For IT service providers serving small businesses, RapidFire Tools has a program ready to help them perform IT assessments – and to help them generate leads and boost sales.
Based in the U.S., RapidFire Tools Inc. has built a program called Network Detective. The program allows managed service providers (MSPs) to perform a free assessment for potential clients in the small to mid-sized business (SMB) market, enabling them to show them where they have loopholes and vulnerabilities in their IT environments.
Network Detective is being touted as fast, minimally invasive and flexible, meaning MSPs can perform a quick assessment without revealing that to a competitor already serving an SMB client.
By leaving a free assessment with a potential client, that gives an MSP the chance to sell the services it can provide, tailoring those services to that client’s specific needs, said Mark Winter, VP of sales at RapidFire.
“First, you document all assets. Then you can identify new projects, like a migration away from Windows XP, seeing which machines are nearing the end of life,” said Winter, speaking from a webinar held on Oct. 2. “Or, you can tell a customer [in education] he has 700 old accounts from past students. With students logging in, that’s a security risk … Documentation will help you scope out a project, and this provides you with a mechanism or tool to sell to customers.”
MSPs can also look for inconsistent security practices by performing regular health checks of a customer’s IT systems, which also helps generate revenue, Winter said.
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Using Network Detective, MSPs can check the age, operating systems, and configurations of a potential client’s assets, which allows them to get a snapshot of what that organization’s needs are. The tool scopes out an SMB’s data, scanning for IP ranges and for external vulnerabilities.
The MSP can then download that data to a USB stick and then take back to their office to create a report. The report can be completely white-label, not showing RapidFire’s name, and can be customized to display the MSP’s logo and brand. To perform an assessment and then create a report, an MSP employee doesn’t even have to be particularly technical, Winter said.
However, he added it’s important to provide a report that doesn’t give away too much information. That might allow another IT MSP to come in and leverage the report, resulting in losing that customer.
Pricing for the network assessment module, the security assessment module, or the exchange assessment module is set at $999 each for a one-year subscription. Buying two modules for a Network Detective double bundle is $899 each, while all three modules together will cost about $799 each.
