MSPs grow faster with Giacom’s Cloud Market Tools

MSPs grow faster with Giacom’s Cloud Market Tools

A quarter of MSPs run on just 0.1% margins, while the best hit 20.7%

Ready to Grow with Giacom?

Time to read

11 minutes

Author

Samantha Dennahy
Product Marketing Manager

Date published

March 2025

Empowering channel partners to accelerate growth and become the trusted advisors SMBs seek.

As the technology market matures and SMBs become ever more reliant on ICT solutions, their purchasing behaviour is shifting. Rather than buying from large providers with limited support, they are increasingly turning to trusted, local partners who can offer the care and expertise they need to thrive.  Many SMBs are also looking for a single strategic partner to oversee their entire technology estate, favouring comprehensive, integrated solutions over juggling multiple suppliers and fragmented approaches. 

The opportunity for channel businesses to accelerate their growth by transitioning from classic resale to managed service models and becoming a one stop shop is immense. Analysys Mason predicts that resellers will lose market share while Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) will gain ground over the next five years, with SMBs set to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives in 2025 and beyond.

At Giacom, we’re empowering our partners to seize this opportunity by making it easier to establish themselves as the trusted advisor that SMBs need. Our platform enables MSP partners to rapidly monetise new services, scale efficiently, and deliver the seamless, integrated solutions that businesses demand.  Our core mission is simple: to ensure that every penny SMBs spend on technology goes through the channel.

In this article, we’ll delve into the operational challenges and complexities that often hold MSPs back from fully capitalising on this market shift. We’ll also explore how Giacom’s Cloud Market Tools aims to overcome these obstacles, empowering MSPs to effortlessly quote, order, bill, and support any product from any supplier.

The Challenges MSPs face

When working with a one-stop shop, SMBs expect a seamless and standardised experience.  Regardless of product, they expect a single process for placing orders, a consistent look and feel for quotes, order forms and invoices, and one portal to manage all their services.

This presents a huge challenge for MSPs.  Selling and supporting multiple products and services involves managing numerous portals and purchasing processes. When business systems operate separately, processes and customer experiences become inconsistent and disjointed.

Siloed data and manual workarounds

Manual workarounds will often be introduced to overcome these challenges, but these inevitably slow things down and increase the chances of error. To quote, deliver and bill each order, each team within the business manually hands over to the next, with data rekeyed from one business system to another as orders progress. When data is siloed and manual processes dominate, businesses waste valuable time resolving errors, reconciling duplicate records, and managing redundant tasks.

Disconnected Teams, Disjointed Customer Experience

Compounding this is the fact that each team will usually only have access to information within the system they operate.  While this aligns with best practices such as the principle of least privilege, limited access to crucial customer information hinders teams from gaining a comprehensive, 360-degree view. As a result, the risk of conflicting data, miscommunication, and delays in resolving issues increases. This inefficiency not only creates frustration and friction within internal teams, but once again leads to a poor customer experience.

A Barrier to Business Growth and Expansion

Introducing a new product or service into an already complex, manual process-driven operation only adds to the challenge. Without addressing key operational inefficiencies and implementing much-needed automation, your business risks increased complexity, inefficiencies, and missed growth opportunities. Ultimately, this could prevent you from reaching your full potential, slow down growth, and impact profitability.

A Typical Quote-to-Cash Process

The following is an example of a typical quote-to-cash journey for an MSP without any automation:

An MSP has sold a complete solution to one of their SMB customers. It includes:

  • Microsoft 365 with security and backup services
  • Broadband for their network
  • Mobile services
  • A unified communications system, such as Microsoft Teams

For most MSPs, the process of quoting, delivering, and billing for a solution like this is complex and time-consuming, involving multiple teams, systems, and manual steps.

