Unlock Revenue: How to Master MSP Sales Pipeline Management

Webinar transcript

Muna: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you may be. Thank you very much for joining us today for what will be an extremely exciting session with our newly added partner, Zomentum. For those of you joining us for the first time, my name is Muna Assi. I’m Head of Product Marketing here at Atera, and I’m very excited to be doing another Atera Partner Spotlight.

We’ll be starting in just a few more minutes. Let’s give a few more people time to join, so if you still haven’t grabbed your coffee or your water, please do so. We’ll be starting in just one minute. We do have a ritual here at Atera as we wait for a few more people to join us. You will see the chat box and the Q&A box. Please type and let us know where you’re joining us from today. Go ahead, tell us who you are and where you’re joining from. Participant Introductions Okay, I see Brandon joining us today from South Africa, welcome. We have Mark here from Delaware, Juan from Austin, Texas—lovely, I was just speaking to one of our clients this morning in Austin. Edward from South Beach, Miami, welcome. Thanks for joining. Hi William, Jessica, thanks for joining. Wonderful, so we have a few more people that have registered. Let’s give them some time to come in and then we’ll get started. I see Chris here from Virginia, we have Louie from California, welcome. Thank you for joining an Atera Partner Spotlight webinar. Great to see some familiar names. Wonderful. 

Okay, so I think that we can get going, and anybody that’s joining late, this is being recorded so they can definitely follow up after. Once again, welcome and thank you for joining us today. Our topic is “Unlocking Revenue: How to Master MSP Sales Pipeline Management.” I’m excited to be welcoming our newly added partner to the Atera App Center, Zomentum, and Rahul here, Head of Solutions, who will be joining to present and explain exactly this topic. Welcome Rahul, thank you for joining us today. 

Rahul: Thanks Muna, thanks for having us. 

Muna: Of course, but before we dig into our topic, I’d love to go through some housekeeping. As I mentioned, this webinar is being recorded and it will be made available on our events page under the On-Demand section. We will be sending the recording of the session within 48 hours after, to all registrants and attendees. We’ll also be sharing a copy of Zomentum’s “Building Scalable Sales Pipeline for MSPs,” a very valuable asset that I’m sure Rahul will touch on briefly as part of his presentation. I do invite you, please, while Rahul is presenting and while we’re discussing the topic, feel free to add in your questions in the Q&A box. We will be addressing those questions towards the end of the webinar, and in some instances, Rahul will address them during the webinar. At the end of the webinar, we have a brief survey—exactly five questions. We’d love your feedback; it helps us improve and helps us understand what additional topics and partners you’d like to see. 

So let’s get started. For those of you who are not familiar with Atera’s App Center, the Atera App Center is really the marketplace of integrated IT and security solutions available to the Atera customer base. It’s a broad ecosystem; we have quite a vast amount of solutions there from EDR, email security, backup, and various other solutions including our latest password protection, and of course now the first CPQ solution—CPQ software—that we’re going to hear about. It’s all built through Atera and supported through Atera, so please, if you haven’t yet tried the solutions, this is an opportunity. From here, I’d like to hand over to you, Rahul. I’m going to stop sharing and I’d love for you to tell us more about Zomentum. 

Rahul: Perfect, thanks a lot. Let me just go ahead and share my screen and see if that’s visible to everyone. 

Muna: We do see it, Rahul. There’s a lot of background noise though, I have to say.  Hold on, let me try and fix that. Yep, that’s fixed it. I hear you better now, much better. Thank you. Please tell us about yourself and then obviously about Zomentum. 

