I wanted to pull a pair of conversations in this week’s Community Sentiment segment.
The first is the community’s assessment of the top 10 common tickets coming into a helpdesk, which are: password reset, onboarding employee, offboarding employee, OneDrive not syncing, allowlist URL, installing software, recovering email from backups, creating new SharePoint site, permissions to SharePoint site, and backup failing.
Second, about experiences selling to startups and whether or not it is worth the time. The consensus is that it is not worth the time, as these customers usually pay lower than market averages, are challenged to keep on track, and often need to gain the experience to implement required changes correctly. However, some people say that it can be profitable if you can identify startups that have the potential to grow quickly. Tips for selling to startups include offering a trimmed-down version of your current offerings, focusing on backup and support, and setting a floor price for your services.
Why do we care?
I’ll comment on each – first, I wanted to offer the kinds of help desk tickets your peers are discussing to note that they remain heavily infrastructure based… but remember, that’s a help desk. That’s not an analysis of the project load.
The other is the perspective on startups. This sentiment can be applied to most industries – if you don’t filter leads effectively, you can find underperforming customers in any sector. Remembering my interview with Marcus Olson, he built a whole life sciences startup business by leaning into these lessons.