Want recurring revenue? Deliver value – and prove it.
Partner
Recurring revenue streams bring stability to any business. For MSPs, that stability can be an essential foundation for service innovation and pursuing growth.
Offering subscription-based managed services is an obvious way to get recurring revenue in place. Collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom are prime candidates for subscriptions since businesses depend on them every day, at all levels of the organization, to be productive and profitable.
Even if they need support with their collaboration platforms, clients are bound to have their own ideas about what kind of support and the results they expect to get from it.
Client value is the key to recurring revenue
According to TSIA’s Top Trends in Managed Services for 2025: Navigating the Shift to Outcome-Based Value, managed service clients today generally want “pricing models that directly align with their business goals and demonstrate tangible value.”
What that means is that if you want to differentiate and upsell by adding value, you need to understand your clients’ business goals first and how your services help meet them. And then you need to deliver the results they believe they’re paying for.
This is actually good news for MSPs because it means clients expect more than the old break/fix model of IT support — more in terms of outcomes — and getting away from break/fix is key to establishing recurring, subscription-based revenues.
Spell it out
To prove that you’re delivering value, you first have to define what that value is. Set clear targets with your clients that go beyond operational metrics or service-level agreements/objectives (SLAs/SLOs). Be explicit about how those targets support the achievement of their business outcomes.
To make that concrete: for Microsoft Teams and Zoom, you might track uptime, meeting quality metrics or call volumes, which your clients can then correlate to business outcomes or productivity measures such as customer interactions or meetings that convert. Or you could track usage of Teams Rooms or Teams Phone licenses to help demonstrate clients’ returns on investing in those premium services.
Whatever the case may be, there are three key things you need to deliver.
Outcomes-ready capabilities
Meeting your clients’ expectations of business-relevant outcomes for Teams or Zoom demands:
- Good process and operational efficiency — to optimize the use of resources so value-based services can be delivered at scale across multiple customers without strain.
- End-to-end visibility of the entire collaboration environment — giving you as much insight into and control over the variables that can affect collaboration outcomes, from device performance and connectivity to ISP network health and Microsoft data center conditions.
- Service performance tracking and custom reporting capabilities — to demonstrate that targets are being met on an ongoing basis.
With those three pieces of the puzzle in place, you can design, structure and deliver value-focused subscription services that bring in recurring revenue and — in the words of TSIA — “demonstrate their value, strengthen customer relationships, [so you can position yourself] for growth.”
Everything you need for recurring revenue
Martello’s Vantage DX meets all three requirements. First, as a single, integrated tool that’s purpose-built to manage collaboration platforms, it gives you one console to monitor Teams and Zoom performance — and how users are experiencing them.
Vantage DX also, importantly, provides complete end-to-end visibility of the Teams–Zoom environment. That includes visual network path tracing, automated root cause analysis and custom alerting so you can get to the source of any issues quickly and precisely based on the performance parameters that matter most to your clients. Vantage DX also includes synthetic testing, which enables proactive monitoring so you can get ahead of problems in the first place, solving them before users are affected.
Finally, Vantage DX provides a range of dashboards and reports that objectively prove your services are delivering the promised outcomes — even when things are working so smoothly, clients don’t notice for themselves.
Vantage DX makes it easy to deliver the kinds of value-added services your clients want, which makes it easier for you to secure recurring, subscription-based revenues with them and show all the ways you’re a truly strategic partner to their business.
If you’d like to learn more about the ways Vantage DX can help, download our MSP blueprint on how to launch compelling managed Teams services.