Rahul: Alright, thanks Muna. My name is Rahul, I head Growth and Partnerships here at Zomentum. I’ve been with Zomentum for about a year and a half now. It’s been an exciting journey for me, learning a lot about the channel space and the MSP market. I’m excited to present to all of you today about what Zomentum can do for IT partners in general. Generally, in our work with the community, we hear a lot of challenges, specifically around the few topics mentioned on screen right here. One of the major challenges is that when it comes to sales and pipeline management, MSPs need to work with multiple tools on a day-to-day basis—whether it’s for sales, billing management, or even collections. Some of the other challenges we hear are that this adds to their operational cost. Having multiple solutions for just running sales and pipeline adds multiple overheads; you need to maintain multiple subscriptions and multiple accounts. At the same time, tying all of these different solutions together is a very tedious process. Often, once you tie them up, there are still gaps; workflows don’t just work the way that you want them to, and instead of making it better, it ends up adding manual overheads both in terms of time and effort. The other thing that we hear is that MSPs want a single tool that takes care of these multiple needs, where all customer information, deal information, everything that they’re working on is stored in one place and can be worked upon. This gets even worse when we’re talking to MSPs that are growing and scaling because they want to have automations of their workflows. They want to be able to see reports and analyses of how the business is doing, and they want to automate as much of the process of billing as well as collections. And that’s where Zomentum essentially comes in. I think the question that we answer is: is there a single solution for all of these issues? We at Zomentum truly believe that as IT service providers and IT professionals, the community needs technology that can enable them to do their best work. You shouldn’t have to work with multiple solutions that weren’t designed for your environment. You shouldn’t have to piece together multiple solutions for your various needs. It is with that ethos that Zomentum products are built—to make running your MSP business much smoother in terms of processes, to have more control, and to use technology in your day-to-day processes while you’re providing technology to your end customers. # Zomentum Features We primarily focus on building solutions that become a part of your revenue stack. They are designed keeping in mind the tools that you already use, that are central to your business—namely your PSAs. Having serviced the community, we have created a platform that brings together the multiple tools needed for running your revenue function as an MSP. To give you a picture of what Zomentum essentially does for you, the next slide is a good visual representation and gives you an overarching view of what Zomentum can do for you end-to-end, especially when it comes to managing sales. It all starts with having a robust CRM capability, if you will, where all your deals are stored, all your client information is available, where you can create deals or opportunities, where you can manage them and see how they’re progressing from one stage to the other. This starts bringing a lot of discipline into your revenue function as well. The other thing that we do very well is contracts, quotations, and proposals. When you’re starting off as an MSP, one of the tools that most MSPs end up subscribing to is a tool for creating quotations. If not, they’re usually creating these in Word documents or on Google Docs—not a process that can be scaled. 

Secondly, it’s very time-consuming and doesn’t give the best experience to your end customer. At the same time, it probably adds a lot of frustration to whoever is doing that process within your organization. 

For closing deals, we have a built-in e-signature feature, so you don’t have to subscribe to another solution to get those documents signed—to get those quotes or contracts signed from the end customer. The other thing that we do, again, like I said, for both small and large businesses, is automation. Automation is key to taking care of redundancies and doing away with processes that can be automated. Zomentum has a very neatly built-out automation solution where you don’t need to subscribe to all the automations that we think are necessary for you, but you can actually go out and build your own automations depending on your business processes.

The last feature is both license reconciliation and collections and payments. Essentially, ensuring that you tally up licenses or bills that you receive from your various suppliers or vendors in accordance with what you’re billing your end customer. This ensures that all your invoices are updated for your end customers and you’re billing them for exactly the right amount. You’re not underbilling—more importantly, so you’re not losing revenue there.

All in all, that is what Zomentum does. If you notice, this is all built with the MSP process in mind—what an MSP or IT provider does on a day-to-day basis and what kinds of solutions they would need. How has this worked for MSPs? We’ve been working with thousands of MSPs globally today, and our customers have seen great results. Some of the figures that are on screen stand out for me, especially building quotes within 3 minutes. Imagine the number of hours saved when you have a tool that allows you to build a quote and send it out in under five minutes. That’s the amount of productivity that your sales engineers, your engineers, or your teams can devote to tasks that are more productive or more value-added. People can make more calls, get more customers on board, and spend more time with the customer rather than at their desk in front of a system. It gives your business the ability to modernize their stack. You can create more professional-looking quotes, which obviously for our customers has resulted in a multifold increase in deal sizes and win rates. A lot of this automation and modernization has helped MSPs that work on Zomentum grow much faster than they would have otherwise. All in all, our customers combined have built revenues of half a billion dollars just last year. That is the impact that our solutions are having, and we’re very proud of that. # Product Walkthrough The next few slides will actually talk you through the product itself—the different modules, functionalities, and features available. If there are questions, feel free to put them in the chat, and we’ll try to answer as many of them as possible. 