  • The salesperson will create a quote, gathering purchase and sale prices from the correct suppliers.
  • They may use spreadsheets or a specialist sales system to manage their quotes and opportunities.
  • Once the quote is finalised and approved by the customer, they must relay the details to the operations team, to ensure that each element is provisioned correctly.
  • The operations team takes over, often using a different system from the sales team to manage orders.
  • They manually enter the order details into their system.
  • Each component must be provisioned separately through multiple supplier portals.
  • They then track order progress, again through multiple supplier portals.  They’ll keep the customer informed and ensure everything is correctly delivered before handing over to the billing team. 
  • The billing team is responsible for ensuring the customer is charged correctly, but they often don’t have access to the sales or ordering systems.
  • They need to determine how the solution was sold, how it should be billed, and when it went live.
  • Billing details are usually entered manually into the billing system. There may even be multiple billing systems for different products which result in multiple invoices for the customer all with a different look and feel.
  • At the end of the month, they must reconcile customer charges against multiple supplier invoices to ensure accuracy.
  • Payment collection is often another manual and time-consuming process.
  • The credit control team identifies overdue invoices and works with customers to secure full payment.
  • Without access to other business systems, they may struggle to answer customer queries about their invoices. Finding the answers adds significant delays to the payment process.
  • Other teams won’t have visibility of payment status, meaning processes can’t be adjusted in real-time, such as placing accounts on hold, intercepting customer interactions, or preventing additional services from being provisioned for bad debtors.

This fragmented, manual approach creates inefficiencies, delays cash flow, increases the risk of errors, and makes it difficult to scale effectively.

Giacom can help

Imagine a world where your business:

  • Delivers outstanding customer service as standard.
  • Operates at peak profitability.
  • Scales seamlessly without disruption.
  • Gains complete visibility and control over every aspect of its operations.

As demonstrated in the previous examples, numerous interdependent manual processes can quickly hinder business growth. We believe that disconnected systems and inefficient processes are the biggest factors holding MSPs back, and the financial data supports this.

According to ConnectWise, best-in-class MSPs achieve 20.7 per cent EBITDA margins, while the median is just 9.9 per cent. More concerning, a quarter of MSPs operate at just 0.1 per cent, meaning they barely break even. There is a strong correlation between an MSP’s Operational Maturity Level and its EBITDA returns, regardless of size. This highlights a major issue: many MSPs are running at unsustainable profitability levels simply due to operational inefficiencies.

For some, fulfilling sales exactly as intended – where customers get precisely what they’ve asked for with proactive communication throughout – can almost feel like random acts of brilliance.

But imagine if you could take those random acts of brilliance and turn them into a seamless, repeatable process, delivering excellence effortlessly, with a first-class customer experience every time.

A Complete Solution for MSPs

As a 100 per cent channel-focused specialist marketplace and software provider, Giacom specialises in giving MSPs everything they need to create and deliver exceptional solutions for their business customers.

With our Cloud Market Marketplace, our goal is to create an Amazon for the channel –a B2B technology platform where MSPs can access all the products and services they need to shape great solutions for their customers.

Our Cloud Market Tools is a suite of software applications and integrations that sit at the heart of an MSP’s business operations. They provide an end-to-end solution to streamline the quote-to-cash process, regardless of supplier. This allows MSPs to automate the transfer of information between systems and rapidly level up the customer experience. Cloud Market Tools’ modular product offering allows MSPs to choose a combination of tools that best fits their business and scales with them as they grow.

A Smoother Quote-to-Cash Journey with Cloud Market Tools

Here’s how an MSP can streamline their quote-to-cash process using Cloud Market Tools when selling a complete solution to an SMB customer, including:

  • Microsoft 365 with security and backup services
  • Broadband for their network
  • Mobile services
  • A unified communications system, such as Microsoft Teams
  • The salesperson uses a Quote tool that includes their entire product portfolio with up-to-date buy and suggested sell prices.
  • The customer receives the quote via email and can e-sign it instantly, which automatically updates the opportunity in the system.
  • Once approved, the opportunity is seamlessly converted into an order.
  • Evaluate the capabilities of your existing business-critical systems and identify gaps or inefficiencies. Understand which integrations will deliver the most value to your business.
  • The operations team has full visibility of exactly what’s been sold.
  • Where direct integration is available, provisioning happens automatically.
  • Automatic updates ensure the team always has real-time order progress information, making it easy to keep the customer informed.
  • Once everything is delivered, products are automatically imported into the billing system.
  • The billing team has full visibility of what’s been sold and when each item was delivered.
  • All products and services are billed through the same system, ensuring the end customer receives one clear, consolidated invoice.
  • Giacom manages supplier invoice reconciliation on behalf of the MSP, saving the billing team time and ensuring all billing is accurate.
  • Payment collection is automated, with full transaction history available within the billing system.
  • The credit control team is alerted to any payment failures and can follow up on more complex cases.
  • With access to full order history, they can quickly answer customer billing queries, resulting in faster payments.
  • Real-time visibility of payment status allows teams to take proactive actions, such as holding accounts, intercepting interactions, or preventing new services for customers with outstanding debts.
  • Customers have access to key metrics, billing details, and spending controls, allowing them to manage their services without contacting support.
  • They can track incidents and make changes independently, reducing the workload for the MSP.

