New Revenue Opportunities for Microsoft CSPs with Bundled Offers | CSP Growth Series

With increasing competition, Microsoft CSPs need to keep reinventing themselves to ensure a steady stream of revenue and business. Opportunities for new customer acquisition, selling more, offering better experience, realizing greater margins are a few key priorities that almost every CSP seeks to achieve. Amongst the various revenue opportunities that you can explore as a CSP, we will primarily discuss the potential of Bundled Offers.

Microsoft CSPs across the globe have been bundling their offerings together to identify and leverage opportunities to realize greater revenue from existing and new customers. There are several aspects to revenue generation with bundled offers that we will discuss through the course of this article including the overview and meaning, benefits and best practices to achieve maximum impact.

What are Bundled Offers?

Bundling of offers is a commonly used practice or technique by businesses that seek to group different products or solutions together to sell them as a group. The foundation lies in grouping together products or solutions which are complementary to each other and can augment the other’s impact for the customers.

From a Microsoft CSP lens, bundled offers refers to grouping together different Microsoft offerings or adding third party solutions to sell them as a consolidated offer. When sold as a combination, you can add to your revenue stream with your existing products and offerings, Microsoft or otherwise, while enhancing customer experience.

Top 4 Benefits of Bundled Offers for Microsoft CSPs

Bundling offers can make the lives of Microsoft CSPs seamless and add greater revenue opportunities to take advantage of. On a close look, there are 4 major benefits that you can achieve by leveraging bundled offers which will have a direct impact on your bottom line, thus, leading to greater revenue and profits.

1. Greater revenue realization from each transaction

As a CSP, your bottom line depends on the licenses and usage of each of your customers. The more licenses your customers invest in, the greater revenue you will make. However, when you sell your offerings individually, your customer is likely to buy or commit to a limited number of licenses or usage of Microsoft or your products. However, when you bundle your offerings, the customer is able to see the complementary value the bundle can offer enticing them to go for the bundle, instead of the individual solutions.

For instance, if you offer Microsoft 365, Dynamic 365 and Azure separately, chances are that your customer will start their journey only with a single product. However, in a bundle, if you are able to capture that benefit that they can achieve when two or all of them are used together, your chances of making a bigger sale will come true. Invariably, this will ensure that the average value of each transaction will increase, thereby, resulting in greater revenue at the end of the month.

2. Reduced sales, marketing, and administrative expenses

Revenue opportunities are not only limited to an inflow, but your overall bottom line will show a positive trend when the outflow decreases as well. That’s where the second major benefit of bundled offers comes in. As a CSP, when you are selling Microsoft licenses and products in a bundle, your allied expenses of sales, marketing and administrative overheads reduce significantly.

You are able to realize the revenue for a suite of licenses or products at the marketing and sales costs of one. Similarly, the administrative costs and burden of managing multiple transactions reduces considerably. Even in the post sales period, monthly bills and invoicing for a bundled offer are easier to manage than their individual counterparts. Invariably, the reduced costs, combined with freeing up of bandwidth of your employees to invest in more value-added work can help you realize greater gains for your CSP business.

3. Better customer experience

The attention span of customers today is decreasing considerably. Customers no longer have hours to build their Microsoft shopping carts with the different licenses and products they need. They may not even have the patience to navigate through your detailed catalog. In such a situation, customers prefer readymade combinations which they can choose for.

Therefore, if you are able to provide the right bundled offers for your customers based on their needs and expectations, you will realize twin benefits. One, you will achieve greater sales. Two, you will be able to get loyal customers who have a great experience and will not think about switching their CSP. Thus, bundled offers can help you breed customer stickiness by providing an effortless experience, which ultimately contributes to greater and longer commitments.

4. Opportunity to sell third party products and solutions with greater margins

As a CSP, you have the opportunity to sell Microsoft licenses and products, as well as solutions from third party providers and even your own value add services. Third party and moreover, your own services and solutions are likely to have greater margins and can provide you with a heavy profit, in addition to Microsoft licenses. However, if you are new in the marketplace, customers might initially be apprehensive about trying the same.

In such a situation, when you bundle third party products and solutions with Microsoft licenses, the chances of customer acceptance will increase. Such bundles will enable you to realize greater profits and revenues with steeper margins. Furthermore, co-selling your value-added products and services can lead to new revenue opportunities.

How to Facilitate Bundled Offers

By now, you would agree that as a Microsoft CSP, bundling offers presents a lot of new revenue opportunities for you with a potential impact on your bottom line. However, you cannot simply group or combine offerings together. You need to make sure there is a logic behind the way you bundle which will ultimately attract your customers. Here are the top three strategies you can follow to ensure you don’t go wrong with bundled offers and are able to realize maximum impact:

Offer flexibility to customize bundles

First, you need to offer your customers to customize their bundles with different Microsoft offerings and third-party solutions. While it is good to have some preset bundles for ease of purchase, being rigid about offering only those may not be the best move. When you give customers the flexibility, they will be able to choose the products and solutions based on their requirements, and be satisfied, while you will be able to realize greater revenue from the same transaction.

Undertake comprehensive customer research

Second, you need to focus on undertaking comprehensive research on the requirements and expectations of your customers. This is very important to ensure that the bundles or groups you make are relevant and meaningful for your customers. Simply putting 3-4 licenses together will not make sense. You need to understand how the licenses or products you are grouping together add value to each other and you must communicate the same. While some of your customers might want to customize their bundles, others will rely on your experience and expertise of working with Microsoft to choose the right bundled offer. Therefore, it is extremely important to provide bundled offers that can actually help your customers realize value.

Provide special offers and discounts

Finally, a great way to make bundled offers the preferred mode of transaction for your customers is to provide special offers and discounts. Put simply, if you price your bundles at a slightly lower cost than their price individually, chances are that your customers will jump to the deal. Selling a composite offer at a lower price can be an added attraction to the convenience and value add of the diverse products and services.

Bundled Offers with C3

As a CSP, creating bundled offers can require expertise, experience, and the right resources. That’s where a partnership with CSP Control Center or C3 can help you out. We have a rich experience of empowering CSP to manage their business with ease and leverage new revenue opportunities.

Towards this, we provide comprehensive support and resources to bundle multiple products and services together and sell as a composite offer. You can also use C3 to offer special discounts and promotional coupons as well as set custom margins. Combine Microsoft products with third party solutions and your value-added services to increase sales using our intuitive platform. Book a demo today to learn more about the benefits of bundling offers and driving your growth with C3.

This blog was originally published on CSP Control Centre.