At the core of it, the opportunity management feature allows you to have a clear view and action of where your opportunities are. One of the hurdles when we talk to our customers and MSPs in general is that when they’re struggling with sales, they don’t have a view of where the business is at today and what needs to be done. Having a CRM view of all your deals and opportunities allows you to prioritize actions. It ensures that each conversation you’re having with your customer is moving through a stage, moving through to closure, or is getting disqualified. That’s the primary principle on which any sales organization functions—essentially moving a client from stage to stage. Zomentum allows you to have a very granular view of how that is happening within your own organization. It allows you to create automations and follow-up actions to ensure that nothing slips out or gets missed when you’re working with your end customers. It has a kanban view, a list view, and you can slice and dice this data however you want. You have an inbuilt module for creating opportunities. A lot of this information is customizable based on how your business operates. You can edit and manage contacts, companies, and opportunities right within the system. Your revenue teams or your sales teams and account management teams don’t need to look for a shared Google sheet or an Excel sheet where they’re managing different customer conversations—this becomes the central repository for all of that. 

Important to any sales function is ensuring that your tasks are getting cataloged and your activities are logged. No lead is forgotten. Zomentum has inbuilt task and activity logging modules where all your customer conversations can be logged. Whenever you’re picking up the phone or visiting a customer, you always have context of the last conversation you had. You’re setting up reminders and tasks for yourself in the future. If you promised a customer a follow-up call three weeks down the line, this ensures that when you log in three weeks later into Zomentum, you have a reminder waiting for you to take that action. It essentially ensures that the customer rewards you for being credible as to what you said you would do. That’s the essence of sales discipline—ensuring that you’re on top of your game and not missing follow-ups. Zomentum makes that seamless.

The next thing I want to talk to you all about is the contracts, quotations, and proposals. That’s the centerpiece of the Zomentum platform. Turning around quotes quickly can be burdensome for a lot of MSPs. A lot of MSPs that come to us are either using age-old modules from other service or solution providers or are still stuck with Google sheet templates or Word templates. What we’ve built out is a drag-and-drop solution where you can create multiple types of documents—proposals, quotes, assessments, QBRs, and even contracts. It’s a very simple and intuitive solution that uses a drag-and-drop framework, allowing you to create multiple types of documents as per your need. If you’re just starting off and don’t know where to get started with something like this.

Zomentum also has you covered with inbuilt templates—pre-loaded templates that you can just lean upon as you figure out what works best for your business. Since it’s a very intuitive drag-and-drop builder, you can customize all of these building blocks of your documents as per your needs. You can rebrand them to fit your schema of branding, include specific clauses, and include specific service types that you go to market with. Once you’re satisfied with what you’ve built out, you can also store these as templates for future use. That’s where the magic happens because the next time you’ve got to build a similar quote, you don’t need to start from scratch. All you need to do is rely on one of the templates that Zomentum has provided or use something that you’ve already created and then just tweak it to the specific customer’s need.

Going back to tying up all your revenue needs in one place, we also integrate with all leading cloud and hardware distributors natively. What this does is when you’re quoting or building out proposals for your customers, you don’t need to toggle between multiple logins and multiple screens just to figure out the right price. We’ve got you covered—it’s all built-in. You can natively search within Zomentum using native search engines, so you will find the right stock for the product that you’re searching for. You’ll know where they’re being housed today, if there’s stock availability, and what the current price is. Furthermore, when the quote goes out, the price is auto-updated to the most recent price available through that particular distributor that you’re quoting from. You can preset your margins and add-ons so that every time you select the product, all of that information is auto-populated and goes out to your customer. If there is a distributor or supplier that we don’t natively integrate with, we have the ability to custom integrate. So regardless of who your supplier is or which distributor you work with, you have the ability to natively integrate that into Zomentum and have real-time price and stock availability from any distributor globally when you’re quoting your end customer. This reduces the friction in sending out a quote to the customer, which is crucial in a fast-paced environment where speed really matters.

All your quotes are professional-looking and appear to your customers as microsites. They are interactive; customers can tweak quantities and select different packages that you’re proposing. At the same time, you have the ability to send out an e-signature document right within Zomentum. You don’t have to subscribe to a third-party service, and there’s no add-on fee for that. All you need to do is use the Zomentum document builder, add the signature module, and it will send out a quotation with an e-signature to your end customer. You’ll be notified when they’ve opened it and when they actually sign it, so you have seamless interaction with the customer and know exactly where they are in the buying journey. This allows you to follow up with context.

