A new integration with ConnectWise helps MSPs predict workload and revenues from sales opportunities.
Everyone leading an MSP in a tight market, shares one deep-seated fear: What if all the opportunities the sales team is courting close at the same time? This worry is right up there with: What if we never sell another product or service again?
You can Google your worries, take them to Reddit to discuss them with your peers, or – if you want real answers – ask Perfect Project to tell you what’s in the pipeline, how likely it is to close, and how it will affect the workload for your business and resources.
An expansion on our integration just dropped. And it lets you accurately map the future of work to alleviate all those nagging, high-level fears.
If you use HubSpot or Salesforce, you might already be familiar with importing
opportunities into Moovila. But now you can do it directly from ConnectWise.
A crystal ball into the future of workload
Importing opportunities into Perfect Project is a terrific trick that helps you make realistic plans for potential work – including financials, delivery dates, and resource allocations – in seconds. You can use these plans to calm your worries about upcoming workloads. And – when customers sign on the dotted line – leverage those plans to go immediately to executing the project.
This is the answer to every question you have ever asked the sales department about how much work is coming and how many people you need to hire to get that work done. But you don’t have to ask. The answer shows up on your screen when you want it.
The first step is to decide when an opportunity is viable enough – at ConnectWise – for you show it as an opportunity within Moovila. As the opportunity moves through your pipeline you can then to spin it up as a project in Perfect Project at a certain stage. You also need to determine if this should happen automatically – say whenever an opportunity closes – or if you would rather do it manually.
This decision depends on your own needs and workflows. You make these decisions quickly in a simple drop-down menu.
In this menu, you decide when to import opportunities
and whether to auto-generate projects.
After you bring opportunities into Perfect Project, you’ll see a high- level view of each one that tells you everything you need to know to make decisions about building out the work: The client, status, product name, value, when it is predicted to close, who sold the service, how likely it is to close, where the opportunity came from (HubSpot, ConnectWise, Salesforce, etc.), and more.
Once imported, you can see what stage projects
are at and how likely they are to close.
Connecting imported projects to prebuilt templates
The key to speed, when it comes to spinning opportunities into projects, is to connect them to prebuilt templates. This is where you get quick, detailed insight into how this opportunity will impact your teams and capacities.
Let’s say, for example, that your sales team is in the negotiation stage of selling a product you offer in your service catalog. They have asked you for an estimate for the completion date to help them close the deal.
To give them a quick answer – and yourself some warning to plan resources – bring the opportunity into Perfect Project from ConnectWise and link it to a template you’ve already built based on your experience delivering this service. That template is complete with hundreds of tasks, durations for each one, dependencies, and the expected wait times for things like equipment purchases.
As you import the opportunity to Perfect Project, you link the
opportunity to a prebuilt template with a click.
Perfect Project quickly builds out the project using everything you know about delivering this service – this speed of process is enabled by also using Moovila’s templates feature. It is also connected to the current workloads of everyone on your team so the near-instant completion date it calculates involves very little guesswork. It knows your capacity on a granular level and does all the math – what type of resources you need and what their real-time capacity is– to come up with that date.
Similarly, you can track the financials around this opportunity, quickly gathering data on potential revenues and margins. These accurate projections can help you change pricing early in your process so that, for example, you don’t sell a lot of unprofitable services because you were unaware of how low the margins were until after they were delivered. Or, alternately, you can see – at this opportunity phase – if you have wiggle room to offer this potential client a discount.
Plan for growth
The most valuable part of getting this data so easily and so early in the process – at the opportunity stage – is that it allows you to accurately plan your resource needs well in advance.
Once a project gets to the negotiation stage or the sales team inks the deal – whatever you are most comfortable with – you can see who on your team is available to work on the project and assign them to it.
Perfect Project predicts – months out – who is busy based on their name, skill set, and resource type. It can also show you, based on the real work that has closed and opportunities coming in, how busy your team is now and will be in the future.
This chart shows you how busy your teams are–as individuals
or skill types–well into the future.
This can help you accurately plan your resource capacity, approve time off, and alert you to a need to hire additional people or bring in contractors.
You don’t have to assign actual people to the projects as you bring opportunities into Perfect Project, though. You can assign resource types – cloud security specialist, hardware engineer, or project manager, for example – and work out the details of who, with that skillset, is available as the project gets closer.
This view of your work helps you know when you need to grow your teams with plenty of time to recruit, interview, hire, and acclimate new people. It gives you a view of the future so that, even if the workload feels light today, you are making decisions based on the future reality not the current mood in the room.
To learn more about these and other new enhancements of Perfect Project, please visit our knowledge base (linked under "More" within Moovila).
For potential new MSP users, a self-guided tour around Moovila can be found here.
