By Mike Cullen, Group Vice President, Customer Success at N-able

Partnership is something managed services vendors often talk about with their communities. For some, the reference is genuine. But sadly for many it’s little more than lip service to the concept and adds next to nothing in terms of value for those “partners”.

The reality is that real partnership has never been more important for the MSP community.

Right now, SMEs are facing more challenges than ever. The shift to the cloud, changing working practices, growing cyber threats, and the rapidly evolving technology landscape all mean these businesses need outsourced IT support more than ever, so that they can focus on growing their business instead of getting wrapped up in the tech that is meant to support them in achieving their goals.​

Our role as managed services vendors needs to be helping our partners succeed, so they can support and fuel success for their SME customers.​ Whether an MSP is a small shop, or a million-dollar business, they still need to evolve their own businesses to help their customers successfully evolve their businesses.​

Helping the MSPs we work with achieve their full potential by meeting them where they are has always been our mission. N-able is all about extending our roots to deliver the protection and performance our MSPs need to do just that.​ After all, the MSPs we work with are our customer first—the designation of partner is a mutual appointment that only comes into play when we have earned the title.

Since day one, N-able has prioritized customer success and made ongoing investments to help our MSPs become the world’s most successful MSPs. Our technology is built with a secure-by-design approach and our processes have been tested and proven by more than 25,000 MSPs. This way, you don’t have to sweat the software and can trust the processes we’ve documented from our valued MSPs. 

Additionally, the relentless N-able focus on bettering the business of the MSP has brought to market customer success and partner enablement resources that are second to none. Here are some of the things we have put in place to do that:

The MSP Institute 

The MSP Institute offers self-paced learning solutions with technical and business-focused content to help drive partner success. Since its launch in 2019, partners have completed more than 58,000 courses. On the technical side, new and experienced users receive in-depth instruction on our products through videos, simulations, and interactive courses. On the business side, the curriculum addresses strategies and practices in management, marketing, and sales through a series of videos, webinars, and downloadable materials. To ensure continuity, the training platform tracks each user’s progress, taking them back to where they left off whenever they log back in.

Our Head Nerds

Your success is our success, and the N-able Head Nerds are among your biggest supporters. They deliver online training and one-on-one consultations to advise our MSPs on how to grow business with investments in areas such as automation and security. Our MSPs can schedule individual sessions with Head Nerds to address specific questions or get help with business and technology challenges. Currently the group consists of six, each with a specialty, like automation, backup, and sales and marketing. You can find our Head Nerds on Twitter and LinkedIn.

This “old school” approach to partnership has served us well and is critical and core to how we operate as N-able. It’s also the lens we use to view, value, enable, and celebrate our partner ecosystem. We strongly believe you get out what you put into a partnership, which is why we are always listening with the intent to take action—and providing the tools, technology, and talent our partners need to help them accelerate and sustain growth.