Talking about automation, we have a built-in automation engine. A lot of businesses that we work with have certain workflows that need to be automated. It’s built on the IFTTT (If This Then That) principle, so all objects that you see within Zomentum can be used to create triggers and then automate downstream activities. You can create follow-ups, renewal opportunities, and follow-up meetings just by triggering workflows. You can send out auto reminders to customers who have been sitting on a particular proposal right through automation. You don’t have to do that work manually. 

A lot of the things that we’ve been hearing when attending MSP events are about how MSPs can add value to their clients’ businesses. Zomentum has had the QBR (Quarterly Business Review) and assessments capability for a while now, and this has been the centerpiece of a lot of those conversations. As IT service providers and experts in the industry, how do you consult with your customers as experts? Built-in capabilities of QBRs and assessments allow you to have a regular cadence of review with your customers. This ensures that you’re showing them a path to success, showing them a path to upgraded IT infrastructure at their end, and ensuring that you’re covering budgets well in advance so they can budget for spending more with you in the future. Penetration today within each account is the name of the game, and these built-in QBR and assessment functionalities allow you to do just that. All of this is customizable. You can create a client roadmap, create client QBRs, and keep sending out these documents. You have those meetings with the customer so that everybody is on the same page in terms of what the path looks like for growth for the business that you’re doing together. 

In terms of other capabilities,  I think I’ve covered most of the big ones: workflow automation, plugging revenue leakage, and keeping in mind that it’s built for partners from the ground up. It allows you to win more deals and do a lot of things that would otherwise require manual intervention automatically. And that’s what we are bringing to you today with our partnership with Atera. 

Now, with the Atera and Zomentum integration, it allows you to access Zomentum right from within the Atera marketplace. You can choose from our different product plans available and you have a 30-day free trial with each of these plans. They are listed respective of the size of the business that you currently operate. Launch is a start-off plan, and Growth is the highest tier which brings in a range of advanced capabilities and functionalities. With this integration, you can pull in information between Atera and Zomentum. Zomentum will also support all of the customers that sign up via this particular integration. While you’re in your trial period, ensure that you book a conversation with one of our customer success specialists so they can help you deploy Zomentum in the best way possible for the functionalities and workflows of your business. All of that’s included; there’s no extra charge on top of that. 

That largely covers a lot of the sales and revenue functionalities that Zomentum has to offer. What I’m really excited to present to you today is Zomentum Payments. We’ve launched Zomentum Payments, which effectively takes away the headache of collections from your business. We automate the entire process of collecting payment mandates, sending out invoices, sending out reminders on those invoices, and actually collecting those invoices on your behalf. The best part with Zomentum Payments is that it is highly competitive when it comes to transaction costs, and it comes at zero subscription or platform fee. If you’ve not checked out Zomentum yet, this is yet another reason for you to do so. It essentially takes away a lot of manual overheads when it comes to ensuring that your clients are paying you on time. The other interesting thing that Zomentum Payments does is its deep integration with Zomentum’s quoting platform, which allows you to actually collect payments on quotes. When you’re signing off a new customer or starting off a new project and need to collect a portion of that fee upfront, Zomentum Payments ensures that while you get the signature, you also get the money in the account right at the onset—not much later when the excitement around that particular opportunity has died down. 

I think we have some time still left, so I’m going to give that to questions. But I highly encourage all of you present here to check out Zomentum. You can find more details on www.zomentum.com. You can reach out to us at [email protected]. Zomentum is also available in the Atera marketplace, so you can subscribe there and somebody from our success team will be in touch with you to get you all set up. But yeah, that’s pretty much it from my end. 

Muna: Thank you, Rahul. I think that was very extensive and explained what Zomentum does, and obviously we’ll do a lot more in-depth demos moving forward. I do want to talk about some of the questions that we have here. I’ll start with the ones around integration. Participant Question: Does Zomentum integrate with Stripe and QuickBooks? 

Rahul: Absolutely. Today, Zomentum does integrate with Stripe, but as I mentioned, we’ve also launched our own payment service, so I can’t promise how long that integration will still be active. But as of today, we do integrate with Stripe. QuickBooks—yes, we do integrate with QuickBooks Online natively as well. The ideal flow is via PSAs, and it depends from customer to customer, but yes, we do have an integration with QuickBooks. 

