facing position. And the relationship breaks down and their old customer just says, stuff yourself.

And you’re carrying, you know, a 20 grand bill or a 30 grand bill that’s, uh, that you shouldn’t be yours. And so if you set that up in the MSA to begin with, then you have a signed agreement that agrees the process to be able to pass them the bill and you get paid.

Jeremy Balius: You were talking about, um, EE enabling a smoother experience for the end user clients on behalf of the MSPs and different friction points that, that you’re removing. Um, tell me a little bit about how you are treating that, uh, signing new MSPs and how Zen contract creates that onboarding experience for your MSPs.

Greg Sharp: Yeah, so, uh. There’ll be a meeting, you’ll discuss what services you want. Then there’s a, a proposal that will be sent out and that’ll be laid out in a, in a way. So those proposals are based on the productized services that we talked about at the very beginning of this

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Greg Sharp: So you can modularize that inside if you are. Of your Z contract system and just turn the, the sections on or off depending on what you’re selling them. So what used to be, uh, you know, getting a Word document and cutting pasting pricing in and things that’s so much quicker than, you know, what used to be four hours is now four minutes. that, that time from meeting to getting a meaningful proposal in front of someone, uh. It’s incredibly important, right? You look highly organized. You know

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Greg Sharp: getting it out there very quickly. That’s step one. Then, if they want to agree to that, you know, the, the concept of e-signature is, is, uh, obviously, you know, you’re not, you’re not detaching and retting and, and negotiating through email and stuff.

They’re already, the user experience is a lot slicker and better and faster.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah,

Greg Sharp: Once they

Jeremy Balius: once.

Greg Sharp: then there’s a whole bunch of notifications that come back. notifications from the automation into the PSA. Then they’ve got, automatically, there’s the delivery team is starting to talk to them, and this all happens in a quite quick real time, which normally there would be. It could be up to a week or twos gap between signing and actually seeing anything

Jeremy Balius: Anything back.

Greg Sharp: and, and that is our industry as

Jeremy Balius: As our industry has

Greg Sharp: fast in traditional terms, would be a week, and it could take up to two or three weeks. you’re signing something

Jeremy Balius: signing something and to.

Greg Sharp: It just poison sitting in that, that time vacuum, which is one and two or three weeks.

So the onboarding experience of the air gets a lot faster. It can be an automation of the MSA sent off the background. So as soon as you agree to a proposal, then you’re getting a master services agreement, which can happen, you know, quite quickly. And then you’ve got the delivery team coming at you.

You’ve got the finance team coming at you. It’s just, you know. You, you appear to your new customer and, and your existing customer as incredibly organized because you’ve got software doing some of this stuff where there can be time voids in the background. At the same time, when you sign a

Jeremy Balius: You

Greg Sharp: you can set

Jeremy Balius: can set up

Greg Sharp: capture a whole bunch of information to

Jeremy Balius: information to set up

Greg Sharp: the, the actual

Jeremy Balius: the actual

Greg Sharp: looks like.

You know, who’s the main billing contact, who’s the escalation? Gimme the name of the CEO, or if it’s not the CEO buying it. capture all that information to put into your PSA, so your interaction with them is a lot better and slicker. So that’s, that’s how

Jeremy Balius: That’s how.

Greg Sharp: sped up. How the onboarding, uh, side of things goes.

We do have designs on having the ability to actually create an onboarding framework within Z contract, which would come off the back of a proposal, and that would send out a form which captures that, and it would automatically populate that into the PSA. That’s down the road. But, uh, between that and our policy management, um, you know, there’s a few areas where we can help the customer monetize things a bit.

But speed, speed being the most organized person in

Jeremy Balius: Person

Greg Sharp: good user experience when in those early days when you’re capturing the heart of what the

Jeremy Balius: relationships.

Greg Sharp: up like, that’s, that’s really where at. The passion of, as well as getting them protected. Having the legals in place is still our main mission. we’re obviously looking at efficiencies and, and things are layered over top of that, Jeremy. So that’s where our heart’s at.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, there’s layers of value there that I can appreciate. You know, the, there’s the notional value of the, um, the protection, but there’s the immediate value of the experience of things becoming easier and faster very quickly, which I think would really resonate with MSPs is,

Greg Sharp: Yeah, it should do. And, and also the, the accuracy, you know, so.

Jeremy Balius: and the accuracy. Mm.

Greg Sharp: always built the way it should be. No human mistakes. Um, you know, that really, that really allows the business to get more, a lot more fuel through the same engine because it’s eliminating a lot of time wasting. And, and so ultimately that means that you could manage another two or three clients because you’re not doing all this admin work. And, uh, and another two or three clients that’s six grand a month, you know, is 18,000. And it adds up on an annual basis and there’s still some head economy of profit margin just goes through the roof. So that’s what we are seeing and certainly the businesses that have designs on scaling soon or are, or already scaling, uh, they see a lot more. Ability to, you know, when they could onboard three or four clients a month, even be it small, you know, they, they send themselves at six and seven doing it with, uh, a lot more accuracy. So.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, fascinating. You mentioned earlier you guys are launching a, uh, through partner play, enabling MSPs to get some margin on, um, managing policies for their end clients. Tell me a little bit about your overall roadmap slash Vision Zen contract. Where, where are we headed?

Greg Sharp: Yeah, so, we’ve got a couple more integrations to do and we, we’ve spent, spent a lot of time. We built the original version. We’ve got a whole bunch of customers on it. We turned a few customers off. ’cause the, you know, obviously you get their feedback and you’ve gotta actually build the platform to be as good as it can be.