With Cloud Market Tools, the entire quote-to-cash process is streamlined, reducing manual effort, improving accuracy, and enhancing the customer experience.

Cloud Market Tools: A Modular Approach to Business Growth

Modular by design, Cloud Market Tools allows MSPs to choose and combine solutions that best fit their needs, with the flexibility to scale and add modules as the business grows. Through seamless integration with Giacom’s Marketplace, and the ability to integrate with third party suppliers, MSPs can automate and optimise processes for quoting, ordering, billing, and supporting their end customers.

Core capabilities include:

Sales

Give your team the tools needed to create precise quotes in minutes. Upon signature, all quotes are automatically converted to orders, eliminating manual data duplication.

Order

Our robust supplier integrations keep you informed with real-time updates directly within our Ordering system. Upon order completion, all charges are automatically billed to your customer.

Billing

Bill whatever you want, however you want with our flexible and scalable billing solutions. Automate the time-consuming, manual parts of your bill run process to improve cash flow.

Self-Serve

Our Self-Serve portal puts your customers in control, allowing them to complete important actions conveniently and autonomously. Reduce the number of inbound calls, saving your team time and lowering your cost of service.

Integrations

Seamlessly connect your disparate systems to simplify complex business processes with our off-the-shelf integrations.

Managed Services

Lighten your load with our cost-efficient Managed Services by enabling our in-house experts to help with your billing operations and system administration.

A Tailored Solution for Every MSP

Giacom supports MSPs of all sizes, whether they are established businesses using PSA systems to streamline operations or smaller businesses relying on low-tech solutions like spreadsheets. For those already leveraging PSAs, we seamlessly integrate into their existing environments. However, many MSPs lack a comprehensive system that unifies their operations, and that’s where we provide an end-to-end solution with Cloud Market Tools.

While PSAs excel in managing IT workloads such as project services, one-off implementations, and subscriptions, they often struggle with the complexities of variable billing involved with communication and connectivity services. Telecoms billing is our speciality, and our expertise allows us to handle everything from straightforward software subscriptions to the most intricate, usage-based telecoms charges, all on a single, simplified bill.

Unbeatable Security, Performance and Scalability

Trusted by over 800 partners, Giacom’s Cloud Market Tools processes £2.4 billion in annual revenue and serves over 300,000 end users via its Self-Serve portal. We hold Ofcom’s Total Metering and Billing Systems (TMBS) and ISO27001 accreditations, ensuring high standards in data security and service delivery.

In a recent survey, 94.7 per cent of 16,567 partners rated our support experience as Good or Very Good. With a remarkable 99.999 per cent uptime, the software guarantees reliable availability, enabling uninterrupted business operations. Giacom is also committed to continuous improvement, investing £15 million in research and development for the platform in FY26.

Conclusion

In an increasingly competitive and evolving market, SMBs are prioritising comprehensive solutions over fragmented approaches, creating a significant growth opportunity for MSPs. By becoming a trusted one-stop shop, MSPs can capitalise on this trend, broaden their portfolios, and establish themselves as indispensable partners for SMBs’ digital transformation journeys. However, this path requires strategic planning and operational excellence to overcome common challenges and deliver seamless integration, accurate billing, and streamlined operations.

At Giacom, we empower MSPs to navigate this transformation with ease. Our flexible Cloud Market Tools enable our partners to scale efficiently, optimise operations, and enhance customer satisfaction. By delivering automation, self-service capabilities, and actionable insights, we help MSPs build stronger customer relationships, drive sustainable growth, and remain future-ready.   

Ready to Grow with Giacom? 

Discover how Giacom’s Cloud Market Tools can transform your business. Visit Discover Flexible Software – Giacom or contact us at [email protected] to learn more.