Participant Question: Great. And I have here a question about your payments module. Does it accept ACH and credit card payments? 

Rahul: Yes and yes. We support all major credit cards and ACH payments on Zomentum Payments. 

Participant Question: Wonderful. And in terms of the support, obviously you’re available through Atera, but is there a certain limitation into which geographies you are currently exposed, or can any client access and subscribe to the Zomentum platform? 

Rahul: There isn’t a restriction via geography. Like I said, we’re a global organization. We have customers globally and support is available globally as well. 

Participant Question: There is a question here about how long Zomentum has been in business. 

Rahul: We’ve been in business for the last five years, especially serving the channel community during that duration. 

Participant Question: Wonderful. Going back to the drag-and-drop interface that you talked about, there’s a question about how complex it is to set up these workflows. 

Rahul: Again, very simplistic and intuitive. You have to try it to believe it. It’s as simple as selecting what you want to go where and then just literally dragging that through the document and placing it where you want it to be.

Muna: Okay, and I’ll remind you again, once you start the 30-day trial within Atera, the first email that you receive has an access link to schedule your call with a Zomentum expert. They’ll definitely handhold you through the trial process to maximize the trial period. There is a question here, Rahul, for users of Atera invoicing. Are these integrated in any way? 

Rahul: I hesitate to answer that from a Zomentum Payments perspective. I don’t think we are integrated with the Atera invoices module today, but thanks for pointing that out. That’s something that both Muna and I can pick up next. 

Muna: Perfect. And I guess to add to that, I’m not quite sure if all of the time entries are automatically pushed into Zomentum in order to quote. I’m not sure. Maybe Rahul, you have that information? 

Rahul: Not off the top of my head. I don’t know if Ben, who is also on the call with me, does, but we’ll take a note of that and get back to you. I’m assuming we’d have access to who’s asked that and get back. 

Muna: Yes, definitely. We can get back with those questions. The depth of integration with Atera is a key question, and we can get back to those. 

What else do we see here? I think these are the majority of the questions that I see here. Any other questions, please feel free to type them in. If we’re using another quoting tool, is there a way for us to import those templates into the Zomentum platform? 

Rahul: Yes, you can import templates into Zomentum. If we don’t natively support a particular format, our onboarding team and our support team will be more than happy to duplicate those templates for you on Zomentum. 

Muna: Wonderful. I do see a question here from an existing Zomentum user about an existing Zomentum and Atera user, just not Zomentum subscribed through Atera. I want to say Vlad, reach out to our support team about how you can implement it through Atera, and they’ll be happy to support you with that. The integration currently, to my knowledge, is quite light. This is the first interaction with Zomentum. The intent is definitely to expand the level of integration, but obviously, Zomentum stands alone as a fully compiled product. The intent is initially to sync the accounts that you have within Atera, but as we continue development and receive feedback from clients, we will then further deepen the integration. We’ll definitely provide more information about that. 

I think that’s it in terms of the questions. I don’t see any more questions here. Maybe, can Zomentum import invoices from distributors for recurring services, as an example, Azure? 

Rahul: Yes, Zomentum Connect, which is a billing reconciliation solution, can import natively through Azure or through distributors. 

Muna: Wonderful. I think that’s it in terms of the questions. Rahul, is there any final words that you wanted to share here? 

Rahul: No, I’d like to thank everybody who’s taken out the time. I know it’s the end of the month, so a busy period for everybody. But thank you for spending the last 30 odd minutes with us. And yes, do check us out. Like I said, all the links are on the screen, and I’m sure you’ll receive them in a follow-up email as well. Be sure to book a conversation with one of our specialists so that we can implement it in the best way possible for your business. 

Muna: Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time, Rahul. It was a pleasure to host you, and like I said, we will do a lot more in-depth webinars. I encourage everybody here who’s already using Atera, please go ahead and go into the app center, start your free trial, and we have a team here to support you with any questions. Thank you so much for your time today. Please don’t forget to complete the survey, and hope to see you on a future Spotlight on Partners webinar. Thanks so much for your time. 

Rahul: Thank you, Muna. Have a great day. 

Muna: Thank you, Rahul. Thank you all.