We’ve, we’ve, we’ve kind of got to that point Got a, got a couple of things that we wanna do, uh, just to round that out. And then from there we want to go down the road of enabling the, uh, the industry to our, our existing partners, you know. of hundred partners and make sure that they have the ability to be able to monetize managing their end user customer policies. They are and are going to be asked to manage these policies. And the fact that their end users have been educated about the responsibilities of, know, um, cyber threats and remote working and whatever other technology policies you can come up with. There is about four or five mainstays, but certainly cyber threats is probably the main one. It’s gonna be the

Jeremy Balius: Gonna be the.

Greg Sharp: MSPs into their SMB market and predominantly MSPs go and manage small to medium businesses as a part of the services to actually educate the end users on what they should and shouldn’t do. Right? There’s a number of, uh. Solutions out there now that will, will educate them on what they should and shouldn’t click it on and, and give them a little bit of a, a, a test from time to time, sort of some phishing education or phishing tests. if they educate

Jeremy Balius: Educate them on the

Greg Sharp: then they know what their responsibilities are. And so this solution seamlessly allows them to be able to send out the policies to, for example, 50 end users

Jeremy Balius: users.

Greg Sharp: um, you know, manage the fact that 40 have signed it, and then 45 and then 48 and 49 will report back. And that’s gonna be

Jeremy Balius: It’s gonna be five.

Greg Sharp: So super, super, super cheap. And they can margin that up to 10, 20, 30, 40, $50 a month. You know, depending on how many customers they’re looking after, solution won’t, man, won’t mind whether it’s five or 500. And certainly you could charge quite differently for that. So it’s gonna be, uh, done in a way where we’re covering costs, make it a little bit of money, but we’re actually gonna enable the, the. MSP customers to be able to go and start, take on policy management in a highly automated 100%. Once it’s set up, it just runs in the background way and you’ll be able to, you know, make 2, 3, 4, 500% margin. So that’s, that’s number one. And then

Jeremy Balius: Yep.

Greg Sharp: onboarding module is, uh, is coming down the line, uh, to. able to go and, uh, send out a document to,

Jeremy Balius: Document.

Greg Sharp: take on a net new customer.

It’ll go out to each and every particular end person, educating them about your managed service and how to contract things, a contact and how to get log a ticket and how to get into there. And then it would just ask them to sign at at the end. So, uh, utilizing the same engine as you can imagine, Jeremy, both policies and contracts and things is.

Get something, get out there, get it signed and seed and stored, and then, uh, and then report back on, uh, you know, how that onboarding’s gone. it, we’ve got the ability to capture information and push that back into certain systems at the same time. So. There’s down that line and, and then the actual existing, uh, solution we want to put in, uh, the in solution negotiation.

There is, um, a number of features that are, there’s probably about 300 features that our existing customers have asked for, and we are working our way through those. That’s probably the thing that gives us the most joy. You, we had a customer in, uh, in the uk. That said, Hey, we, we love using this solution.

We’d really like it that we had some rules based engine for when we are putting, um, um, managed services bundles together. You’re like, if we sell managed services automatically add two hours of onboarding time, or if we sell. Uh, managed services automatically add the four security products that, that we always take to market.

And so we’ve, we’ve built that and they, they’ve built 300 rules in the background that allows ’em to get their products to market in a super slick way. They reckon that

Jeremy Balius: Hmm.

Greg Sharp: proposal used to take them two days, now takes them literally five minutes.

Jeremy Balius: Unreal.

Greg Sharp: Yeah, it’s, um, a result they’re scaling faster.

’cause they didn’t have a, know, they, they, they actually were suffering from being able to onboard enough customers. It was taking too much time. And so now they’re growing at a, at a rate, and we’re seeing that with the user account and the amount of, uh, the amount of contracts that they’re putting through the system. Uh, and we’re starting to track that now. It’s unbelievable once you do the amount of con, so MSPs multiplied by the amount of contracts going through the system and the ones that are getting signed off multiplied by the dollar volume into one single currency. It is a big number, really big number, and I’m finding that quite fascinating.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, that’s, stay close to that. ’cause that’s gonna be the, the billboard number.

Greg Sharp: Yeah, that’s it. Yeah. are doing those calculations mean it’s, it was about eight months ago. We were, we were near on $800 million a year in US dollars and in, uh, in MSP contracts that were getting signed, annualized. Of course, number now would be two or three times that I think in, uh, so that we’re looking to monetize that, but just be across it.

It’s,

Jeremy Balius: Yeah,

Greg Sharp: significant.

Jeremy Balius: that’s it. That really is. Well, congratulations on building this, where you’ve gotten it to today. The way you’ve got that feedback loop with your customers and you’re constantly evolving it. We’ve got new products coming online. It all sounds so amazing. Appreciate you coming on and talking so openly about your journey and, and, uh, and, and all your insights and how to sell into MSPs for us.

Thanks.

Greg Sharp: Thanks very much. Yeah, look, I mean, any SaaS

Jeremy Balius: Any business.

Greg Sharp: with cash and so you’re, you’re getting up against raising and then cash and then managing cash and it, that’s probably what’s provided me the most stress and, uh, and, and obviously having the right team alongside that, but. So I wouldn’t say it’s all been super, super easy and it’s, it’s quite easy to talk, talk about the good stuff, but certainly has been enough good stuff to keep doing it and, uh, and I’m enjoying it.

I think, I think we’ve broken the back of it, but there’s still a, there’s still a wee way to go.

Jeremy Balius: That’s awesome. I’m excited to see where you go with it. Thanks so much.

Greg Sharp: Thanks very much Jeremy. Great to be here.