Will You Hit Your Numbers This Year?

Increasing Your Recurring Revenue May Be Easier Than You Think

Supersizing, asking if you want fries with that, and bringing out the dessert tray, are all strategies restaurants use to increase revenue. And they work!

My son is a manager at a local Charlotte restaurant. He tells me they are closely monitoring, and rewarding the waiter with the biggest check. Their wait staff are trained to sell, and adding things like dessert and drinks to the tab raise the profits significantly. Asking has a lot to do with selling.  But targeting those who are already eating is also a key part of the strategy.

How to Increase Your Ticket Per Customer Now

If you’re trying to increase your monthly recurring revenue number before year end, you have just 3 months to do it. Here are a few things to consider…

1. Firewall Monitoring. If you’re already doing some level of firewall monitoring, are you actually providing 7 by 24 monitoring? If not, this is worth between $100 and $500 or more per month for small businesses. Do they need it? If they don’t have a solid detection strategy in place, and their data is important to them, this might be the place to start.  If you can’t do it internally, consider outsourcing it to a third-party security operations center like Foresite.
2. Backup and Recovery. Do all of your clients have offsite, cloud based backups?  If not, a disk failure could be disastrous. Disaster recovery experts tell us that about 77% of restores fail. If they value their data, and their restore point objective (How much data they can afford to lose) is important, this might be a good add-on.
3. Mobile Security. More threats are coming, targeting phones to steal login credentials and spoof email. Your clients are probably using their phones for business, but the adoption on mobile security software is still extremely low. Per device, it’s not a big number, but the lifetime value of this customer goes up significantly with a small add-on per mobile device.
4. Advanced Firewall Features. Many of the small business firewall products are now available with add-on features like threat emulation, sandboxing, and SIEM-like features. Selling a firewall might be hard, but what about providing these in a Hardware as a Service (HaaS) offering?

How to Get Started

Contact your current clients, offer a security update or briefing (using the concepts in my book, The House & The Cloud), and move them to an assessment. Since they are your client, I recommend waving your assessment fee, using the steps outlined in my book (Above) on page 94 – 200. 

If you follow these steps, the likelihood is high that you’ll come up with problems. If nothing else, they probably don’t have adequate protection against ransomware, and their endusers probably need a more thorough understanding of ruses be used to con them into wire transfers, downloading malware, and giving access to fraudsters.

While a new prospect deal might take 3 months from start to finish, these add-on deals are more like the fries at McDonalds. The customer is standing there, you just need to make the recommendation.  Some percent of them will buy.

© 2016, David Stelzl