How to Choose the Perfect Service Provider for Your Business Size
Hi. I'm Max Clark. One of the things that we do when we're evaluating and how to match a provider with a customer is org sizes this is gonna sound really interesting maybe this is familiar to you maybe this is just gonna sound strange if you are a large enterprise let's just put you in the fortune 1,000 size if you're a fortune 1,000 company you have an organizational structure related to functional areas of the business. You've got teams, you've got project management, you've got procurement, you've got legal, you've got quality control, you've got maybe you're in 6 Sigma, and you're doing continuous improvement across these things. And you've got a cadence, and you've got checklists and you've got project plans and you've got reporting intervals and you're probably running OKRs, something along you know, something similar.
Speaker 1:I mean, if you're tech, you're running OKRs. In that case, it makes sense for you to do business with a service provider that can talk the same language and run at the same cadence as you and have the same sort of team integrations. So when we talk to larger enterprises, when our customers are looking for service providers and they're a large enterprise, right, one of the things that we're talking about is, okay, what is the right mix and match? It makes probably more sense to have a large enterprise at play. If you are a smaller company by the way, I, just a little side ramp.
Speaker 1:SMBs, depending what definition you're using, technically go up to a 1,000,000,000 in revenue. So, I mean, okay, what's a small business anymore? You know, in most people's example, small businesses are gonna be somewhere between, you know, 50 to 500 employees. So let's just kinda put all businesses or, you know, you I mean, this is so crazy. Some I mean, I've I've seen it define up to a 1000 employees.
Speaker 1:So then you get mid market a 1000 plus employees. So let let's just say up to 500 employees. If you're an SMB, you know, your sub 200 employees, let's say 50 to 200 employees, it is gonna really suck if you go and you're working with a service provider that is geared up and structured around servicing 14,000 plus companies because the bureaucracy that you're gonna deal with and the levels of interaction and the workload that's gonna be assumed on you is gonna make absolutely no sense it's gonna be crazy town for you so if you're between 5200 employees 50 to 500 employees, you probably wanna work with a service provider that is equipped to deal with SMBs. If you're a mid market emerging, you know, and you're in that 500 to 1500 or maybe we're gonna call it you're in the 1,000 to to 2,000 size employee. Same thing.
Speaker 1:There's different tiers. Right? So we see these different levels between micro organizations, SMBs, small meeting enterprise, the mid market, you know, large enterprise and, you know, how you actually fit up and down the stack. This is part of the reason why larger service providers start segmenting based on customer size because they have different teams doing different things. Part of it's just resource efficiency.
Speaker 1:Right? The amount of resources you can allocate to a small customer are just less than what you're gonna allocate to a large enterprise. If you're selling a service and it's got 200 seats licensed, the value of that company to you as a service provider is just much lower than a value of somebody that's got 20,000 seats licensed. Right? There's no judgment with that.
Speaker 1:It's just the reality. So this becomes a consideration for us when we're matching a company with a service provider. What does that company look like? What are their experience? What's their growth trajectory?
Speaker 1:What do they actually need? What is a service provider able to give them? Is a service provider too small, too large? You know, where do you actually fit within those buckets? And then also something that we get to do is we get to help smaller growing companies deal with larger service providers because maybe what you actually want what you need is you need to deal with and you want to use service from the gorilla in that space But that gorilla in that space is just too unwieldy for you to deal with and a lot of times what we can do is we can help get our customers the support they actually need in order to function with the larger service providers as their provider you know the note and the caveat with all this just becomes if you are a company and you are trying to purchase services from a service provider that is not equipped geared tooled whatever you want to phrase it right is not set up to deal with you as the size of company that you are.
Speaker 1:You're gonna have a bad time and you either need to figure out how to adapt your processes to them which is probably gonna be easier or you get them to adapt their processes to you which is gonna be a little harder if you don't have a third party in place that can help navigate that for you. You know, when I say navigate this, this could be presales, sales, account management, QBRs, implementation, billing, collections, modifications, whatever it might be. Like, there's there's lots of different processes that we go into account manage, you know, account life cycle over a long period of time. So just, you know, food for thought. Are you dealing with a service provider that makes sense for you based on the size that you are?
Speaker 1:And is that service provider are you trying to push them outside of their comfort zone and their zone of excellence for how they actually deliver service? I'm Max Clark. If you have any questions, comments, let me know below and we'll get back to you.
